Word: clarineting
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Woody remembers that trip, along with two earlier jaunts to the Crescent City, as high points of his life. Accompanied by Diane Keaton, he scurried around the French Quarter with his clarinet under his arm, looking, listening and sitting in with local jazzmen. "It was like watching Willie Mays all your life and then finding yourself in the outfield with him," Woody recalls. Festival producer George Wein even talked him into playing a set at one of the official concerts...
...Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his appearances not be advertised and has repeatedly turned down offers of big- time recording contracts...
...sold his first joke or even dreamed of making a film, he was scouring record stores in search of New Orleans music. Woody first caught the bug at age 14, when he happened to hear a Saturday-morning radio show devoted to Bechet, one of the all-time great clarinet and soprano saxophone players. "I heard it, and it just sounded wonderful," he recalls. "It was sort of like an opening of the dike." With the facility for self-teaching that he would later demonstrate as writer and filmmaker, he laid his hands on a soprano sax and started...
...lyrical, emotional style. To this day, Woody models his own playing on Lewis' and speaks of him with a reverence he accords to only a handful of his culture heroes, including Willie Mays, Groucho Marx and Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. "He was a great, great artist on the clarinet," enthuses Woody. "He had that sort of sweet, soulful, just beautiful, beautiful sound...
Woody goes after that sound in two ways. First, by using a wide open mouthpiece and a very hard reed -- a Rico Royale No. 5 -- which provides a lot of volume but requires cast-iron lips to play. (Benny Goodman once borrowed Woody's clarinet for a sit-in and had to shave the reed down with a kitchen knife before he could get a toot out of it.) Second, by playing an Albert System clarinet -- an antiquated, wide-bore instrument based on a virtually obsolete fingering method. Why the Albert System? "Because all the guys I liked played...