Listening to Now: Anat Cohen and John Pizzarelli - "I Wanna Be Around"

By Richard K. Barry

I play some clarinet. Mostly I'm a sax player. Well, actually, mostly I'm a civil servant, but I play a few different instruments when time allows. While no expert on jazz clarinet, it does seem to me that it gets short shrift compared to other "sexier" instruments like sax, guitar, piano, trumpet, etc. Don't get me wrong, maybe there are a bunch of high profile jazz clarinet players, but they don't seem to get the same kind of notice when I leaf through my monthly edition of Down Beat.

 Just to give myself some cover, I did find a blog post a couple of years old with the title: "The Rise and Fall of the Clarinet," which makes the case in a much more thorough manner.

 Thinking of no more clever way to find out who the current crop of jazz players are on the old licorice stick, I consulted the aforementioned Down Beat Magazine and their readers poll for the clarinet category. I'm not quite sure how the voting works, but I assume the names listed below were the bright lights from which their readers were encouraged to choose in the most recent round of voting. In any case, Anat Cohen won the category in 2012.

I even provided links, if you're really interested.

Don Byron
Paquito D’Rivera
Eddie Daniels
Ken Peplowski
Anat Cohen
Marty Ehrlich
Buddy DeFranco
Michael Moore
Louis Sclavis
Evan Christopher
Dr. Michael White
Victor Goines
Ben Goldberg

 Below is "I Wanna Be Around" by Ms. Cohen with John Pizzarelli. This is what you're supposed to do with a clarinet. Great.

 

(Cross-posted at Hogtown Hipster.)