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Re: Pete Fountain retires

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2014-11-25 05:42

I remember when Pete Fountain wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and played an O'Brien clarinet. He used to play with the trumpeter George Girard at a restaurant/bar in New Orleans on Canal Blvd called Lenfants that was replaced by an office building for one of the large cemeteries. He got his first crystal mouthpiece from one of his clarinet idols, Irving Fazola.

When Fountain first went with Laurence Welk, he still had the horn rimmed glasses and was playing either an O'Brien or Selmer big bore clarinet. Welk, of course, made him wear contact lens and a toupee. The Leblanc company quickly switched him to one of their models, in line with the theory of Leon Leblanc and his acoustician Charles Houvenaghel that the clarinet ought to be played with a relaxed, open throat and little pressure on the reed. Both the medium large LL and the Dynamic H models were designed to make this easier, and Fountain played them both with Welk's band and after leaving them. The Dynamic H morphed into the Big Easy model with gold keys but it was still basically Houvenaghel's design.

Fountain could play anything he or anyone else could hum. He had a great sense of melody and his improvisations never sound like sterile mechanical exercises the way some others often do. He intuitively understood the ideal of tone production that Leon Leblanc and Houvenghel were building into their design and added a warm vibrato that is unique and seldom sounds overdone.
He always used very soft reeds (under #2) on a medium-open mouthpiece and almost never missed a note or squeaked. Watch him closely on any of his videos and you will see no sign of muscle tension in the embouchure, just a fluid natural flowing means of production with no tightness anywhere.

Leon Leblanc and Houvenaghel probably wanted to see such a relaxed approach to sound production on their clarinet designs adopted by classical players, but it was a natural-born jazz player--Pete Fountain--who brought their ideas to fruition.

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Pete Fountain retires new

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2014-11-17 03:09