Ken Peplowski: House Music Hunting

Clarinetist and saxophonist launches initiative to do house concerts playing jazz and beyond

Ken Peplowski wants to play at your house. The noted jazz clarinetist and saxophonist isn’t really hurting for gigs. After all, he’s on the road roughly half the year, performing at clubs, schools, festivals and cruises. He just wants to do something different. This week he announced a touring program he calls “KP’s House Party,” in which music fans can book him for a house concert and pairing him with the group of their choice, across all genres.

Ken Peplowski

“I’m throwing myself out there and saying to people around the country or even in other countries, ‘I’m ready to play with whomever you think would be an interesting combination, whether it be a duo or me playing with a group or me playing with different kinds of music, like with Indian musicians or a blues band,’ because I genuinely like all that stuff and I’m open to playing different things,” says Peplowski. “Part of the fun of this project is that we’re going to create everything in front of the audience. There aren’t going to be any rehearsals beforehand. I’m going to meet them as the audience is meeting us. We’re going to have an open forum and discuss everything in front of the audience. I’m going to ask them questions about what they do and they’ll ask me questions. I’ll tell some stories. It’s going to be a fun evening and kind of a look inside what we do as musicians when we’re collaborating with other people. Ultimately, we’ll create some good music out of it. It’s like walking the highway—sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t. Even if it doesn’t, I think it will be interesting for people.”

A fan of way more than the mainstream jazz with which he is so strongly associated, Peplowski came up with the idea in part because he had been seeing that independent rock, pop and folk artists have been doing house concerts for years. So why not jazz? And he has done some jazz house concerts over the years, mostly on the West Coast. “There’s more of a tradition of those private concerts out there,” he explains. “I’ve always enjoyed them because it’s more intimate than playing a club. You’re usually playing in somebody’s living room and you’re right there with the audience. It makes for a much looser evening. I like opening up a dialogue with the audience as well as with the band.”

Peplowski can also lean on his experience as a soloist playing with local rhythm sections. “I’ve learned a certain discipline from that experience,” he says. “I used to study with Sonny Stitt and he always said, ‘If you can find one person to hook up with on the bandstand, you lock in with them. If you can’t find anybody, then you block them out and generate all the music yourself.’ It’s a process of opening and closing doors in a sense, depending on who’s sympathetic. Over years of doing this, I have a really good sense of how to keep a standard for myself in all kinds of settings.”

You’d have to think that he’d be concerned about being paired with a band like the Shags or some other less than proficient aggregation of amateur players, and indeed he will do a little vetting. Still, he says, “If it sounds like it will be fun, I will do it.”

Peplowski is known primarily as a mainstream jazz player, but that’s not necessarily what he’s prepared to play. In fact, he sees the cross-genre approach as one of the real benefits not only for the presenter, but for himself creatively. He wants to escape from the veritable box of the swing label. He believes the instrument itself is partly to blame for the pigeonholing of his music. “Benny Goodman had such a long shadow over that instrument and still does, that it’s hard to people not to make that association,” explains Peplowski. “And I tend to favor songs from the classic American songbook, but I don’t think of myself as playing them in a swing style—I just play them the way I play. But I can’t help what people say about me.”

Compared to touring with a group, the logistics for this program are decidedly simple, at least for Peplowski, who mostly has to be game for whatever happens on the living room bandstand. The presenter takes care of Peplowski’s transportation and lodging, adds a basic performance fee and then is free to pull together the band from the local scene. He says that he’s empowering this new breed of promoters. “It gives people a chance to be a producer and challenge me,” says Peplowski. “And it gives me a chance to play with different people and open up my horizons."


http://jazztimes.com/articles/29712-ken-peplowski-house-music-hunting

Clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Peplowski talks about his project of performing house concerts with various musicians. This "In Person with JazzTimes" interview was done aboard the MS Westerdam during the Jazz Cruise 2012. A longtime regular on the Jazz Cruise, Peplowski performed as an All-Star and organized the opening concert, a salute to jazz in the movies. Interview by Irene Lee. Video by Lee Mergner. Footage shot on Canon EOS 5D Mark II.