PROFILE, Page 76Play It Again, WoodyYou all know the successful writer, comedian, actor andfilmmaker. Now meet WOODY ALLEN, jazz clarinetistBy Thomas A. Sancton
Michael's Pub is packed. The green-and-white-checked
tablecloths are jammed so close together that the waiters can
hardly squeeze between, and patrons find themselves knocking knees
with their dinner companions. No matter. They have come from around
the world -- Japan, Italy, France, Scandinavia, South America --
to savor this moment. The random babel of a hundred conversations
suddenly turns into an excited murmur as a sandy-haired man in an
open-necked white shirt and corduroy trousers saunters in and heads
for an empty table. He nonchalantly opens a tattered case and
removes, then hooks together, the sections of an antique clarinet.
Peering through his familiar black-rimmed glasses, he hops up onto
the bandstand and takes his usual seat next to the piano. The
trumpet player snaps his fingers twice, and suddenly the whole room
is reverberating to the strains of a 1905 pop tune, In the Shade
of the Old Apple Tree.
For the past 18 years, with rare exceptions, Woody Allen has
spent every Monday night on this bandstand. He even skipped the
1978 Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order
to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who
has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and
filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once
a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent
for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his
appearances not be advertised and has repeatedly turned down offers
of big-time recording contracts.
The fact is that Woody, by his own admission, is "obsessed"
with jazz. Not Dixieland, not swing -- definitely not bebop. He is
devoted to the pure New Orleans style that developed early in this
century and was recorded by his pantheon of clarinetist heroes:
Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone and George Lewis. Woody
is so passionate about jazz, in fact, that he says he would have
preferred to be a full-time musician if only he "had been born with
a massive talent" for it. "It's the best life I can think of if
you're a really talented musician because communication in music
is so emotional in every way."
Long before young Brooklyn-born Allen Konigsberg had sold his
first joke or even dreamed of making a film, he was scouring record
stores in search of New Orleans music. Woody first caught the bug
at age 14, when he happened to hear a Saturday-morning radio show
devoted to Bechet, one of the all-time great clarinet and soprano
saxophone players. "I heard it, and it just sounded wonderful," he
recalls. "It was sort of like an opening of the dike." With the
facility for self-teaching that he would later demonstrate as
writer and filmmaker, he laid his hands on a soprano sax and
started to learn it. Bechet's driving, growling virtuosity on the
sax, however, proved too difficult to emulate, and Woody soon
switched to clarinet.
About that time, he heard his first recordings of Lewis and
was immediately enthralled by the clarinetist's lyrical, emotional
style. To this day, Woody models his own playing on Lewis' and
speaks of him with a reverence he accords to only a handful of his
culture heroes, including Willie Mays, Groucho Marx and Swedish
filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. "He was a great, great artist on the
clarinet," enthuses Woody. "He had that sort of sweet, soulful,
just beautiful, beautiful sound."
Lewis, who died in 1968, spent most of his life playing obscure
New Orleans dance halls and parades until his "discovery" in the
mid-'40s. Yet he had something that touched people all over the
world. Wherever his records were available, young musicians strove
to copy his sound. Woody first confronted this phenomenon in 1971,
when he went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and sat
in on some French Quarter jam sessions. "There was a Japanese
George Lewis and a British George Lewis and a Jewish George Lewis.
It was really hilarious."
Woody remembers that trip, along with two earlier jaunts to
the Crescent City, as high points of his life. Accompanied by Diane
Keaton, he scurried around the French Quarter with his clarinet
under his arm, looking, listening and sitting in with local
jazzmen. "It was like watching Willie Mays all your life and then
finding yourself in the outfield with him," Woody recalls. Festival
producer George Wein even talked him into playing a set at one of
the official concerts.
That unscheduled appearance prompted New York Times music
critic John S. Wilson to hail Woody's playing as "one of the most
invigorating and encouraging evidences of the continuity of the New
Orleans jazz tradition." Other critics have not been so effusive.
"I wouldn't rate him as a professional," says Dan Morgenstern,
director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.
"It's cute; it doesn't do any harm."
Cute is the last thing Woody wants to be. Though he calls jazz
his hobby, he pursues it with the utmost seriousness. He practices
religiously -- up to two hours a day -- usually in the bedroom of
his two-story Fifth Avenue penthouse. But even when he's working
on location, he makes time for the horn. "There have been times
when I would film all day long and wouldn't get to my hotel room
until 10:30 at night," he says. "So I would get into bed and pull
the quilt over my head so I wouldn't offend the neighbors." Missing
a single day's practice, says Woody, makes him feel "absolutely
consumed with guilt. You know, it's like when people break their
diet or something."
Woody, who neither reads nor writes music, is the first to
admit his technical shortcomings. "I feel that I don't really have
much of a musical talent at all. I have enthusiasm and affection
and obsession for the music. But I wasn't born with the real
equipment for it. I mean, I'm totally eclectic and derivative of
the guys I've heard and loved." His one advantage for playing the
old-style New Orleans stuff, Woody feels, "is that I am genuinely
crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful,
wailing tone of the original jazzmen. The biggest compliment he
ever got as a musician, Woody says, was when he was jamming in New
Orleans and local people told him how "indigenous" his sound was.
Jazz clarinetist Kenny Davern agrees: "He has sought to get that
New Orleans plaintive sound, and he has really captured the thing."
Woody goes after that sound in two ways. First, by using a wide
open mouthpiece and a very hard reed -- a Rico Royale No. 5 --
which provides a lot of volume but requires cast-iron lips to play.
(Benny Goodman once borrowed Woody's clarinet for a sit-in and had
to shave the reed down with a kitchen knife before he could get a
toot out of it.) Second, by playing an Albert System clarinet --
an antiquated, wide-bore instrument based on a virtually obsolete
fingering method. Why the Albert System? "Because all the guys I
liked played the Albert," says Woody.
The instrument Woody uses these days is a patched-together
twelve-key Rampone, made in Italy in about 1890. Like many of the
horns in Woody's collection, it was supplied by fellow clarinetist
Davern, who picked it up in a New York City pawn shop. Davern once
offered to lend Woody a horn that had belonged to the great New
Orleans clarinetist Albert Burbank, another of Woody's idols. Woody
hesitated. "What if somebody steals it?" he said. "So what?"
replied Davern. "They'll probably steal it while I'm playing it,"
said Woody.
That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously
separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke
on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and
no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection
with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime
Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily
ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music
was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in
the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after the
owner's child tugged on trumpeter John Bucher's sleeve and begged,
"Please, mister, don't play anymore."
Michael's Pub, where the band finally landed a regular gig in
1971, has been the scene of more than a few light moments. When the
Mets were in the 1986 World Series, sports-junkie Woody showed up
with a tiny transistor television and propped it up on his music
stand so he could watch the game while he played. Trombonist Dick
Dreiwitz and his wife Barbara, the tuba player, tell of a surprise
visit by Groucho Marx. "After one of Woody's solos," says Barbara,
"Groucho reached up and handed him a few pennies as a tip."
Psychiatrist Ron Brady, a friend of Woody's, recalls the time a man
claiming to be a biologist walked into Michael's and asked Woody
for a skin sample. "He said he was working on a clone."
Most fans, however, do not get near their hero. Michael's Pub
owner Gil Wiest aggressively fends them off, which is just fine
with Woody. He makes no bones about the fact that he's there for
his own kicks, not to strike up a rapport with the audience. "I'm
not somebody who smiles and bows," he says. "You know, I'm up there
to play. It's strictly business with me." Yet many patrons expect
something different from the former stand-up comic. "Most of them
are shocked that he doesn't speak or tell jokes," says banjoist
Eddie Davis. "But after a few tunes, they get caught up in the
music."
Allen's standoffishness with the public is echoed in his
relations with the other band members. Although many of them have
played with him for nearly two decades, he does not socialize with
them or hang around making small talk after a gig. Nor do the other
musicians, most of whom come from the slick Dixieland school, share
Woody's abiding passion for the rough-hewn New Orleans style or his
aversion to tuning up. Despite the different approaches, says
pianist Dick Miller, the band tries mightily "one night a week to
create the collective sound that resembles the music he loves."
In an effort to get even closer to the music he loves, Woody
has been quietly rehearsing with a group of more New
Orleans-oriented musicians for the past year or so. He remains
vague about his ultimate plans for the group, but banjoist Davis
says there is talk of booking it in a jazz club one night a week,
and there have been feelers from several European jazz festivals.
The tapes are always rolling during the rehearsals, moreover, so
there is a chance that the sessions could ultimately produce
something Woody has long resisted: a record featuring him on
clarinet.
Whether or not that ever happens, music has already left a deep
mark on Woody's artistic achievement. No one who has seen his films
can fail to appreciate how effectively he uses the scores to
reinforce the visuals -- from the Gershwin themes of Manhattan to
the Django Reinhardt and Louis Armstrong ballads of Stardust
Memories to the brooding Schubert string quartet of Crimes and
Misdemeanors, which premiered last week. For the sound track of
Sleeper, Woody even went to New Orleans in 1973 and recorded
himself playing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. (The old
musicians there had never heard of Woody's films, and one of them,
trombonist Jim Robinson, called him Willard.) He hopes one day to
devote a whole film to "the birth of jazz."
It would be a mistake to see Woody Allen's obsession with the
clarinet as an eccentric hobby or psychological crutch. In ways
both direct and indirect, concrete and spiritual, his musician's
ear and instincts have helped make him the remarkable artist he is
in other domains. "Jazz is a perfect music for him," says Eric Lax,
who is writing a book on Allen. "It hates authority. It is a
quirky, individual style requiring great discipline to play right.
It is all the things that fit his comic character." So play it
