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

[Harry Callaghan]

Sorry, somehow my zeros got clipped.  that was actually $800. for the
mouthpiece.


On 8/5/10, Harry Callaghan <meetmrcallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> While we're on the subject of Kenny Davern, I was just perusing the
> selections available by him on both Amazon and Half.com by EBay.
>
> It might be of interest to his fans that EBay is offering on a "Buy It Now"
> basis, as opposed to starting bid,
>
> Kenny Durham's Meyer-Truflex gold clarinet mouthpiece for $8
>
> Because it was relatively inexpensive, I settled on a 1992 CD entitled "My
> Inspiration" which had him playing with Bob Haggart, Howard Alden and Bobby
> Rosengarden. (that was Amazon)
>
> Tides
> HC
>
>
>  On 8/5/10, Ken Mathieson <ken at kenmath.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> 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
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>
>
>
> --
> Some men see things as they are and say why....I dream things that never
> were and say why not            -
>                         -George Bernard Shaw




-- 
Some men see things as they are and say why....I dream things that never
were and say why not            -
                        -George Bernard Shaw