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Body and Soul, or Baermann?

Author: Bill
Date: 2012-12-29 18:13

Twice in my life I have fallen in love with a particular clarinet sound; OK, three times, but Reginald Kell doesn't count. The first was Benny Goodman in his late 1940s trio recordings. The second time was Harold Wright playing Baermann's Adagio on an old Music Minus One LP.

As someone who has been neither a professional nor even a serious student, the clarinet is my hobby, like golf or the Civil War. Hobbyists can get pretty serious (and I have observed some professionals--after painstaking work--act rather devil-may-care). In my short history with clarinet, I was lucky to achieve a rather nice, "serious" tone quality pretty much from the beginning. I'm not sure where it came from. I adopted double-lip, on my own, very early.

But recreating what I heard in my head as "Benny Goodman's sound" was difficult. I got frustrated one day and took an old, wide-open junk drawer mpc and a 2.5 reed and started tooting and whittling back that reed. The experiment was a disaster, but somewhere in the process I tasted some qualities -- less of sound than of feel, of control and flexibility -- that I liked, and which I had never experienced in my playing before.

That was about 8 years ago, and those experiments have slowly begun to affect my "serious side," the side of me that was as dead serious as a weekend golfer. For one thing, I really learned how to wield a piece of rush a la Daniel Bonade. But the big change was that I lost the willingness to ever have to push an intractable reed again ... as if I were an artist using a brush that was too big, the bristles and the width too large for fine lines and details. As a player with nowhere for my sound to go but my music room, I have allowed my tone to be just firm enough to please me.

Yet, I never get too far from what I hear inside my head of Harold Wright's compact, elegant, fulsome yet somehow articulate sound. Pamela Weston reported that he used #5 reeds, "which he works on, slightly, near the top." My God!

Now when I sit down to play, I sometimes think "What will it be today? Body and Soul or Baermann?" I like both.

Bill Fogle
Ellsworth, Maine
(formerly Washington, DC)

Post Edited (2012-12-29 18:22)

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