[Dixielandjazz] Joe Muranyi Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is Joe Muranyi's Obit from the Washington Post.


Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Joe Muranyi, jazz clarinetist who played in Louis Armstrong’s band,  
dies at 84

By Adam Bernstein, Published: April 26 - Washington Post

Joe Muranyi, who was bandleader Louis Armstrong’s last clarinetist  
and became a leading ambassador in the effort to preserve the  
traditional jazz sound on records and in concert, died April 20 at a  
hospital in New York. He was 84.

He had congestive heart failure and bladder cancer, said his wife,  
Jorun Hansen.

Mr. Muranyi, a vivacious player and raconteur, spent more than five  
decades as a fixture in New York’s Dixieland and vintage-swing scene.

He liked to recount that Armstrong, upon meeting him in 1967,  
couldn’t pronounce his Hungarian surname. Mr. Muranyi suggested that  
Armstrong say it like the 1920s blues singer Ma Rainey. “He broke up  
laughing, he never forgot it,” Mr. Murayni told Armstrong biographer  
Ricky Riccardi. “A lot of cats in the business call me, ‘Hey, Ma  
Rainey!’ ”

As a young man, Mr. Muranyi studied with such modern improvisers as  
pianist Lennie Tristano, but he remained joyfully defiant in his  
musical tastes. His passion was squarely on the exuberant and melodic  
traditional jazz pioneered by Armstrong, even as it gradually lost  
popular ground to rock-and-roll and the thrilling jolt of bebop jazz,  
favored by such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

By his teens, in the 1940s, Mr. Muranyi was sitting in at Jimmy  
Ryan’s New York nightclub with the New Orleans trumpeter Bunk  
Johnson. He subsequently worked with some of the finest traditional  
jazz musicians of the era, including Jimmy McPartland, Max Kaminsky,  
Henry “Red” Allen, Yank Lawson and Bobby Hackett.

Terry Teachout, the jazz scholar and critic, called Mr. Murayni “an  
absolutely first-rate clarinetist. . . . He was, in the very best  
sense of the word, a journeyman, a professional who played this  
familiar style with great passion and seriousness. He developed a long  
liquid tone and beautiful phrasing.”

Mr. Murayni recorded in the 1950s with groups such as the Red Onion  
Jazz Band and then joined the Village Stompers, whose 1963 banjo-heavy  
instrumental “Washington Square” became an unlikely top-10  
Billboard hit.

Mr. Muranyi was most remembered for his association with the Louis  
Armstrong All-Stars band. He joined the band in 1967, after the death  
of Armstrong’s clarinetist, Buster Bailey. He had beenrecommended by  
Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, an admirer of the Village Stompers.

Armstrong, the trumpeter and gravelly voiced singer, whose early fire  
and expressiveness made him one of the most influential musicians of  
the 20th century, was in poor health by the late 1960s but was still  
touring rigorously.

Mr. Muranyi, who considered Armstrong his “absolute idol,” was  
intimidated. Armstrong was an institution and also disconcertingly  
mercurial — jocular and mellow one moment, inexplicably volatile the  
next. His insights and eyewitness accounts of Armstrong, at his best  
and worst, later proved useful to Armstrong biographers, such as  
Riccardi and Teachout.

The clarinetist said he mostly avoided the bandleader’s rages by his  
eager attitude and by his spry playing of even the most shopworn  
Armstrong repertoire. He was a self-described “moldy fig,” a  
traditional jazz purist and kindred spirit.

He remained in the All-Stars until Armstrong’s death in 1971, at 69.  
He remained an active freelancer until retiring in 2010, often playing  
at Armstrong tributes.

Joseph Paul Muranyi was born Jan. 14, 1928, in Martins Ferry, Ohio,  
and grew up in New York. After serving in an Air Force band, he  
attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University.

His marriages to Hannah Brahinsky and Donna Slocum ended in divorce.  
Besides Jorun Hansen, whom he married in 1996, survivors include two  
children from his second marriage, Paul Muranyi of New York and  
Adrienne Fuss of Larchmont, N.Y.; and two grandsons.

After Armstrong’s death, Mr. Muranyi performed with trumpeter Roy  
Eldridge at Jimmy Ryan’s and also with the World’s Greatest Jazz  
Band.

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Muranyi helped form the Classic Jazz Quartet  
with guitarist Marty ­Grosz, trumpeter Richard Sudhalter and pianist  
Dick Wellstood. New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett once called it  
“fresh, tight, swinging and witty” and “a summation and a  
reworking of the best small-band jazz from the twenties to the early  
fifties.”

Mr. Muranyi told Balliett that Grosz initially “came up with a name  
— the Bourgeois Scum — but we settled on the Classic Jazz  
Quartet.”