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Re: Pete Fountain's mouthpiece, reeds, and transcriptions

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2016-12-07 21:33

I find the article interesting but I can not vouch for the accuracy of everything in it. Pete did play on crystal mouthpieces with a fairly wide opening and relatively soft reeds. From some point in the 1960s, he did use the 6 ring big bore Leblanc with articulated G#. The transcriptions are samples of great playing by Fountain.

When discussing clarinets, the author seems to be less reliable. LeBlanc did not provide an entirely new model for Fountain to play. I saw him give a presentation (at Werlein's Music in New Orleans) on the Leblanc LL he actually used for most of the Welk program appearances, and for a little while after he returned to New Orleans. As many people know, LeBlanc decided to see what would happen if they gave him a larger bore Dynamic model to play. Then they gradually morphed that with articulated G#, added gold keys and a few other things into the Pete Fountain, and then the Big Easy, model.

I suppose the person who could really say yeh or nay to each point in the article would be Tom Laughlin (spelling corrected), who played at Pete's funeral, has at least one of Pete's clarinets, and is considered by some to have "apprenticed" to him for many years.

I recall that the Series 9* Selmer did have a smaller bore than the Series 9. And those "impossible" passages in China Boy that are made easier on the 6-key articulated G# mechanism can be played even at that fast tempo by many virtuoso clarinets even though many of us ordinary mortals might have trouble with them.

Post Edited (2016-12-08 00:40)

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