The Clarinet in Jazz

Abstract

Abstract The first jazz record, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues,” announced in 1917 a new kind of music but also, startlingly, a new kind of clarinet playing, heard in the forthright, repeated squeal, a high E flat, by clarinetist Larry Shields. Shields’s thin, abrasive tone sounds like a wild cry as it carries above the rest of the band. On the “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” he flings out high notes before him, letting them sag in pitch in a manner that might have been plaintive but for the insistently upbeat style of the band. His two-bar breaks include the whinnying sounds and brash glissandos heard repeatedly in early jazz. Those high notes, pushed out dramatically, are inevitable if he is going to be heard, but his vibrato-laden tone is not. It is indicative of a New Orleans style of clarinet playing, which frequently took the instrument’s sound in a direction radically different from the classical tradition.