Clarinet Ninja Podcast
Ron Odrich, Part 3: Classical Background Meets Jazz Career
Transcript
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JAY HASSLER: Welcome to the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. My name is Jay Hassler. As always, I am doing my best to bring you the finest in clarinet information and entertainment. We're in segment number three of an afternoon with Ron Odrich, and Ron has agreed to talk about his sort of mixing his classical background as a clarinetist with his jazz career, and how that all actually, one thing applied and informed the other.
RON ODRICH: The thing that really ignited me, I was a cellist as a kid and I was playing the unaccompanied cello suites. My father was a cellist, so it was serious stuff. And I heard the Rhapsody in Blue, the glissando. For some reason, as an 11-year-old, 10-year-old kid, I was ignited by that. And there was always a clarinet around, and a flute, and a saxophone. My father was a doubler, and very active in the radio, recordings and jingles and stuff like that. And so there was usually the clarinet there, and I realized that was the instrument that was making that sound. And I used to pick it up and I would play with it.
You know the story about Putti Wickman? You know who he was? Putti Wickman was a wonderful Swedish clarinet player. I'm about to tell you a story about me, and every time I do, I think about him. Putti was a wonderful, wonderful swing bebop clarinetist for many, many years. Among clarinetists, he was regarded very, very highly. Played classical, got a beautiful sound, was a really good jazz player, going toward the Buddy DeFranco thing, and a friend of Buddy's. And I met him a couple of times.
The story is very similar in a way to what I did, or what I didn't do. When he was a kid, he was a son of a very wealthy family. The family was always on tour. The mother and father traveled and everything, and he was always kind of in the hands of the maid and the servant in Sweden. The kid expressed a desire to play the clarinet. So the father went out and made sure that whoever knew about clarinets got him the best clarinet. Didn't give him a teacher. And the father presented him with a clarinet.
Putti telling the story is very funny. He said, "I tried and I tried. I couldn't get the damn thing to work. I just kept trying." He said, "One day the maid came in and said, well, maybe if you put your right hand down below and your left hand on top, maybe it'll work better." My approach as a cellist, luckily, I put my left hand where it was supposed to go.
And the reason why I'm saying that, it's a funny kind of a thing, because I remember as a child, how do you get a gliss? I had no idea that was supposed to be, especially in those days, a hard thing to do. Al Gallodoro could do it, and I think Benny did at one point. But anyway, I learned how to do it. I didn't know what the notes were. I had no idea. I played the record over and over again. It was the Oscar Levant recording. I went right through all the acetate to the cardboard. I played this thing over so many times. And my father had no idea, because I only did it when he wasn't around. The clarinet was like on a stand somewhere. And I would go over. The wet reed, I learned you have to do that or the thing doesn't play. And it was all intuitive. Completely intuitive.
I had no idea what. I didn't even go over to the piano to figure out the first thing is a low G for me to trill on. I finally figured out what that was and what the other keys were. And I somehow got a chromatic scale out of it. I know, a lot of questions come up about this. But anyway, I did it. I mean, I only know I lived it, and I'm being honest with you, telling you how stupid it was for me to do this. But when I think about it in retrospect as an adult, maybe that's not such a bad way to learn something. I mean, you go right to doing it. Nobody's telling you what to do, to put your nose here, your fingers here, your toes there, whatever. And I got the gliss. I played a scale up. I figured the fingers come up gradually as you go up higher, you pick off more fingers. And that funny part in the middle there that you have to go across the hump. I knew what a chromatic scale sounded like. So I wasn't tabula rasa. It wasn't like a white sheet.
The point is I wound up doing it, and my father came home one day and said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Dad, listen." And I played it. He said, "What? Play the high B." And I said, "I don't know." And he got angry with me. He said, "That's incredible, but you don't even know where the notes are. Oh, my God." So he called up Salamato. Salamato came down and I started to take lessons. But that's how it started. And it started with me enamored of this sound.
In a sense, it's what I'm talking to you about. Not to take credit for any of this, because I don't feel like I take credit for it. Exhale into the clarinet, that's kind of a natural thing to do. Pick up the clarinet and try to figure it out, that's a natural thing. It's a little unusual, but that's how I started, and I was in love with the clarinet from the very beginning. And that was my beginning.
And then my father heard me playing and I still didn't really know the names of the notes. And I went to Bryant High School, and I was in my freshman year, and they asked me to audition. And while I preluded, of course, all I did was I could only play that. I could play some scales. I couldn't read anything, because I had no idea what the notes were. I knew on the cello but not on clarinet. And I preluded for the band master there and I just played a gliss, you know, just warming up, and he said, "Forget it. You're going to sit in the first chair."
JAY: Oh, no.
RON ODRICH: Oh, yeah. But the story, the plot thickens, because who's playing the first chair? My neighbor two doors down, Freddy. He's been playing the clarinet since he was 5 years old, and he knows that I just picked up the clarinet, because he knew me. And I'm sitting next to him. He was really angry at me. I couldn't do anything. I mean, soon, out of necessity, I had to learn where the notes were. Salamato got me going. And while I was sitting as assistant principal, I was learning how to play the clarinet. So that's how I started.
And then my father came home one day, and when he heard me playing Perdido, I'll show you the picture I have of the time when he recorded that. Tom Ranier sent me a picture of Buddy DeFranco playing next to Charlie Parker and Charlie Ventura. That was the recording that they were doing, that I used as a kid to learn how to play Perdido, the chorus of Perdido.
JAY: Speaking of Tom Ranier, I got to hear him play a number of times in Los Angeles when I lived out there.
RON ODRICH: Oh, he's just, I mean, people use the word genius a lot. Tom is a stupendous pianist and stupendous clarinet player. And the way I met him, do you want me to deviate into that? It's very funny.
Because Eddie Daniels, a very close friend of mine, was playing at the ICA, the International Clarinet Association, and he was going to play and he said, "Why don't you come out with me, and you can come up." I often played with him wherever he was. He'd have me come up because we were friendly and I was playing. He was tickled about the fact that this dentist was, you know. He didn't know me. He got to know me when I was in the play. And we used to get together and play together, and we felt very comfortable with each other.
So I go out there, and I'm sitting in the audience with the clarinet ready, and Eddie's up there playing with this guy playing piano. Tom Ranier. I'd heard who he was. I had no idea what his capabilities were. So at one point, Eddie says, "Ron, come on up and play with us." So I jump up on the stand. I go up there, and Eddie says, "I'm going to play piano. You play clarinet," to Tom Ranier. I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah." So Eddie sits down and he's playing. We're playing tunes. This guy playing the piano knocked me out, because I'd heard him play for about 15, 20 minutes before I got up there. And he picks up the clarinet. He sounds unbelievable. He's an incredible clarinet player. And so I played with him, as opposed to Eddie. Eddie was playing the piano. So the tunes that I played, I was playing with Tom. We became friendly.
At the end of the last tune we played, I played a high D above a high C on the clarinet. And while I was talking to Ranier, Cipriano walks over and I was introduced to him. I didn't know we were almost related at the time. I found that out later. And he looks at Tom, he says, "Tom, you sound great. That high D at the end was incredible." And he said, "He did it. This guy did it." He looked at me, he said, "The dentist?" Because somebody had told him. He goes, "Ah," and he walked away. He's a very funny guy. Tom has been a friend, and he's a stupendous talent. A wonderful piano player, wonderful writer and arranger, a phenomenal musician. Plays the hell out of the clarinet and the saxophone.
JAY: But let's get back to you. So when you joined the Airmen of Note, that probably took an audition. That took some effort.
RON ODRICH: No. I went to high school and I played in high school, and I played at Queens College. And then I found out that they were going to draft me into the Korean War. It was up to the local group in Astoria, and the local group didn't like the kids in college, because most of the college kids were exempt from the draft at that time. But I was not. I went down and spoke with them and they said, "No, you're in the next call."
So I started to figure out what am I going to do. I don't want to go over there. I auditioned for the West Point Band, and I got to know the guy who was a classmate of my father's at Yale, and he wrote me a note recommending me to the Army base in Brooklyn. I used to remember the name of it, but I have a good reason for blocking it. Anyway, that's too bad a story. I won't go into it. I auditioned for it and I passed the audition, but I didn't wind up there. I wound up with the Airmen of Note.
I went down. I had been studying with Abbado at that time. From Salamato, Abbado, then down to Marcellus. So in 1950, I went down to Marcellus, and it was playing with a quintet attached to the band, to the Airmen of Note. And so I spent three years down there practicing three to four or five hours a day sometimes, with rehearsals. And I got a really good, solid foundation with Bob Marcellus, and we became very friendly. I used to go down to hear him at Constitution Hall all the time, and was very impressed with him as a teacher.
He was an interesting guy. I mean, he never went to college, you know. He came out at 17, playing second clarinet in the National Symphony. Then he went for several years into the Air Force. He played where I wound up going, at Bolling Air Force Base. And he became principal when he was 18. So he was this young guy. By that time it was in the 50s, he was about three years older than I was, so he was about 21. And I studied with him for that period of time, became very friendly with him, and he's the guy who introduced me as I said before to Bernard and to the whole list of great teachers and great players. And it opened up a whole world for me, and I really fell in love with that whole thing. But I always wanted to be a dentist through that whole period.
JAY: You know, we've talked a lot, and the thing I've never quite gotten you to talk about is the specific way in which you were able to become conversant, more than conversant, in jazz.
RON ODRICH: Well, you know, it really goes back to that Buddy DeFranco thing. I mean, I heard Buddy play Perdido. I knew that's what I wanted to do. As a matter of fact, it's very telling. My father took me down to Birdland when I was a kid, because Buddy was playing with George Shearing at the time, and they had a quintet. And I sat in the little bleachers there and I was introduced to Buddy DeFranco. And Buddy was one of the nicest, sweetest, gentlest, wonderful people you could ever have as a friend and a teacher. He was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
I'll never forget the first words out of his mouth. My father took me backstage after they played a set, and I remember, I was what, 12, 13 years old, kind of obstreperous. And what I said to DeFranco when I met him, he said, "Oh, you're a clarinet player." And my father said, "Yeah, he plays your chorus on Perdido." He said, "Really? You do that?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "That's great." And I said, "I'm kind of disappointed." And so he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I wanted to be the first bebop clarinet player." He said, "What are you, crazy? Don't be silly. There's a lot of room up here for another clarinet player. I'll help you if you like." And I said, "Would you do that?" And he came over to the house and we had dinner together, and he became a friend and a teacher. That's how I got involved with making, no transition.
I mean, I was not even really, I was playing a lot of clarinet and playing a lot of jazz things strictly by ear, and with some basic knowledge of chord changes. I was a pretty good Buddy DeFranco imitator, and I used to get by on a lot of that.
JAY: Well, I get that. But, I mean, you probably remember this. We played together once. I was in a band and you and Lou Soloff were there. It had Horace Mann, just around the corner. You were in that band?
RON ODRICH: Oh, yeah. Sure.
JAY: Well, I mean, whatever. It was just like that one-day thing. There was a chart that had this big alto solo. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. I'm not playing these changes. There you and Lou Soloff standing there, and without any music, without really much of a chart, you just played the whole thing. And you did it with a lot of ease. And it wasn't something that you could have prepared for, because none of us had any idea what was going to happen that day. And that kind of skill comes from obviously something other than just being able to imitate Buddy DeFranco. Because the amount of information you're taking in, processing, and giving, with great voice leading, that doesn't come from imitation alone.
RON ODRICH: I remember that incident now that you talk about it. What did I, I stood up and it wound up in A flat, and I kind of fumbled my way through it.
JAY: That's not how I remember it. I just remember you sounding great. I don't recall any fumbling.
RON ODRICH: I'm going to just stick with my story. But what's funny is that it's such a departure from learning clarinet from any of the people that you learned clarinet from.
But, you know, once again, the way I learned how to play the clarinet to begin with is indicative of the way I learned anything. And if I heard a phrase on the radio, I could play it. I was learning by imitating, and I could hear what the changes were. And if you stopped me in the middle, I could tell you it was an E minor 7 going to an A minor 7. But whatever. That was not an obstacle. It was just natural.
JAY: Do you have perfect pitch?
RON ODRICH: Depending on how often I play the clarinet. I know I have perfect pitch, because I go over to the piano and I check myself. I can hear the pitches and I know what they are. But I wouldn't say perfect pitch. I mean, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and said, "Sing a C sharp," I don't think I could do it. I have a very good relative pitch. And it really depends on how long I have the horn in my mouth. Because when I hear a sound, my finger goes to the note on the clarinet.
JAY: I know that same experience. When I'm playing the clarinet and somebody plays a note, I know what it is. But if I'm not holding the clarinet, I've got no idea.
RON ODRICH: But if you played the clarinet for five hours a day for about five weeks, and you heard a sound, your finger would automatically go to it.
JAY: Only if I'd been playing it that day.
RON ODRICH: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. If you're really in the groove with the instrument, and you're really adept at doing everything on the instrument, there's a feeling you get sometimes. I used to have that. You know, you can do anything on the instrument. There are no obstacles. So the what you're talking about, it was not an obstacle at all. And it may sound like an achievement of some kind, but it's just not terribly impressive.
JAY: Well, as far as somebody whose jazz career reasonably did not go very well, I mean, I always had a very serious interest in it, a real love for the music and a love for playing. And I got relatively good at it. My solos made sense. You could hear the tune and the voice leading. But I always know that on that day we're together, like, I could play these changes. But if there are other people in the room, I should not. Like I recognized, it's out of respect for the music. And that I understand how much different the outcome is going to be.
RON ODRICH: I thank you for being that considerate. But it's not even deferential. In the moment, it's not. It's just simply, I don't want to hear myself do that.
RON ODRICH: So by that time, my brother was a piano player. He played Teddy Wilson-type piano when I was just starting to play the clarinet. I never tried to sound like Benny Goodman, but it was always Buddy DeFranco from the very beginning, and Bird, and Charlie Parker. When I went down to the Three Deuces as a 17-year-old, and I heard Bird play in person, I want to tell you, it was one of those moments, like a moment with Bernard playing. He filled the room up with the sound. I never heard him recorded the way the sound he gave. I went there many times to hear him play.
Bird got a sound on the alto saxophone I never heard from anybody else. I mean, it was just the most gorgeous, room-filling sound. Warm, beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And the thing that impressed me so much, that infected me, it really got to me and was inspiring, was the ease with which he played everything. Everything was like playing a C major scale. It was like nothing. And it was just all musical. Beautiful, musical. He was a funny man. A pretty woman would come in, and no matter where he was in the chorus, you would hear a little quote from "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Bird did that all the time. And he was a nice, gentle man.
My introduction to him was through Buddy DeFranco backstage at one of the theaters in Washington, DC, years later, when I was with the Airmen of Note. He introduced me to Charlie Parker, to Bird. Because I had seen him and met him before, but this was an official introduction. And here I had just been through high school and college, and all the guys I was playing with are like, "Cool, man," and "This is groovy," with the duck's ass hairdos and the peg pants and all the shtick that everybody had. And here this guy is the king of all jazz players. He walks up to me, shakes my hand, he says, "Howdy, partner." And I looked at him and I said, "Oh, my God." All the hip guys trying to be Bird, and here the real Bird is like a western cowboy. He was a wonderful man.
But Buddy was a huge influence on my playing jazz.
JAY: When I was a kid growing up in Alaska, I depended on the, you grew up in Alaska? I didn't know that.
RON ODRICH: Really? Yeah. I'm surprised you didn't know that.
JAY: I feel like that's something that everybody knows about me. But the Anchorage Public Library for some reason did not have Buddy DeFranco records. And so I knew of this mythical character named Buddy DeFranco who was a bebop jazz clarinet player, but I'd never heard him. Because the internet wasn't around, I couldn't just type his name in and hear him play. I didn't hear him play probably until I was over 20.
RON ODRICH: Really? Wow.
JAY: Yeah. And it was kind of mind-blowing to hear him play, because the way he treats the instrument is so much different than the swing era.
RON ODRICH: Absolutely. He's a bebopper from word go.
JAY: And it was kind of alarming to hear the instrument do something that I never thought of. I never heard anything quite like this. I had the same experience listening to Eddie Daniels' Breakthrough album, when he plays the Bach at the beginning.
RON ODRICH: Sure.
JAY: That just turned me on. I was like, "Oh my God, I had no idea that was possible." And then the jazz solo that follows it, which is incredible clarinet playing, but rooted in bebop and yet not actually bebop.
RON ODRICH: No, Eddie's not a bebopper. He's got a lot of Coltrane and other more advanced harmonic things. But to hear those lines wrap around the way Buddy DeFranco does it, because it's really phenomenal.
JAY: It's really amazing. So what other jazz influences did you have?
RON ODRICH: Clark Terry had a lot to do with some of the sounds that I was trying to get out of bass clarinet especially. His vibrato, for example, was a very silver, burnished, beautiful, beautiful sound. And I think Buddy was principally my major influence in terms of clarinet playing. I never wanted to sound like Benny, although I love the way he played. His time was exquisite. And Putte Wickman, who was the Swedish player, is a very, very good player also. I knew Tony Scott very well, but he didn't affect me in a way that I wanted to copy anything that he did. Eddie was a very big influence on me, just to hear what he was capable of doing, playing on the instrument. It's like no holds barred, no limitations. Whatever key, whatever tempo you want.
The thing that used to kill me with Eddie when he lived in New York is he would be playing somewhere, or I would be playing somewhere, and we would play together. And he did a thing, like on Donna Lee, really fast. And he would stop the rhythm section and play five choruses with time that was absolutely perfect. And not mechanical at all. The one came down once in a while a little bit late and a little bit early, but it was always under control. And you always knew where he was. And he would play the most creative kind of combinations.
The wonderful part about Eddie, because a lot of people get into that groove and are very formulaic. You know, they get into pentatonic scales of different origins and modal playing, and you hear these things being run back and forth. You never get that with Eddie. Eddie is always, you really don't know where he's going to go.
JAY: I fear saying this because I don't feel like I'm an expert in it, but there's a lot of times where I hear people play and I call it hyper-diminished. Where it could almost go over any tune. But Eddie doesn't play that way.
RON ODRICH: No. And that's a huge distinction. What you're saying is right on the money. There are a lot of people who just, as I said, the word is formulaic. They know all the different pentatonic scales and all the alternate alternative things, and then you hear the same things over and over. And people that are revered, you know. Eric Dolphy did this all the time. Coltrane, later Coltrane. And they're sensational players. But they never spoke to me anyway. This is a very personal thing. I'm not putting them down. Those are phenomenal players. But you don't get that with Eddie. With Eddie you get something that's musical and really very supportive of a kind of creativity. It's not like you could superimpose this on anything. It's just that he's playing within.
And as a matter of fact, we had a conversation. He was sitting right where I'm sitting when I was playing for him when he was up in New York a couple of months ago. And his comment was, when you hear somebody play, when they're playing a tune, you want to be acquainted and know that what's being played is, he didn't use these words, but like in tribute of that song and that organization of harmonic sequences. And if you don't get that, then what are you doing? You're not playing the song. Right.
JAY: He's very musical. He's been an influence. We have a funny thing where I keep telling him, "You're not my teacher." But, "You're my influencer." Well, tell me if I'm right about this. In terms of your formative years, Eddie came much later than that, right?
RON ODRICH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He came after. I had a 15-year hiatus when I wasn't playing at all.
JAY: Oh. I had no idea about this.
RON ODRICH: Yeah. I just didn't play the clarinet anymore. I was busy doing other stuff. I was lecturing in Italy for 28 years, and I used to go over there for two weeks at a time, three times a year. And I would always bring my clarinet, and they knew I played, and so I played in all the jazz clubs that they had there. And I actually ran into Tony Scott there a couple of times. But it was never the kind of playing that you'd call playing. I was never practicing or anything like that. It was just very peripheral in my existence at the time. It was always important. I always played, but I didn't practice, let me say. Didn't practice for about 15 years.
And then I heard Eddie Daniels play in an interesting way. My father called me up one day in the office when I was in dentistry and he said, "You know, I heard this guy play." He says, "This is the way you would be playing if you kept on playing." I said, "Who is this?" He said, "A guy named Eddie Daniels."
So just before that happened, I got into that, which is another long, torturous story, acting in that play Lenny, for Lenny Bruce. And Eddie was playing in a pit band. And we, I called him up and I said, "You know, my father just called me." He knew who I was. I said, "I've heard of you, but I'd never heard you play." He said, "I heard you play." I said, "My father gave me the greatest compliment. He told me this is the way I would be playing if I kept on playing. So you're kind of a challenge." So we met. I got a bottle of Bordeaux, and I went up and met him. He was living on the West Side. And we sat down and played clarinet together for a while, and we got to be very close friends that way. And he's a wonderful guy. We have a lot of fun.
JAY: Excellent. Stick around. We've got one more set of things I want to talk to you about. But for our audience, thank you for joining us at the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. If you are an adult clarinet player looking to up your game, the Clarinet Ninja Dojo is for you. No matter what your level, if you're coming back after a long layoff of perhaps 40 years or more, or you're just starting up fresh for the first time, the Clarinet Ninja Dojo is for you. And by the way, if you've been playing very seriously for a number of years and are looking for a place that has some more challenge, there's also a separate part of the Dojo for you. So no matter what, if you're an adult clarinet player who wants to get better at the clarinet, check out the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. It's in the show notes or the description, depending on how you're watching or listening to this. Please, no matter what you're listening on, like, subscribe, leave a comment. We'll get back to you. Probably me, maybe Ron. We'll see.
