by Seth Rogovoy

Don Byron brings his Music for Six Musicians ensemble to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. (call 845-876-7666), on Saturday, February 8, at 8, and to Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, Mass., on Sunday, February 9, at 8 (call 413-528-3394). Byron will also offer a free lecture demonstration at Bard at 3 on Saturday.

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., February 4, 2003) – Don Byron is widely regarded as the premiere clarinetist in contemporary jazz, and equally acclaimed for his expansive musical vision that embraces disparate genres including classical, salsa, hip-hop, funk, klezmer and swing.

Yet to hear Byron tell it, the very fact that he is still playing clarinet is a lucky, cultural accident.

“I should be playing saxophone and not clarinet,” said Byron in a recent phone interview from his home in upstate New York. “This is not an instrument or a pedagogy that I should have any access to. I just stayed around because I wanted to.”

What Byron is hinting at when he says he shouldn’t still be playing clarinet is the notion that as a black man, he can only play jazz and not classical music – and therefore by the time he got to conservatory, the expectation was that he would switch over to saxophone, the clarinet being a predominantly “white” instrument.

“I always thought all the guys in the [Duke] Ellington band, if they were white they’d be in symphonies,” said Byron. “That’s what they were doing in Duke’s band, creating a symphonic environment.

“The places where jazz clarinet is particularly idiomatically played is old ghost-band stuff, and those contexts are notoriously non-integrated -- the Benny Goodman/Woody Herman worship.

“Those are particularly white environments, so I wouldn’t expect to be hearing from those people. The symphony is even worse, and those are basically -- that and maybe a smattering of commercial music -- that’s where the clarinet plays. But I don’t hear from those people. I don’t do those gigs.”

Instead, what Byron does has in large part been to create an entire mirror universe in which he is able to exercise his prodigious talent and creativity on his instrument and as a composer and bandleader in a diverse range of formats.

Byron served for four seasons as artistic director of jazz at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a position that might well be considered the antithesis of the one that Wynton Marsalis holds at Lincoln Center Jazz. Since 2000, Byron has been an Artist-in-Residence at Symphony Space in New York, creating projects including “Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Henry Mancini and Sly Stone,” “Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Igor Stravinsky and Raymond Scott,” and “Sugar Hill Revisited,” a tribute to the music of the pioneering hip-hop label.

Byron’s recordings include “A Fine Line,” an exploration of arias and lieder that found common ground among Schumann, Puccini, Chopin, Stevie Wonder, Roy Orbison and the Four Tops; “Nu Blaxploitation,” which drew on ‘70s funk and hip-hop as a compositional starting point; and “Bug Music,” which juxtaposed the cartoon novelty music of Raymond Scott and John Kirby against Duke Ellington.

A charter member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which he helped found while a student at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Byron also recorded “Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz,” an exploration of the music of the mid-20th century klezmer clarinetist and musical parodist.

In addition, Byron was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet to write “There Goes the Neighborhood.” He has written original scores for silent films and new movies, and has written and performed music for the Bebe Miller and Mark Dendy dance companies. He also appeared in Robert Altman’s movie “Kansas City” and Paul Auster’s “Lulu on the Bridge.”

With Music for Six Musicians, which he first formed in 1994 for the recording of his third album, he pays tribute to the Latin and Afro-Caribbean rhythms at his musical roots.

“It’s definitely a compositional outlet,” said Byron. “Latin jazz is a pretty corny idiom. I tend to like to do things that are more like Latin dance music. Certain things that happen in Latin dance music don’t happen in Latin jazz, because Latin jazz is based on the thirty-two bar standard thing, but the dance music is based on other principles, the clave, and changing the clave.

“As a composer I come from a different pedigree. I have a different perspective having studied composition in a very pure way. I just decided to put different elements in the way that I did it.

“But it’s not a free-improv group, or screamingly avant-garde. I think I’m just a different kind of composer than a lot of people who play those rhythms.”

How does Byron account for his seemingly boundless embrace of seemingly unrelated musical styles?

“I used to be into Mandrill,” said the son of musician parents who grew up in the Bronx. “As a kid, they were my model of versatility. They were Caribbean people, but they played good rock, good funk, good Latin, good calypso -- all the music away from the jazz and classical that I grew up with.”

Byron insists that more than anything, he is sincere about what he plays. And he senses an effort to marginalize him – perhaps a racist one -- in descriptions of his music as avant-garde.

“People persist in saying I do avant-garde,” he said. “I don’t think my composing is avant-garde. I’m an American composer, not any more avant-garde than Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

“I don’t feel like I’ve broken down any borders at all. I’m just black and play different music and people think that’s amazing. I did klezmer music proud, I did Stravinsky proud, I do a lot of things proud. People into that music come to hear me, and if they’re not completely prejudiced against me, they’re satisfied.”

Don Byron brings his Music for Six Musicians ensemble to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. (call 845-876-7666), on Saturday, February 8, at 8, and to Club Helsinki in Great Barrington, Mass., on Sunday, February 9, at 8 (call 413-528-3394). Byron will also offer a free lecture demonstration at Bard at 3 on Saturday.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on February 8, 2003. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2003. All rights reserved.]



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