The Clarinet in Jazz

Johnny Dodds

Originally a German invention of the early 18th century, the clarinet has played an illustrious role in the development and history of jazz, but is an instrument that arguably had its greatest impact and visibility during the music’s New Orleans infancy and later during the Swing Era of the 30s and 40s. Leon Roppolo with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Sidney Bechet’s early work on clarinet and the playing of Johnny Dodds with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives bands of the mid-20s were all highly influential, and by the mid to late 1930s, clarinetists Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman were towering figures in the world of swing music as both instrumentalists and bandleaders. But, the end of the instrument’s relevance was seemingly in sight.

Eric Dolphy

The late 40s saw the explosive rise of bebop, and with the exception of a few superlative artists like Buddy DeFranco and Edmond Hall, the clarinet was largely pushed to the side in favor of its younger brass cousin, the saxophone, as the primary wind instrument of the period. Despite Goodman and Shaw’s dalliances with bebop and Duke Ellington’s continued employment of the instrument, the clarinet was generally considered passé among the cutting edge artists of the 40s and 50s, and only slightly less-so into the 1960s, when post-bop wind genius Eric Dolphy performed regularly on bass clarinet and Jimmy Giuffre emerged as an under-appreciated innovator. Eschewing the influence of bebop, New Orleans clarinetist Pete Fountain made a notable impact in the early 1960s with his nouveau-Dixieland approach, but the jazz world still seemed to largely consider the instrument unfashionable. But was it? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that use of the clarinet became more specialized as the styles and definitions of jazz began to fragment into hard bop, the avant-garde, soul jazz and myriad other sub-genres, and a continuum certainly exists upon close examination.

Anat Cohen

By the 1970s, the clarinet had devotees within the avant-garde including Anthony Braxton, Alvin Batiste, and World Saxophone Quartet co-founder David Murray, who performs extensively on bass clarinet in addition to tenor saxophone. Cuba’s Paquito D’Rivera broke out as a giant of Latin Jazz during the decade, and the clarinet began to enjoy a mainstream resurgence in the hands of the jazz and classical master Eddie Daniels, swing revivalist Ken Peplowski, and later Don Byron, an artist whose talent for crossing genre boundaries made him a major critical and popular figure in the 1990s, continuing to today. Israeli-born clarinetist Anat Cohen has been a dominant force bringing the clarinet to new levels of notoriety in recent years, winning eight consecutive DownBeat Critics Polls and a Rising Star Jazz Artist of the Year nod in 2010. Baltimore’s Todd Marcus is one of the rare instrumentalists who have chosen the bass clarinet as their primary means of expression, and is easily one of this era’s defining voices on the instrument. Jazz’s current trove of clarinet specialists has assured that the instrument is no longer a second-class woodwind, and that its future is assured for generations to come.

Don Byron, David Murray, Anat Cohen, and Todd Marcus perform at Grace Cathedral on Thursday, 11/12 in a celebration of the clarinet. Tap here for more information. 

Sanctified By Jazz: Music at Grace Cathedral

Duke Ellington Orchestra at Grace Cathedral, 1965

by Jesse Hamlin

Fifty years ago, on September 16, Duke Ellington filled the soaring Gothic nave of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral with the sublime and exultantly swinging sounds of his first “Concert of Sacred Music.” Commissioned by the Episcopal cathedral to help consecrate the new sanctuary, it was an offering to God in Ellington’s expansive idiom that gave the composer the chance, as he put it, “to say openly what I’ve been saying to myself on my knees.”

A deeply religious man, Ellington wove older themes of his like the spiritual “Come Sunday” from his 1943 suite Black, Brown and Beige with potent new gospel pieces – he wrote the music and the hip lyrics – in a stirring hour-long work brought to life by a great assembly of artists: his jazz orchestra, featuring the peerlessly lyrical alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges and the roaring tenor soloist Paul Gonsalves; the Herman McCoy and Grace Cathedral choirs; the vocal soloists Jon Hendricks, Esther Marrow and Jimmy McPhail; and the mesmerizing tap dancer Bunny Briggs, who seemed to float over the floor like a shimmering hummingbird as he clicked and whirred through a brisk-tempo nine-minute reworking of “Come Sunday” that Ellington called “David Danced Before the Lord with All his Might” (text courtesy of the Biblical Book of Samuel).

“It’s the most important statement I’ve ever made,” Ellington said of the piece, the first of his three sacred concerts, on the eve of its 1965 Grace premiere, which was filmed and aired on public television and, thankfully, can be seen on YouTube. It’s an inspiring performance. To celebrate the piece’s golden anniversary, SFJAZZ has assembled its own estimable cast of artists to recreate the “Concert of Sacred Music” at Grace on September 17.

Queen Esther Marrow

Alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón of the SFJAZZ Collective has re-arranged the music for an aggregation that features one of the original singers, Queen Esther Marrow, Kurt Elling in the Hendricks role and Terrance Kelly leading the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir and singing one of the solos. Zenón leads a prime 11-piece ensemble that includes trumpeter and new SFJAZZ Collective member Sean Jones, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, bassoonist Paul Hanson and SFJAZZ Collective pianist Edward Simon. Stepping into “David Danced Before the Lord” his way will be the wizardly tap dancer Savion Glover, who was a teenage prodigy when he performed with Bunny Briggs in the 1989 Broadway musical Black and Blue and is supremely suited for this part.

Bill Frisell at Grace, 2007

SFJAZZ has a long tradition of presenting musicians in the Nob Hill cathedral, among them Joe Henderson, Zakir Hussain and Charlie Haden. It’s producing three other promising performances this fall at Grace, where the acoustics — particularly the seven-second echo — provide challenges and musical possibilities. On September 18, the creative and far-ranging guitarist Bill Frisell, a subtle master of space and silence who played solo at Grace in 2007, returns for an evening of improvisation incorporating the natural acoustics and electronic effects.

A hair-raising Gothic Halloween is on the bill for October 31, when the 1925 silent movie classic “Phantom of the Opera,” starring Lon Chaney as the deformed soul who haunts the Paris Opera house, screens in the sanctuary to live accompaniment on Grace’s massive pipe organ by Dorothy Papadakos, the noted organist who plays in the Paul Winter Consort and was formerly the organist at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. (That’s where Ellington premiered his “Second Sacred Concert” in 1968, and where his funeral was held in 1974. It closed with violinist Ray Nance playing “Come Sunday.”)

One can only imagine the rich woody sounds that will reverberate through those Gothic vaults on November 12, when four marvelous jazz clarinetists – Don Byron and Anat Cohen, playing B flat clarinet, and David Murray and Todd Marcus on the big bass clarinet – come together to make music in that inspiring space.