The Andrea Motis Quinetet

NOW ON SALE! The Andrea Motis Quinetet is joined by living legend Ken Peplowski and the SJW 50/50 Jazz Orchestra for one spectacular show on July 13. Get your tickets soon, you don't want to miss this one! https://t.co/jh71mIsevh pic.twitter.com/IdR0oKkQMP

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Frank Vignola and Ken Peplowski - Tiger Rag

Clarinet Virtuoso, Capitol Center Jazz Pay Tribute to Goodman

Clarinet virtuoso Ken Peplowski and The Capitol Center Jazz Orchestrap play Oct. 6 at Infinity Music Hall & Bistro. (Handout / September 29, 2013)

By OWEN McNALLY, Special to The Courant
The Hartford Courant
September 29, 2013

One of the great historical and cultural breakthroughs for jazz — music long maligned as lowlife, raffish noise best-suited for speakeasies and whorehouses — occurred Jan. 16, 1938, when clarinetist/bandleader Benny Goodman presented his now famous concert at Carnegie Hall, America's great bastion and holy temple of classical music, sophistication and high culture.

Certainly, there had been other heroic forays into "legitimizing" or "mainstreaming" jazz by other pioneering maestros, including James Reese Europe and Paul Whiteman.

But Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert, with its outstanding performances by the bandleader, his all-star orchestra, classy jazz chamber groups and special appearances by superb sidemen from the Duke Elllington and Count Basie Orchestras, has long been enshrined as the dramatic turning point in the acceptance of jazz as one of America's greatest, original contributions to the international world of arts and culture.

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of that landmark event, the noted clarinet virtuoso Ken Peplowski and The Capitol Center Jazz Orchestra pay tribute to Goodman and the music from the Carnegie Hall concert next Sunday, Oct. 6, at 1:30 p.m. at Infinity Music Hall & Bistro, Rte. 44, Norfolk.


Although Peplowski has profound respect for the historical significance of the Carnegie Hall concert and especially for Goodman — one of his boyhood idols and former bosses — don't look for him to present the standard, museum-like, rote, note-for-note re-creations of the concert's original solos, or what he calls "a jazz under glass approach."

Look, instead, for something fresh and in the moment, nourished by and based on Peplowski's deep knowledge of and appreciation for the past, particularly the rich legacy that Goodman left as a brilliant instrumentalist and bandleader. And also, as Peplowski notes, with acknowledgment of Goodman as an iconic pop culture figure and jazz superstar who was, he adds, as popular and musically innovative in his day as, say, Elvis Presley or The Beatles were in theirs.

Peplowski, with the greatest reverence and love for the original music, presents fresh, interpretive takes on such classic selections from the Carnegie Hall concert as "Don't Be That Way," "Memories of You" and, of course, the ultimate showstopper, "Sing, Sing, Sing."

Read more: http://www.courant.com/entertainment/music/hc-ken-peplowski-0929-20130929,0,4607050.story?track=rss

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.

Ken Peplowski....

The late Mel Torme´said, "Since the advent of Benny Goodman,there have been too few clarinetists to fill the void that Goodman left. Ken Peplowski is most certainly one of those few. The man is magic. "The New York Times pronounced a concert of men's "Goodman Straight Up, With A Twist Of Lightning. "These quotes only hint at Ken Peplowski's virtuosity - not only is he an outstanding clarinetist and saxophone player, but he's also a charismatic entertainer who has been delighting audiences for over 30 years with his warmth, wit, and musicianship.

"When you grow up in Cleveland, Ohio, playing in a Polish polka band, you learn to think fast on your feet", says Peplowski, who played his first pro engagement when he was still in elementary school. "From my first time performing in public, I knew I wanted to play music for a living."
Ken, and his trumpet-playing brother Ted, made many local radio and TV appearances and played for Polish dances and weddings virtually every weekend all through high-school. "That's where I learned to improvise, 'fake' songs, learn about chord changes, etc.- it's exactly like learning to swim by being thrown into the water!"
By the time Ken was in his early teens, he was experimenting with jazz by playing in the school "stage" bands, and also by jamming with many of the local jazz musicians. "By the time I hit high school, I was teaching at the local music store,
playing in our family band, and playing jazz gigs around town while still getting up early every day for school."

After a year of college, Ken joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra under the direction of Buddy Morrow. "Buddy heard me with my quartet at a Cleveland jazz festival along with Teddy Wilson's trio and the Dorsey band, and made an offer right then and there
for me to not only play lead alto, but to have a feature spot on the clarinet with the rhythm section. It was a great 'road-school' - we learned the discipline that goes with playing one-nighters every day for 48 weeks out of the year, and Buddy was a great, very generous bandleader."
Peplowski met Sonny Stitt while on the road with the Dorsey band, and studied with him. "He was, and is, an inspiration to all of of us who make a living 'on the road' - I've never heard anybody play with such amazing consistency as Sonny, through all kinds of settings."

In 1980, Ken moved to New York City,and was soon playing in all kinds of settings, from Dixieland to avant-garde jazz. "Everything's a learning experience in jazz music - there's always an element of the unpredictable." In 1984, Benny Goodman
came out of retirement and put together a new band, hiring Ken on tenor saxophone. "I think Benny was as great a figure to the clarinet as Louis Armstrong was to the trumpet. He was an extremely tough band leader, but he was as demanding on himself as he was on us - if you showed him respect and were there to play his music for him, he respected you back, and I have yet to work with anyone else that could get such great results out of a band. Part of the key to unlocking the enigma of Benny was that he thought about music pretty much 24 hours a day, and sometimes that was to the exclusion of personal relationships. I liked him a lot, though, and he actually tried to get me signed to a record deal (with him as producer!) before I'd signed with anyone else."

Peplowski wound up signing with Concord Records,under the tutelage of Carl Jefferson, the founder and president, and recorded close to 20 albums as a leader, including "The Natural Touch" in 1992 which won Best Jazz Record of the Year by the Prises Deutschen Schallplatten Kritiken, and "The Other Portrait", recorded in
Sophia Bulgaria with the symphony orchestra and highlighting Ken's classical side. His last two records were "Lost In The Stars" and "Easy To Remember" (on Nagel Heyer Records), the latter of which features Bobby Short on his last recording. "I loved Bobby Short's approach to the American songbook, and we'd talked about doing a record together for a while - I'm glad we got this one 'in the can.'"What's in the future? "Who knows? I love all kinds of music, and I'd like to find more oppurtunities to bridge the gaps between different musical styles - I consider myself an interpreter of material - if something interests me, I try to put my own spin on it, without thinking or worrying about playing in any particular style. Basically, I like a challenge, I'm a sucker for a good melody, and I love playing for audiences, big or small."

And he has certainly achieved these goals, be it in small clubs, the Hollywood Bowl (where he played a sold-out concert), headlining in Las Vegas, the Newport Jazz Festival, pops concerts, European festivals´ clubs, or at home in NYC doing everything from playing on the soundtracks to Woody Allen movies, to taking on the role of music director for interactive French and Italian cookbooks ("Menus And Music").

Frank Vignola & Ken Peplowski - Tiger Rag