[Dixielandjazz] The Life & Music of Kenny Davern - Just Four Bars

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi Folks,

I love the Mickey Mouse announcement and can just see Kenny doing it. I worked with Kenny a lot over the years when he toured in Scotland and witnessed both sides of his character as he worked an audience. As Steve says, he could get them  the palm of his hand at the beginning of the first set, but he was just as likely to estrange them with some pretty blatant time-filling during his "requests" routine. 

This involved some very lengthy dialogue asking for audience requests, painstakingly disecting them before dismissing any he didn't fancy with some acid put-downs. It was funny the first couple of times, but when the audience has heard it all many times before, they pretty quickly get the idea it might be blatant time-wasting at best, or p*ss-taking at worst. As one of the guys in the trio, I had heard it umpteen times and could feel the vibe coming off the audience, but it didn't seem to bother Kenny, who would continue to ignore the irony of seeking requests (perhaps because he couldn't think of anything to play himself) and then chiding them for their lack of imagination.

On the other hand, he could be fantastically entertaining and informative. In 2006, he was working on the Nairn Jazz Festival in the north of Scotland (a fantastic festival of world class mainstream & traditional jazz, with names over the years like Ray Brown, Junior Mance, Kenny Barron, Harry Allen, Scott Hamilton, Jake Hanna etc) and found to his horror that the festival organiser had set up a Kenny Davern Clarinet Masterclass with a 10:00am start. I heard him protesting to the organiser (I'm paraphrasing here) "what will I do? I can show them how to take the horn out of its case, how to assemble it and how to pack it away at the end. I can't show anyone how to play it because I don't analyse what I do. I just do it and it's finished."  Well, neither the organiser nor Kenny was prepared to back down, so Kenny insisted that Rosanno Sportiello and I should be booked to accompany him in case he ran out of things to say.

He was booked for an hour and, as it turned out, the masterclass lasted at least 2 hours and had to be cut short in order to prepare for a concert at 1:00pm. Rosanno and I played no more than 3 numbers and Kenny charmed, informed and entertained his audience, many of whom were clarinettists, for the rest of the time with instructive technical insights and advice, hilarious anecdotes and spontaneous charm. He was helped by an intelligent first question from an amateur clarinettist who asked about the differences between playing Albert and Boehm systems, and the difficulties of switching from one to the other. This got him started about his beginnings and his switch to Boehm, as compared with Evan Christopher, who (according to Kenny) started out on flute (Boehm system) before switching to clarinet and then to the Albert. That led on to talk about the stylistic characteristics of the New Orleans clarinet greats, who all started on Albert and were mostly taught by the same man, Lorenzo Tio Jr. Kenny demonstrated a few phrases that were common to the playing of Jimmie Noone, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard etc, explained how the fingering of these phrases differed between Albert and Boehm, and reckoned that they had most probably derived from exercises given by Tio as part of their tuition. It wasn't just informative, it was an insight into the history of the music, and it was fun too. He could have had a career as an educationalist if he had chosen. 

I haven't seen the book yet, but would be interested to know if the discography includes any of the sessions done at concerts in Scotland. They were all private recordings and I've got copies (mainly on tape or casette, but some have been converted to CD) of some of the gigs I was on, including one in Inverness where the band was Kenny, pianist Stan Greig (ex Lyttelton etc) and me on drums. Before the gig Kenny said "there's only three of us, so everyone has to solo on everything." That was fine until he called Mood Indigo at a tempo so slow it was almost becalmed, and then demanded a 2-chorus drum solo! While I struggled to play something meaningful and musical at approx 45bpm, Kenny made encouraging gestures from the wings while laughing himself silly. It wasn't fun for me at the time, but I sure miss him now he's gone.

Cheers,

Ken Mathieson
www.classicjazzorchestra.org.uk