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I’m a clarinet player again

The saxes are parked and aren’t a bit happy about it, having enabled me to make a living from my late teens until my early sixties. They keep protesting and I’ve had to outline my playing history to them:

Let’s start at the beginning. The Luftwaffe did a job on the family home in 1941 – my parents came home one day to find themselves homeless – and Dad, Mum and elder brother Philip moved to Portstewart where I was born some years later. My father, Raymond had been a jazz banjo player – quite an avant garde hobby for a politician’s son in 1920s Belfast and when we went back to Belfast in 1950 Dad bought me a wee ukulele and helped me understand chord symbols. Soon I had a repertoire of 1930s and ’40s show tunes like Chatanooga Choo Choo and Up a Lazy River. But I began singing them – must have been awful.

When I was seven, Philip was fifteen and had started his lifelong hobby of buying recorded jazz. Thus I heard great clarinet players like Goodman and Shaw on the newly invented long playing record (LP) and asked if I could transfer from ukulele to clarinet. They didn’t have the money and instead I was given a wooden descant recorder. It came with a diagrammatic fingering chart and I figured it out for myself. There was great relief when I stopped singing. Familial rejoicing even.

With my mother, Denise, an ex piano teacher and my father an ex banjo player, there was nobody around who could tell me what to do. More importantly, there was nobody to tell me what I couldn’t do. So I started learning Goodman tunes by ear and working out primitive decorations that became substitutions and then full blown improvisation. It took years.

When I was ten, Aunt Biddy told her next door neighbour about her nephew who played jazz on the recorder. The neighbour was a BBC producer and I was invited to play on a children’s radio programme. Over the phone, they asked what I wanted to play and I said, ‘Lullaby of Birdland’, a jazz tune I had taught myself. Its chords are complex but in my naivete I thought everyone would know it. Including the BBC pianist who didn’t. I suppose she thought some ten year old was coming in to play a nice wee lullaby so she didn’t ask for any rehearsal and I didn’t bring any sheet music because I’d never had it. In my innocence I thought about nothing except playing as well as I could and spent the journey on the trolley bus with my mother into central Belfast and Broadcasting House thinking about the tune and hearing some improvisations in my head. I didn’t take in my surroundings – the huge edifice that was the BBC, the corridors, the people, the studio and its equipment – but I did notice the look of horror on the pianist’s face when I launched into Lullaby of Birdland live to the province and her hands hovered in indecision over the keys. For quite a while. Then she had to commit or else admit defeat and we created the most cacophonous jazz ever broadcast.

But I’d done something that people appeared to find remarkable. I seemed to have made my parents and Philip proud. Maybe nobody had ever heard jazz tackled by recorder and piano and maybe it hadn’t been so nobody knew what to expect and the very fact of its happening made it right, justified it. Maybe its awfulness was a secret to be shared only by the pianist and me.

The following year I went to Methodist College Belfast (Methody) and when I was twelve the school bought me a clarinet. I went to weekly lessons with a wonderful teacher, John Johnson and practiced up to four hours a day. Three things happened when I was seventeen: I played the Mozart concerto in the Grosvenor Hall, I played the Queens University Jazz Festival and The Beatles started releasing records. That changed everything: the baby boomer generation found something of their own and stopped dancing and listening to jazz.

So I parked the clarinet, bought a tenor sax and taught myself how to play it. Although I’ve never had a lesson, I’ve never been found out and have played with Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Moving Hearts, Van Morrison, Christy Moore, Vusi Mahlasela, The Real McCoy, Louis Stewart, The Dubliners, Ronnie Drew, Mary Coughlan, Honor Heffernan, Phil Lynott, Maire Breatnach and hundreds of others.

But I always missed my first love, the clarinet. Last year I made myself a present of two matching clarinets that I bought in Paul Ryan’s shop in Temple Bar. I’ve taken up where I left off 47 years ago and practice clarinet every day.

The saxes are jealous but are enjoying their well earned, well oiled retirement. And I did tell the curved soprano sax that if Moving Hearts gets to gig again, I’ll treat her to one more tour.