Kenny Davern dies

[Ted O'Reilly]

I've just heard that clarinetist Kenny Davern died of a heart attack last night...looking for more information.

[Harold_Z]

Bad news indeed.

[Big Al]

Jeez, what a day. First Peter Boyle, now this.

What a year for the losses.

[sidewinder]

An unbelievable year for jazz losses. Very sad news - RIP.

[jlhoots]

I just saw him here in Santa Fe recently, playing great.

Huge loss.

[White Lightning]

Very sad News. R.I.P.

[brownie]

A very unique voice has been stilled

[clifford_thornton]

I was just listening to him on Blown Bone... sad news indeed!

Thanks for the music, Mr. Davern, and RIP.

[EKE BBB]

Very sad news. A true original (much in the way Pee Wee Russell was) has gone.

Here's Steve Voce's obituary for The Independent:

John Kenneth Davern, clarinettist and saxophonist: born Huntington, New York

7 January 1935; married Elsa Last (one stepson, one stepdaughter); died

Sandia Park, New Mexico, 12 December 2006.

" Louis Armstrong can say something with one note, but then there are

others who take an hour to rev up and wind up with a fart in a bathtub."

Although Kenny Davern became one of the most effective jazz

clarinettists of the last 50 years, he always regarded a trumpeter, Louis Armstrong, as

the wellspring of his inspiration. Unusually for a clarinet player he had a

forceful attack, almost as though he was playing the trumpet. He played

the instrument with great fire and probably more passion than any other

clarinettist playing today.

"When I was a kid we'd go to Bop City and Birdland to listen to

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell. Bird was a great musician but

his points of reference were different from mine.I thought the real jazz

was Louis Armstrong and I still do.

"I can listen to 'Jubilee' by Louis Armstrong and know that good will

triumph after all and that there's justice in the world."

Self-taught, Davern was given an old Albert system clarinet when he

was 11. Three years later he acquired a more convential Boehm system

instrument. He began playing professionally when he was 16 and three months after

he left high school auditioned for the big band led by Ralph Flanagan.

"When I got there were about ten guys ahead of me, but I went up to

the manager and said 'Let me play, I gotta be somewhere, I have an

appointment..Then Flanagan went over to the piano and we played two

choruses of "Muskrat Ramble" and that was it.'"

In the Flanagan band he was required to play alto and baritone

saxophones as well as clarinet. He stayed for a year, leaving because he couldn't

stand life on the road.

Perhaps he was fortunate in being a New Yorker, for all his formative

work was in the city, often playing with the jazz greats of earlier years.

"To be on the bandstand with a Roy Eldridge or a Buck Clayton is an

honour and a privilege not granted to everyone. Making harmonious music with

such people in your formative years, you come away with something in your

head. Call it tradition if you must, although it's a word I hate - maybe

because I overreacted to it by playing revival music at one time."

Back in New York he rejoined Flanagan on a temporary basis. One of

the saxophone players asked him how he'd like to play with Jack Teagarden.

"I was gassed. I joined the band at the Meadowbrook, played a couple

of tunes and got off the stand. Teagarden hadn't said anything so I went

over to him and asked how I'd done. He smiled and said 'Where've you been?'

After Teagarden, with whom he recorded with in 1954 when he was 19,

Davern freelanced in the city and led his own band which he called his

Washington Squares. It included his friends and contemporaries Dave Frishberg and

Johnny Windhurst. He worked with Ruby Braff, Wild Bill Davison, Billy

Butterfield, Bud Freeman and for Eddie Condon at Condon's club. He also

appeared in the play "Marathon 33" on Broadway. The play starred Julie

Harris and the band, which stayed on stage throughout, included

Davern's long-time colleague and pianist Dick Wellstood.

An avant-garde band that Davern helped to run in the Fifties that

included Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd and played arrangements by Carla Bley and

Cecil Taylor inspired the remark at the beginning of this piece. Davern

also appeared along with Rudd in the film The Hustler (1961).

Following a jazz party in 1973 where he and fellow clarinettist Bob

Wilber played together they formed the band Soprano Summit - two soprano

saxophones and a rhythm section. The band lasted until 1979 and recorded several

albums, including reunion ones in 1991 and 1997. The soprano sax is a

difficult instrument and Davern became bored with it and returned to

the clarinet after a couple of years.

When the band broke up he worked in small groups and led a trio with

Dick Wellstood called The Blue Three. He and Wellstood worked together until

the pianist's death in 1987. He frequently worked with two other pianists,

Ralph Sutton and Dick Hyman. He toured Europe with the New York Jazz

Repertory and the successful Kings Of Jazz and appeared regularly on jazz cruises

and at European jazz festivals. He worked in Australia and New Zealand in

August 1988.

A concert of his with Humphrey Lyttelton was recorded in 1982 and he

returned to record with Lyttelton in 1985.

He was described by Lyttelton as "Fluent, hot and with as original a

slant on traditional clarinet as you'll find anywhere."

In the Nineties he became much involved with the Arbors record label,

where he was given a free rein to record what he liked by the sensitive

director Mat Domber.

Last year he put a band together for a one-night appearance at New

York's Tavern On The Green by an old friend, the film star Billy Crystal. He

visited Britain last summer with The Statesmen of Jazz.

Davern could have an alternative career in stand up comedy. He hated

microphones, preferring to play acoustically and in clubs would always

turn them off if he could, sometimes to the annoyance of the audience. He

answered complaints that his announcements couldn't be heard with "I'm

not saying anything. Just passing the time." He would elicit requests for

tunes, asking members of the audience who would respond with everything from

early New Orleans marches to, say, Artie Shaw's "Concerto For Clarinet".

"I'm not going to play any of them," Davern said. "I just want to

know where your heads are at."

Steve Voce

Edited December 14, 2006 by EKE BBB

[John Tapscott]

Sad news, indeed. I really enjoy Kenny's playing. Certainly one of my favorite clarinetists and jazz musicians. Sackville just released a new Davern CD called "No One Else But Kenny." It's a good one and I'm going to listen to it again right now.

RIP, Kenny.

[Brownian Motion]

Here's his NYT obit.

The New York Times

Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

December 14, 2006

Kenny Davern, 71, Clarinetist Who Loved Traditional Jazz, Dies

By DENNIS HEVESI

Kenny Davern, a radically traditional jazz clarinetist and soprano saxophonist whose liquid tones linked him to the classical sound of New Orleans but who could also play free jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Sandia Park, N.M. He was 71.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Elsa, said.

A professional on several instruments since his teens, Mr. Davern became nationally known in the 1970s when, with the pianist Dick Wellstood and another soprano saxophonist, Bob Wilber, he formed the Soprano Summit. The band toured the world and recorded several well-received albums.

When the band reunited in the 1990s, Mr. Davern had returned almost exclusively to the clarinet, on which he was known for hitting notes far above the instrument’s normal range.

“You could pick Kenny out on a record after two or three notes —like a hot knife going through butter,” said Warren Vaché, a trumpeter and longtime friend. “His playing was edgy and cutting and virile and, at the same time, passionate and tender..”

His style, Mr. Vaché said, “was derived from Dixieland but weaved in everything else.”

John Kenneth Davern was born on Jan. 7, 1935, in Huntington, N.Y., the son of John and Josephine Davern.

By the age of 11, Kenny Davern was playing a clarinet that his mother had bought for $35. Living with his grandparents in Woodhaven, Queens, after the breakup of his parents’ marriage, he played in the school band and in a Dixieland band with friends from the neighborhood.

At 16, Mr. Davern got his first big break when the trumpeter Henry (Red) Allen called him for a clarinet gig at an American Legion Hall in Queens. “I have no idea how he came to phone me,” he recalled in a profile written by Brian Peerless, a British jazz impresario.

Within two years Mr. Davern was on the road in the saxophone section of Ralph Flanagan’s big band. He then auditioned for Jack Teagarden’s Dixieland band and afterward, Mr. Davern recalled, Mr. Teagarden asked, “Kenny, where’ve you been all my life?”

In 1954, still a teenager, Mr. Davern made his recording debut with Mr. Teagarden. Four years later he recorded his first album under his own name, “In the Gloryland,”on the Elektra label. He later made many albums for the Concord, Chiaroscuro and Arbors labels.

In the mid-1950s and ’60s, enthralled by the recordings of Jimmie Noone, Mr. Davern focused on the New Orleans style. He played with Phil Napoleon’s Memphis Five and Pee Wee Erwin’s band, even joining the Dukes of Dixieland for a couple of years. But later in the ’60s, when Mr. Davern was regularly leading his own traditional band at Nick’s in Greenwich Village, he also became close to musicians like the trombonist Roswell Rudd and the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, Mr. Vaché said. “Kenny’s curiosity made him see the good side of the avant-garde,” he said.

In later years he was a sought-after performer at jazz festivals in America and Europe, resolutely playing his own lyrical version of a traditional repertory from the 1920s on an instrument last popular in the 1940s.

He is survived by his wife of 36 years, the former Elsa Green, for whom he and his friend the saxophonist Flip Phillips wrote the tune “Elsa’s Dream”; two stepchildren, Mark Lass, of San Diego, and Deborah Wuensch, of Poulsbo, Wash.; and four step-grandchildren.

Asked to name other jazz greats his friend had played with, Mr. Vaché said, “We’d need a year to list them all.”

But Mr. Davern, who was known for his acerbic wit on and off the bandstand, listed as one of his favorite ensembles Dick Wellstood and His All-Star Orchestra, which consisted of exactly two members.

[gmonahan]

But Mr. Davern, who was known for his acerbic wit on and off the bandstand, listed as one of his favorite ensembles Dick Wellstood and His All-Star Orchestra, which consisted of exactly two members.

Now, THIS is a guy I would have had fun talking to almost as much as I've already enjoyed hearing him on records. A sad loss.

[Nate Dorward]

Sad news indeed. Thanks for passing it on, Ted.

[Harold_Z]

WKCR-FM ran an official tribute broadcast for Kenny yesterday, but they will "continue" the tribute tonight from 6pm-9pm, tomorrow on "Traditions In Swing", again from 6pm-9pm, and on Monday's "Out To Lunch" from 12 noon thru 3pm.

[DukeCity]

Sad news indeed!

I've been away from the 'net for a few days, so just heard about this.

There's a great site that features New Mexico jazz musicians, and there's an extensive interview with Kenny and some music samples here.

[Chuck Nessa]

G'bye Kenny.