Buddy DeFranco obituary

Clarinettist Buddy DeFranco practising before a performance at the International Association for Jazz Education conference in New York in 2006. Photograph: Nancy Kaszerman/Zuma/Corbis

John Fordham
Friday 26 December 2014 17.36 GMT
The role of the clarinet in jazz changed from vital to marginal in little more than a decade, between the last hurrahs of the big swing bands at the end of the 1930s, and the rise of the unsentimentally byzantine style of bebop. The traditionally woody-toned instrument turned out to be no match for the fiercer saxophone on bop’s edgy melodies, except in the hands of a rare exception in the American musician Buddy DeFranco, who has died aged 91.

In the 21st century, the instrument’s unique personality has reappeared in contemporary jazz through the work of artists including the Americans Don Byron, Joe Lovano and Anat Cohen, and the UK’s Shabaka Hutchings – but during the first wave of the bebop revolution, the prodigious DeFranco was almost alone.


If Benny Goodman, Johnny Dodds, Frank Teschemacher, Artie Shaw and Pee Wee Russell had dominated jazz clarinet in the 1920s and 30s, and Kenny Davern, Eddie Daniels and Bob Wilber had become the celebrated inheritors of their styles, DeFranco was the maverick who investigated the labyrinths and rat-runs of bebop and developed a flawless technique for it. Only the post-second world war clarinettists Tony Scott and Jimmy Giuffre came into the modern frame alongside DeFranco – and though they were regarded by some as warmer and more quirkily expressive players, DeFranco’s playing was far from the coldly efficient exercise it was sometimes caricatured as being.

Though he avoided the idiosyncrasies of pitch and intonation that made more obviously characterful performers of Dodds or Russell, DeFranco had a rich tone, ideas and seamless fluency. He also maintained an exuberant consistency into his 80s, continuing to practise several hours a day, and recording music with younger exponents of the same garrulously lyrical jazz style that he loved.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/26/buddy-defranco-jazz-clarinettist-obituary-john-fordham