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Re: Lester Young on clarinet

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2014-05-13 20:51

Talk about diversity of influences! I grew up in New Orleans in the 1950s, listening to many traditional styles of jazz clarinet playing. The first classical player I heard on records was the Vienna Philharmonic's Leopold Wlach on his Koktan Oehler clarinet playing a stiff reed on a very long, close facing. That ultra dark, covered sound he gets on the Westminster recording of the Brahms Trio reminded me of some of the Albert System players in town! Then when I heard Louis Cahuzac play the Hindemith Clarinet Concerto with the composer conducting, I heard another sound completely different--almost as if from another instrument altogether. Cahuzac's tone on his French clarinet and his Vandoren Diamond Perfecta mouthpiece with a rather soft reed was as luminous and centered as Wlach's was dark and covered.

These two classical players, along with the many jazz players I heard when young, etched a neural pattern in my brain that remains vivid and fully working today. I asked myself so many times, which way should the clarinet sound--like Wlach or like Cahuzac--that I finally decided there was no answer. It can sound like either or neither. Most players today,in an era of homogenized style and tone, don't present such stark contrasts but I am glad to have been exposed to them. I don't have a fixed concept of how the instrument should sound, or how I should sound. I am pleased to not be a "single influence" player.

Go back to people like Noone, Goodman, and Shaw, and you have multiple influences probably even more diverse than I experienced growing up. John Cippola tells the interesting story of Buddy DeFranco losing a copy of the Jeanjean Vade Mecum that Artie Shaw had given him and having to replace it. What on earth, some would say, was Shaw doing with Jeanjean's Vade Mecum. Didn't Shaw play on a large bore clarinet and a white plastic mouthpiece? Why would he willingly practice out of a book written by a French Impressionist clarinetist who played in a completely different style? What kind of gumbo is that?

Mighty tasty kind, I would say.

Post Edited (2014-05-13 20:54)

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Lester Young on clarinet new

Clarineteer

2014-05-07 10:47