As Charlie Parker did for the alto saxophone, as Dizzy Gillespie did for the trumpet, as J.J. Johnson did for the trombone, so did clarinetist Buddy DeFranco obliterate the presumed limitations of his instrument.
Beginning in the 1940s, DeFranco dared to bring the technical wizardry and harmonic complexities of be-bop to an instrument that hadn’t yet advanced much beyond the era of swing.
As he prepares to celebrate his 70th birthday later this month with a national tour, including a performance Feb. 19 at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, DeFranco has not forgotten the rejection, hard times and, ultimately, the belated recognition that attended his accomplishment.
“I guess I realized early on that to be a Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw clone wasn’t going to mean very much,” says DeFranco, referring to his first two jazz heroes. “It’s nice to attempt to play that well, but what’s the point?
“So I was playing with Gene Krupa in New York, and Dodo Marmarosa (the fabled piano innovator) and I ran into (trumpeter) Charlie Shavers, who told us, `There’s this guy up in Harlem playing strange music. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to find out.’
“Now we had heard rumors about this sax player named Charlie Parker, too, so Dodo and I decided to spend a few days tracking him down.”
Night after night, DeFranco and Marmarosa cruised Harlem’s jazz rooms, eventually chasing down Parker at Minton’s Playhouse, the be-bop laboratory where Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and other first-generation boppers were perfecting their experiments.
“Charlie Parker finally showed up after Dodo and I had been waiting around for hours one night, and he had to borrow a saxophone-he didn’t even have one of his own!
“But when he started playing, it was totally fascinating. I didn’t know what he was doing, but that night stuck with Dodo and I, and we kept on tracking Charlie Parker around.
“Then Charlie started working more regularly with Dizzy, and they both kind of molded this bop idea.
“And I thought to myself, `I’ve got to learn to play clarinet like this,’ ” a task easier said than done.
DeFranco, however, was ready to attempt it. Having worked extensively in both symphonic and swing idioms since he was a 9-year-old growing up in Philadelphia (including stints playing alto saxophone for both Krupa and Charlie Barnet in the early ’40s), DeFranco hungered for “the challenge.”
He had no idea, however, how long and hard the journey would be.
“Technically, just articulating that music on the clarinet became the most difficult stumbling block, because the clarinet did not have the flexibility and response that the alto saxophone or the flute had,” says DeFranco. “So it was doubly difficult to get it right.
“Actually, it was the most difficult transition imaginable. A lot of guys who tried to make that transition to be-bop failed miserably, because of the problem of the articulation. It was murder.”
Somehow, DeFranco achieved the fluidity of technique that was essential to bop. But, even then, in the mid-’40s, the greatest hardships were still to come.
“There was another problem-80 percent of the public did not get it, probably because they couldn’t participate, they couldn’t dance,” says DeFranco.
“So the mass audience just broke away, looking for something simpler.”
Undaunted, DeFranco decided to test his wings by the late ’40s, quitting his gig with the Tommy Dorsey band to work as a freelance clarinetist in Los Angeles. Dorsey, however, did not let go easily.
“A lot of people had promised me a lot of really important work when I’d get out to L.A., like playing background music in the movies and getting freelance dates,” recalls DeFranco.
“But then when I got out there, everyone said, `Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ I got about three or four jobs all year and went through all my dough.
“Years later I ran into (trumpeter) Ziggy Elman, who said to me: `Yeah, the old man really zinged you,’ so that’s how I found out that Dorsey had made the phone calls to all his friends telling them to freeze me out.
“After that seige, in fact, Tommy called me and said, well, I won’t use the exact words, but essentially he said: `Do you have enough wrinkles in your belly?’ So, basically, he forced me back.
“Now that makes him sound like the worst ogre in the world, but that’s not quite true.
“Tommy was a combination of every personality type. He was as generous as he was hostile, he had the highest paid band in the business, he was a brilliant musician.”
By 1948, DeFranco broke away from Dorsey for a second time, briefly hooking up with Count Basie’s small band in the early ’50s, thereafter realizing that America had virtually lost interest in jazz.
“By the time the ’60s came around, there was practically no work at all,” says DeFranco. “The only guys operating in jazz were the superstars like Getz, Brubeck and Miles.
“Most of us weren’t working at all. We were scrambling to get what we could, and more and more we were finding hostile audiences.
“Almost the entire music business became rock-infested, and that spread across America like a disease. That may sound bitter, but it’s a fact.”
DeFranco was not the only jazz great soured on musical life in America. Shaw, his clarinet hero, after all, put down his instrument in 1954 once and for all.
“It was a tragedy for the music business when Artie stopped playing,” says DeFranco. “Had he continued the way he played, I think he would have come up with a whole new approach to improvising.
“I have the feeling that in those days, when he became extremely popular, I think he thought most of the people understood what he was doing.
“And then when it turned out that they really didn’t, that was the most frustrating thing for him.”
DeFranco, however, would not quit, simply because “I decided this is what I was going to do, period.”
So he signed on as leader of a “ghost” version of the Glenn Miller Band, playing the great old charts through the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Incredibly, the man who brought the clarinet into the world of be-bop didn’t find himself in great demand again as soloist until the current resurgence of jazz, dating to the late ’70s.
“I think jazz never really went away in Europe, in Japan, in Australia,” says DeFranco.
“But in those places TV was not considered the pivot of the universe. So there were always people who wanted to go out and hear something.
“So jazz never really died in other parts of the world, though it came near to death in the U.S. People all the time would tell me that I was finished, that my friends were finished.”
Thankfully for anyone who appreciates a sublime and sophisticated music, DeFranco and his generation have won a kind of belated recognition, with DeFranco barely able to keep up with requests for his services these days.
His most recent recording, “Chip Off the Old Bop” (Concord), proves that his chops remain as dexterous as ever, and he has the profound satisfaction of having worked with the titans of jazz.
Charlie Parker, recalls DeFranco, “was awesome, overwhelming in many ways. He had flawless technique and such a feeling for time.
“Of course, no one was stupid enough to follow him (on stage) after he played 19 choruses of some tune and did everything but take the keys off the horn.
“But if you preceded him (onstage), the difference between you and him was so obvious, the way he played with such stability. You felt like you were in the shadow of this giant oak tree. Nothing will budge it.”
Billie Holiday, with whom DeFranco toured Europe in 1954, “was a tragic figure, no doubt about that, but we were friendly and got along well. I learned a lot from Billie. She had certain subtleties of singing and placing notes that are hard to pin down, but you learn what it is from being there with her.”
And Count Basie “could get any 12 guys together who could play, and after one or two hours they sounded like Basie. For one, he had a flawless concept of the tempo of the song. He knew when to bring in the band, when a soloist should stretch out or not-he just instinctively had it.”
As for the future of jazz, DeFranco says he’s encouraged by the young talent, but insists that the world still waits for the next great innovator.
“Technically, the kids playing today impress me,” says DeFranco, who turns 70 on Feb. 17. “But my criticism of them and the criticism of my peers is that there are too many clones.
“There hasn’t really been an original approach to jazz since (John) Coltrane and Chick Corea. Past that point nothing has been said.
“We need another Count Basie, another Bird or Bix or Tatum.
“But, believe me, it’s going to happen. A new guy is going to come along one day and say, `Here it is,’ just like Bird did to me.”
