Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 56)

other George Lewis clones who were actually much better, like Sammy Rimington, the English clarinet player who actually gave me my first clarinet in 1962. That’s why I wound up playing. Frank Oxley here probably learned a lot from his dad, started by maybe copying his dad, I don’t know. There are musicians who remain clones all their lives and some of them are very good at it. I don’t think that really makes much sense. I think you have to eventually come to your own style and often that means synthesis. In terms of clarinet players, I first listened to George Lewis and I was hearing all these other guys, but later really tried to learn something from each one of them, something from Albert Burbank, something from Willie Humphrey, something from Louis Cottrell, and then others that I didn’t know but had heard on records, Albert Nicholas, Darnell Howard and Johnny Dodds. The composite of all this music is the New Orleans Jazz Tradition. I think the way we innovate really is to try to find our own synthesis within the tradition by taking a little here, a little there, and putting it together in your own way. You can innovate beyond that by going beyond the models and doing something that’s not really part of what I’d call “ it’s hard to remember, particularly for younger people to remember, what things were like in the Jim Crow days I was well aware that it was a very unusual thing to have this human contact, this social contact with this community, and I look back on it as a great privilege.” the canon of traditional jazz and bring in be-bop licks and things like that. I personally don’t like to do that but it’s doable. You can draw on different musical traditions and funk and things like that and bring them into the way you play a jazz tune. There are many ways to innovate, but I think the main way is for each musician to take the best of what appeals to him as the best in the style and just put it together in a synthesis that is uniquely this musician when it comes out. Audience: Is the New Orleans style played elsewhere besides in New Orleans? Sancton: Very much so. I live in France now and I play with a number of bands over there and some of them play CHERYL GERBER very, very convincing traditional New Orleans style jazz. In England, where Clive comes from, there are many bands. Not as many as there used to be, but I guess at the time that he came over and I first started to get interested in music, in the early ’60s, I don’t guess it was as popular as the Beatles, but it is hard to imagine how popular that music was among young people in those days. In Germany there are a lot of traditional bands and in Sweden as well. One of the great experiences I had here was being in New Orleans and hanging out at Preservation Hall as a young man, was meeting all of these people from these different countries and different cultures and speaking different languages and speaking with different accents. Lars has learned English now, by the way. Long before we heard the Beatles and fell in love with their Liverpool accents, I was hearing people who spoke English in different ways. They came from different cultures. I’d hear Clive’s posh public school accent and I’d hear other people like Sammy Rimington. It was like this big extended family that really went all around the world. I should mention the Japanese. One of the great copyists of George Lewis is Ryoichi Kawai, a wonderful Japanese clarinet player. He has a band called the Osaka Rascals who play this music. We were honored to have for a number of years a wonderful Japanese trumpet player named Yoshio Toyama, whose name was unpronounceable by Kid Sheik so Kid Sheik turned him into “Kid Claiborne” for some reason. He was known as Kid Claiborne and he was a wonderful player, played just like Bunk Johnson; his wife played the banjo. They lived here for many years. So yeah, it’s a great question because it really allows me to make the point that this music, this tradition, has circled the globe, not just in the way that jazz in general has gone around the world as this great cultural phenomenon, but really in its CHERYL GERBER 56 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Summer 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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