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| "Salute to Kenny Davern" Jack Kleinsinger's “Highlights in Jazz, ” New York's longest running jazz series, is pleased to announce their third series concert Thursday, December 1, 2005 - “Salute to Kenny Davern” featuring The Statesmen of Jazz with Wycliffe Gordon, Houston Person, Harry Allen, Jon-Erik Kellso, and Norman Simmons plus the Kenny Davern Quartet featuring James Chirillo, Greg Cohen, and Tony DeNicola. Each year Highlights In Jazz honors an artist who has been a featured favorite performer over the years at Highlights. This year's honoree is the reed master Kenny Davern. John Kenneth Davern, better known as Kenny Davern is one of the premier jazz clarinetists of his generation. Born January 7th, 1935 in Huntington, Long Island Kenny was inspired to become a jazz musician after first hearing Pee Wee Russell. In 1954 he joined Jack Teagarden's Band. Later on, he worked with the bands of Phil Napoleon, Pee Wee Erwin and the Dukes of Dixieland. The late 1960s found him free-lancing with Red Allen, Ralph Sutton, Yank Lawson and his life-long friend Dick Wellstood. In the 1970s Kenny teamed up with reedman Bob Wilber to form Soprano Summit. In 1997, he was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame at Rutgers University, and in 2001 he received an honorary doctorate of music at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. Listening to Kenny Davern snake his way through a blues tune or blow a cool, slinky toe-tapping number it's hard to understand why the clarinet has fallen so far out of favor in the jazz world. In Davern's hands at least, it is a keenly expressive, highly emotive, distinctly laid-back instrument. The Statesmen of Jazz was originally organized in 1994 under the sponsorship of the American Federation of Jazz Societies and featured Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Benny Waters, Buddy Tate, Panama Francis, Claude “Fiddler” Williams, Joe Wilder and many other prominent jazz musicians with the mission of increasing the public's awareness of jazz through concerts and school clinics. In 2004 Arbors Records released The Statesmen of Jazz: A Multitude of Stars a 2-CD set that celebrated thirty of jazz's living legends. Noted author and jazz historian Dan Morgenstern had this to say about The Statesmen of Jazz. “Not since the heyday of Jazz at the Philharmonic has there been a jazz talent pool - indeed, a multitude of stars - to compare with The Statesmen of Jazz.” Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, tenor saxophonists Houston Person, and Harry Allen, trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, and pianist Norman Simmons all have distinguished themselves through recordings and live performances continuing the legacy as Statesmen of Jazz. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Jazz News :: home page |