Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Manhattan to the Django Reinhardt and Louis Armstrong ballads of Stardust Memories to the brooding Schubert string quartet of Crimes and Misdemeanors, which premiered last week. For the sound track of Sleeper, Woody even went to New Orleans in 1973 and recorded himself playing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. (The old musicians there had never heard of Woody's films, and one of them, trombonist Jim Robinson, called him Willard.) He hopes one day to devote a whole film to "the birth of jazz...
...that I am genuinely crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful, wailing tone of the original jazzmen. The biggest compliment he ever got as a musician, Woody says, was when he was jamming in New Orleans and local people told him how "indigenous" his sound was. Jazz clarinetist Kenny Davern agrees: "He has sought to get that New Orleans plaintive sound, and he has really captured the thing...
That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after...
...even closer to the music he loves, Woody has been quietly rehearsing with a group of more New Orleans-oriented musicians for the past year or so. He remains vague about his ultimate plans for the group, but banjoist Davis says there is talk of booking it in a jazz club one night a week, and there have been feelers from several European jazz festivals. The tapes are always rolling during the rehearsals, moreover, so there is a chance that the sessions could ultimately produce something Woody has long resisted: a record featuring him on clarinet...
...would be a mistake to see Woody Allen's obsession with the clarinet as an eccentric hobby or psychological crutch. In ways both direct and indirect, concrete and spiritual, his musician's ear and instincts have helped make him the remarkable artist he is in other domains. "Jazz is a perfect music for him," says Eric Lax, who is writing a book on Allen. "It hates authority. It is a quirky, individual style requiring great discipline to play right. It is all the things that fit his comic character." So play it again, Woody...