Kenny Davern, 71, Leading Jazz Clarinet Player

Kenny Davern, who died Tuesday at 71, was a jazz player regarded as one of the great clarinet players of his generation.In a career that stretched more than 50 years, Davern was widely hailed for the beauty of his tone, for his facility on his instruments, and for his ability to compose solos spontaneously that were light and airy but at the same time solidly swinging and well grounded in the blues. He was a master at playing in all registers, with a particularly distinctive tone in the lower, chalameau range, and at all tempos.Davern was born in Huntington, Long Island, and lived for most of his life in New Jersey. His original inspiration to play the clarinet was the great stylist Pee Wee Russell.In a November 2005 interview, Davern told The New York Sun, “I was 14 years old when I heard this record on the radio, ‘Memphis Blues’ by Muggsy Spanier’s Ragtimers, and I heard Pee Wee for the first time. I heard all these grunts and growls, sounds of spittle — I had no idea even what horn he was even playing but I said to myself, ‘This is what I wanna do with my life!'”In his first amateur band, Davern worked with the soprano saxist Steve Lacy and with Bobby Grauso, a young drummer who introduced Davern to the famous bandleader and club owner Eddie Condon. “He used to take us to the original Condon’s. We would stand on the side of the bandstand and I was ecstatic to hear those guys play,” Davern said last year. Within a short while, the young Davern was sitting in with the Condon Mob.Davern’s first major professional engagement was with Ralph Flanagan’s orchestra, which was regarded as a carbon copy of that of the popular Glenn Miller. He was playing baritone saxophone at the time — the instrument on which he initially joined the musicians’ union. In 1954, he began playing with one of the all-time giants of music, the trombonist Jack Teagarden. “I left that big band, where I was making for $400 a week, to join Jack Teagarden for $175 — I didn’t care about the money. Jack was wonderful, he was a marvelous guy,” Davern told the Sun.Davern worked prolifically with Condon, Teagarden, George Wein, and other leaders throughout the 1960s, and he was a particular favorite of trumpeters such as Wild Bill Davison, Phil Napoleon, and Pee Wee Erwin; one of his more unusual early projects was a jazz version of “Peter and the Wolf,” narrated by the actor Hans Conried, in which Davern played the role of the duck. He recorded as leader with his band the Salty Dogs on several occasions, but only began to come into his own as a star when he teamed with Bob Wilber to form Soprano Summit.After that group broke up around 1980 (they would later reunite as Summit Reunion), Davern, at long last, began to record prolifically as a leader, mostly in a series of quartets with guitar rather than piano. He made roughly 25 albums in that many years, mostly for the MusicMasters and then the Arbors Jazz labels.For nearly all his career, Davern was a star in the traditional jazz field, but he also recorded in a free jazz setting on several occasions with two old friends, Lacy and trombonist Roswell Rudd. Although he had earlier played both the baritone and soprano saxes, from 1980 on he concentrated exclusively on the clarinet. “I didn’t want to divide my attention between two mistresses,” he told the Sun, further explaining that the clarinet is such a demanding instrument that mastering it required all the attention he could possibly give it. He ended the Sun interview by quoting one of his mentors, the great swing clarinetist Johnny Mince, who told him as a young man, “The clarinet never says thank you.”

Kenny Davern, 71, Leading Jazz Clarinet Player

Kenny Davern, 71, Leading Jazz Clarinet Player

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