 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: GBK
Date: 2018-06-24 02:43
Having seen practically every Pete Fountain video on YouTube, I finally came across a rare one, which I had never seen.
It's one of Pete's first appearances (if not the first) on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, in 1964 when it was filmed in black and white from New York.
It's amazing how he just takes a simple tune and makes it into a jaw dropping study in Dixie style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPY0l_uEVLk
...GBK
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2018-06-24 09:55
Pete hadn't yet gotten rid of toupee Welk made him wear on the TV show. His improvisations came naturally as part of the jazz street marching band tradition he grew up with in New Orleans. In late 1940s and early 50s New Orleans, any one walking down a street beating a bass drum or crashing a pair of cymbals would be joined by people playing other instruments, and lo and behold, a band would be born. All as natural as the milkmen and the icemen delivering their wares in the morning or the street vendors yelling "fresh oysters, sweet potatoes, strawberries off the vine--come an get 'em." The rhythm and phrases were to some extent, ready made. Pete learned them by ear as a kid, and later formed the "Half Fast Marching Club" to strut his stuff on Mardi Gras. Musical traditions of this sort are like language; you pick up the whole formed patterns, you don't analyze the grammar and syntax. Pete is echoing the sounds of his own neighborhood, back of Warren Easton High School on Canal Street and creating and extending them within that framework. The local musical culture was created by innumerable New Orleans clarinetists before Pete--Irving Fazola, Leon Rappolo, Sydney Bechet, Larry and Harry Shields, Barney Bigard, Al Nicholas, Ed Hall and many whose names have been lost or never were widely known. He is speaking their language--an idiom to which he was born. To anyone outside the New Orleans locale that produced this tradition. Pete's performance must seem incomprehensible. But he is singing the old songs in his own way, just as the epic writer Homer retold the old myths that he had heard a thousand times. Pete was a continuation of the old New Orleans jazz clarinet style with his own unique sound and melodic turns added to be sure, but still a continuation. In this particular performance, Pete's high register phrasings dominate much more than usual. He seems to have caught a good grove up there that night.
Post Edited (2018-06-25 08:47)
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2018-06-25 12:17
For me, another super-humbling characteristic about Pete, is that even in his (recorded) earlier years with the Basin Street Six, Pete sounded like Pete. It sorta blew my idea of "When I get older, maybe I'll be as good as Pete." It seems that Pete was just always that good.
I wish I had made the trip south to see/hear him in his prime, but I'm so glad to have gotten to see/hear him several times at all - even if a little past prime.
I love his life story as well. Sort of a "local boy makes good" story, which led me to read the autobiography of Welk (which is a surprisingly good read - as much about navigating the music business as it is about the music iteself.)
For all the negatives brought about by the YouTube world in which we live, I must confess that I love the opportunity to experience so many old(er) performances, I would have otherwise missed out on. Not only the opportunity to watch, but the opportunity to study. Pretty cool time to be alive. (Take this wonderful clip of Pete's friend, Eddie Miller, playing in 1986 as an example: Dream (By Johnny Mercer)
Fuzzy
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Author: Hank Lehrer
Date: 2018-06-25 15:43
GBK,
Very nice. It just kept cooking to the end. Pete was the Man.
HRL
PS I see Tommy Newsom on sax with the band.
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