Author: seabreeze
Date: 2014-12-12 23:14
Marty, with all due respect, if you or anyone else "worked" on Pete Fountain's sound you would ruin it. Thousands of music lovers now recognize Fountain on his recordings after just just hearing him play a few notes. That's because those notes bear his tonal signature. If Fountain had studied with Bonade or today with Gilad, he would just have had more hurdles to overcome in developing his own style. He would not have developed swing plus Dixie style that he did. On a Buffet with a Vandoren M13, an inverse Bonade ligature, and and a harder reed, he would have had more trouble sounding the way he wanted to. Fountain is not ignorant of how the clarinet can sound. At Warren Easton high school in New Orleans Joe Valentino taught him. New Orleans long had an Opera House and a Symphony (both Don Montanaro and Larry Combs began their professional careers here) and classical players such as Paquet from Belgium (who produced a splendid sound on an HS *no star) mouthpiece were well-known. New Orleans is after all a cosmopolitan town; Fountain was not raised in the trees by apes--he was exposed to a rich musical culture, both jazz and classical. A hint of all this appears in historian
Al Kennedy's well-researched book Chord Changes on the Chalkboard.. Fountain certainly listened to everthing by Goodman, Shaw, and Fazola and a virtually endless number of New Orleans style clarinetists.
Would those of you who don't like Pete Fountain's "sound" (actually he had many different sounds at different periods in his career) presume to similarly "correct" the sounds of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Would you tell Goodman that he could have done much better had he studied with you rather than Reginald Kell? And what of Eddie Daniels? Some commenters have dismissed him on YouTube for using a "breathy" sound. But he studied with the big names in New York, including Abato, Allard, and Portnoy.
Could it be that when Daniels wants to sound breathy he does, rather than trying to sound like Bonade? Maybe it fits the jazz mood he is developing better than what you would tell him to do? Could it be that the jazz style requires rejection of some classical concepts; and the converse is also true? I have heard maybe 36 different classical clarinetists perform the Artie Shaw Concerto, and maybe two or three do it right. They don't swing like Shaw, they don't diamond ace the high notes, they don't have the flexability to gliss, and their tone is too hard and scrapy to sound like him. So should Shaw take lessons from them (if he were alive and young today)? What, exactly would he learn that he could apply to the jazz idiom?
If Fountain had wanted to also include classical music in his performaces, then, yes, he could have learned something, perhaps, from you. But he didn't--and since he is clearly one of the major jazz/pop clarinetists, you may have something to learn from him! Even something about tone producion for jazz.
Fountain was honest enough to draw the line. He respected Tony Scott, Buddy DeFranco, Al Batiste, and Eddie Daniels but had no interest in playing modern jazz. Nor did he want to be a "trad" revivalist. New Orleans culture had a lively strain of music going that did not need a revival. As as boy, Fountain used to stand outside the bars where Irving Fazola was playing and hum through the choruses Faz took. He actually was more "progressive" than the trad players (certainly than the revivalists). He wanted to add the more sophisticated harmonies and tech work of Goodman and Shaw to the developing New Orleans jazz tradition. And his great acheivement is that he did. But he drew the line at incorporating any be-bop, cool jazz, or avant guarde into his music. He didn't disdain these styles; they just weren't for him, just as the career of a classical performer was not for him.
Let's get this straight: Pete Fountain became the best updated New Orleans Jazz, swing, and pop clarinetist on the planet--bar none. That is his place in jazz history and he didn't need extensive lessons in classical tone production to do it. The best clarinetists, Louis Cahuzac, Harold Wright, Robert Marcellus, Ricardo Morales, Sabine Meyer, Karl Leister, Martin Frost--you name them--could not have improved the way Pete played jazz (and that includes his sound). Yes, they could have taught him many other things--mostly that he did not need, considerning the tragectory of his chosen career. And he could have taught all of them how to play jazz.
I heard Fountain a few times discuss other New Orleans clarinetists he liked. These included Art Ryder and Tom Laughin. He always referred to their "workmanship," as if they were carpenters or house builders. Fountain was, in his own way, a technical perfectionist. I heard him live over 50 years in hundreds of performances, and I can hardly recall any serious flubs, squeeks, or mechanical difficulty. In his own realm, he was a perfectionist. During the 50s and 60s, he played rather quietly with a very liquid, flowing sound. To those of you who actually believe you know his ability from listening to a few videos from Johnny Carson appearances rather late in his career, I can only be so bold as to give you a homework assignment. Fountain made at leat 56 LP recordings, going back to the 50s. Listen to them all or at least to 20 or 30 of them, and then come back and we can discuss whether his sound was "nasal" or not.
Fountain in the 50s and 60s had a very soft-edged sound. I attended an appearance he made at Werlein's Music store when he was promoting the Leblanc LL clarinet. He was playing "La Vie En Rose" when the clarinet repair tech in the next room started to try out a clarinet. The tech's sound was ten times louder, with a harsh edge that obliterated the cooing of Fountain's horn. When the guy stopped, we all felt a storm had passed and we could again heart some sonorous music from the clarinet. So, back then, he was a very gentle, beguiling player. He passed out some reeds that were very soft. He was using the crystal O'Brien mouthpiece that Leblanc later copied with his name on it.
Fountain became a household name appearing on the Welk TV show each week. Early on, he was still using this O'Brien clarinet (and the O'Brien mouthpiece) and playing wide with a covered sound like Fazola. YouTube has some of these performances--one is Round and Round. The classic Fountain sound emerged when LeBlanc America decided to see if they could get Fountain to switch to the clarinet designs of Leon Leblanc--the LL and the larger bore Dynamic. These were designed to allow players to blow the instrument with a relaxed throat and mininal lip and jaw pressure. Fountain liked both the LL and the Dynamic models. In fact, he became the poster child for both. His sound WAS the relaxed throat, light embouchere that Leon LeBlanc had dreamed of. When other players like Jerome Stowell, Gus Bivona, and Don Bonnee played the LeBlanc Dynamic models they sounded good but did not acheive the iconic, relaxed sound LeBlanc was looking for. They found that sound in Peter Fountain. To this day the Fountain sound is THE DYNAMIC Leblanc sound. Warm big bore with some resonance and center. Nothing nasal about it!! Later Fountain began to play louder and more aggessively on the same equpiment (the Dynamic was outfitted with gold keys and renaned the Big Easy.) I prefer the way he sounded from the early 60s through the 70s.
As for loud players, it would be hard to beat Sydney Bechet. He tried to match his clarinet sound to the strength of his soprano sax sound and had a vibrato that could virtually attack trumpet players and swallow them whole. Louis Armstrong was wary of playing with him because "there's room for only one lead player" and with Bechet, that would probably have been Mr. B!!
Post Edited (2017-03-11 06:11)
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