[Dixielandjazz] KENNY DAVERN & Albert

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I happened to be looking up some details of a Kenny Davern CD and came across a detailed biographical report, which was repeated in an obituary, that Kenny learned on an Albert because that was the model which turned up second hand and affordable within the straitened circumstances of his family around 1946. 
He does remark in an interview or discussion with Bob Wilber concerning the Summit Reunion recording that the clarinet was invented by two people who never heard of each other, and this might have been a reference to problems with instruments. 
Bob Wilber does there compliment Kenny on his mastery of different saxophones, baritone in respect of an Ellington project, where he thought Kenny had come closer to Harry Carney than anybody else he'd heard, and bass in respect of the Bix project easily sampled on YouTube. Kenny observed that he liked all the reeds, and when he started working briefly with a bassoon teacher the guy supposed he'd had the horn for about a year rather than just a month or so. 
He dropped everything else, he continued, when playing other horns got in the way of his having his own voice, which was to say hampered his realisation of what was essential to him on clarinet. This presumably meant the relatively weatherproof Boehm other correspondents have mentioned. 
Stylistically, Kenny was a jazz clarinetist rather than a clarinetist who can play jazz to a very high standard, There is a certain territory in common between jazz clarinetists and legit, and more common where the main influence has been Benny Goodman. Kenny never went there. Once when he was gigging with Peanuts Hucko Peanuts listened for a bit and said "Jimmy Noone" and probably recognised some kinship between Kenny and Noone which he, Peanuts, didn't possess. 
Talking clarinets, I remember long ago Alun Morgan, notable critic whose musical home was avowedly in the 1940s and certainly included bop and post-bop (and also a remarkable fondness for Cliff Jackson's piano-playing) saying he thought Goodman's stylistic peak was attained sometime around 1933, when there was a reediness which departed thereafter for the sake of other noe exactly reprehensible characteristics.
I heard Kenny reminisce about arriving for a date and seeing some radio or tv news people setting up  their gear, prior to his being put on the spot to provide an instant obituary for BG. It seems his praise was not muted. He also mentioned at the same time a broadcast recording he'd heard chez Ruby Braff, of some sort of award ceremony in the presence of BG but no clarinets. In lieu of which BG had played a tenor sax after a fashion which was entirely Goodman. Kenny had been and remained fascinated by the sound of that.