Word: musics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...explores the Woody Allen most fans do not know: Woody Allen, the jazz clarinetist. Though Allen rarely grants interviews to discuss his movies, he readily agreed to talk to senior editor Thomas Sancton about his other career. In the projection room of Allen's Manhattan film center, they discussed music and clarinets for 90 minutes. "Woody Allen is passionate about jazz," says Sancton. "It's not just an eccentric hobby...
That unscheduled appearance prompted New York Times music critic John S. Wilson to hail Woody's playing as "one of the most invigorating and encouraging evidences of the continuity of the New Orleans jazz tradition." Other critics have not been so effusive. "I wouldn't rate him as a professional," says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. "It's cute; it doesn't do any harm...
...passionate about jazz, in fact, that he says he would have preferred to be a full-time musician if only he "had been born with a massive talent" for it. "It's the best life I can think of if you're a really talented musician because communication in music is so emotional in every...
Long before young Brooklyn-born Allen Konigsberg had 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...
Woody, who neither reads nor writes music, is the first to admit his technical shortcomings. "I feel that I don't really have much of a musical talent at all. I have enthusiasm and affection and obsession for the music. But I wasn't born with the real equipment for it. I mean, I'm totally eclectic and derivative of the guys I've heard and loved." His one advantage for playing the old-style New Orleans stuff, Woody feels, "is that I am genuinely crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful, wailing tone of the original...