The Hot New Sound on the Scene? Oh, Yes, It is the Clarinet
By AARON BRITT
Published: October 21, 2010
Since the end of the big band era, the clarinet has taken a backseat to its sexier woodwind cousin, the saxophone. But in the Bay Area, thanks to a fertile environment of classically trained clarinetists with experimental sensibilities, the oft-overlooked instrument is having a moment.
Federico Cusigch/Getty Images
The members of Clarinet Thing, from left to right, Harvey Wainapel, Beth Custer, Sheldon Brown and Ben Goldberg. Clarinet Thing is helping to rev up the Bay Area scene.
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“I can’t imagine a better time for clarineting in the Bay Area,” said Ben Goldberg of the New Klezmer Trio. “There are so many wonderful players here now. And it’s only getting better, baby.”
Talented clarinetists such as Cornelius Boots, who after graduating from music school in 1999 wanted to form a bass clarinet quartet, have had their ambitions squelched by the limited repertoire and passion for their beloved instrument. But upon arriving here in 2003 — after getting a tepid reception from potential band members in Chicago — Mr. Boots quickly got his bass clarinet quartet, named Edmund Welles, off the ground. Within a year and a half Mr. Boots had received a composition grant from Chamber Music America. Now, as far as Mr. Boots knows, Edmund Welles is the only contemporary composing bass clarinet quartet in the world.
A big key to Mr. Boots’ success was Mr. Goldberg and Beth Custer, two pre-eminent Bay Area clarinetists who were at the center of a musical community with a national reputation for innovation and collaboration. Mr. Goldberg, who leads the New Klezmer Trio and the Ben Goldberg Quintet, was named a top national player in a 2009 critics’ poll in DownBeat Magazine; Ms. Custer, who fronts the Beth Custer Ensemble, has won numerous accolades, including a McKnight Fellowship.
Keeping track of membership in the different groups requires a flow chart. Ms. Custer used to belong to Edmund Welles, but she now focuses on the Beth Custer Ensemble and Clarinet Thing, an all-clarinet quartet. Another Edmund Welles member, Aaron Novik, has also started his own experimental group, Thorny Brocky. The two other members of Edmund Welles, Jeff Anderle, an instructor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Jon Russell play in Sqwonk, a bass clarinet duo.
The groups tend to combine classical compositions with modern fare. At a recent Edmund Welles performance, the group applied its “heavy chamber music” formula to an odd mix of songs, from the theme to TV’s “Knight Rider,” to an arrangement of Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre.” At times they sounded like a throbbing metal band, at other times like a flock of angry geese.
The clarinet has long been a force in symphonic music and concert bands. But in the United States, the advent of jazz, Dixieland and big band added to its popularity, especially in the able hands of clarinetist-bandleaders like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. In whatever genre, the clarinet’s high, distinct tone and four-octave range sings out over a symphony orchestra and swinging rhythm section alike.
But a series of players like John Carter and Eric Dolphy on the bass clarinet found fertile ground at the field’s fringes.
“For a while it was the accordion you saw everywhere,” Ms. Custer said. “Now I think it’s the clarinet.”
She credits the clarinet’s warm sound in a pop landscape dominated by electric and electronic instruments. “I don’t want to sound like too much of a hippie, but it’s the wood, man,” she said. “People love the wood.”
This flourishing scene can be traced back to Rosario Mazzeo, the late clarinetist and teacher.
Mr. Mazzeo played for decades in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1961 he licensed a new key system for the clarinet, leading to the manufacture of a new kind of instrument, the Mazzeo system clarinet. Later he moved west to Carmel, and then taught at theUniversity of California at Santa Cruz, Stanford and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He also gave private lessons to many of the region’s most promising students.
“It was between 1987 and 1991 that I would go down every other week to study with Rosario,” Ms. Custer said of her teacher, who was in his late 70s at the time. “Ben and I would go down together. That’s how we got to know each other.”
“There is no way to overstate his importance as a clarinet teacher,” said Mr. Goldberg, who came from Denver to study music at U.C. Santa Cruz. “Even though Rosario’s legacy was for the most part felt in the world of classical music, he was the most enthusiastic listener to every kind of unusual and weird music.”
Ms. Custer, now 52, and Mr. Goldberg, now 51, came into their own as players of that “unusual and weird music” in the 80s and 90s. They brought their explorations of klezmer, trip hop, free improvisation, and straight-ahead jazz to Bay Area listeners through dozens of bands and recordings, and now as teachers themselves.
Their playing and tutelage has helped crystallize the scene, and some even see the clarinet overtaking a higher profile woodwind — the saxophone — in popularity.
“If it were a choice between the saxophone and the clarinet, I think clarinet would be the preference,” in the Bay Area, said Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist, composer, and co-founder of SF Sound, a collective playing and promoting contemporary classical music. “Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for saxophonists right now.”
