THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 22, 1994 TAG: 9409220039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By MARK MOBLEY, MUSIC CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
MAYBE YOU remember the '50s. And maybe you're Jewish. And maybe you like a joke.
So you remember Mickey Katz. The meshuggah clarinet player and father of Joel Grey who turned ``April in Portugal'' into ``Paisach in Portugal.'' He made the ``Saber Dance'' into the ``Seder Dance.''
Or maybe you like modern jazz and Don Byron. He's the young clarinetist with the dreadlocks and the great reviews. His taste runs from classical music to avant-garde jazz to hip-hop to . . . Mickey Katz.
Perhaps the hottest show of the year is Saturday at the Virginia Beach Pavilion Theater. Byron is appearing with the band that recorded last year's acclaimed ``Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz.''
The album is a wild ride through Katz's loopy universe of musical stunts and Yiddish jokes. Byron assembled a formidable band that meets and matches his own virtuosity. He wrote a prelude and postlude that capture the bittersweet side of Katz's ethnic humor.
Byron has appeared on ``The Tonight Show With Jay Leno'' and ``Late Night With Conan O'Brien'' - strange territory for a guy known to push musical boundaries.
``I've probably done a wider range of things than most people ever listen to,'' Byron, 34, said last week from his home in Boston. ``I kind of feel like I never expected everybody to like everything I did.''
But many critics have. Byron's previous album, the 1991 ``Tuskegee Experiments,'' took its title from the heinous project in which African-Americans with syphilis were left untreated. It also referred to the Tuskegee Airmen, who were trained but not allowed to fly combat missions in World War II.
Byron juxtaposed incisive modern jazz with a transcription of a classical art song. He recruited a poet to tell about the medical experiments over a driving background. Downbeat magazine gave the album five stars and named Byron jazz artist of the year.
Now, Byron is focusing on Latin jazz with a group called Music for Six Musicians, with a new album of original material to be issued next year. In a way, the project harkens back to Byron's childhood in the Bronx. His father, a postal worker, moonlighted as a bassist in a calypso band led by a clarinetist.
``That was the only guy, except for dumb-ass swing cats and classical cats, that I ever saw front a band on a clarinet,'' Byron says. And one of his cousins led a well-known jazz-influenced calypso band in Antigua.
However, Byron trained as a classical player. He took up clarinet after a doctor suggested swimming or a wind instrument as treatment for his asthma - and he's afraid of the water. His parents used to take him to Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts as well as to Dizzy Gillespie club dates.
At Boston's New England Conservatory, he played in the famous Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble and listened to lots of loud jazz and post-punk rock. But one of his most important gigs turned out to be the Klezmer Conservatory Band, with which he played and recorded for seven years.
``I haven't really moved from one thing to the other,'' Byron said. ``I can only stand to play so much klezmer music per annum. It's all right, but I just need to concentrate as much of my time on stuff I've written.''
Byron includes some of his own music on the Mickey Katz dates. He also programs numbers by klezmer great Dave Tarras and quirky composer Raymond Scott.
One of his regular outside gigs is with guitarist Bill Frisell, and he may be heard on the guitarist's recent ``Have a Little Faith'' recording. He has also performed with Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid.
Not every musician and critic respects Byron's eclectic tastes. Stanley Crouch, writer and artistic consultant for Jazz at Lincoln Center, told the New York Times Magazine: ``I really don't consider Byron a jazz musician. . . is actually a virtuoso, but when I hear him, I don't hear the elements that make jazz sound like it sounds.''
Byron and his avant-garde colleagues don't get booked at Lincoln Center, which is booked by Crouch and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
Byron said: ``I would say that on a jazz tip what I've come to represent kind of clashes very nicely with the current, neo-conservative Jazz at Lincoln Center s---. . . . What's weird is all the people in New York are trying to kill each other over what's jazz and what isn't.
``This kind of elevated, high-profile jazz at traditional classical performance venues is kind of rewriting what the jazz world is. It doesn't include the Chicago cats, the St. Louis cats, the European cats. It doesn't include a whole lot of music that exists already. I like the way that Wynton plays, but I don't support saying (composer) Anthony Braxton, that's not jazz, that's not cool.
``There was a jazz world before Wynton, and there will be a jazz world after Wynton.''
Byron himself has experienced musical authenticity. For some of the Katz gigs a few years back, the singer was Joel Grey, Katz' son.
``A couple of the vocal things he would do only a relative of Mickey Katz could do. It was one of those time-capsule moments when you feel, `Whatever this thing was, it was that.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/Staff
Don Byron will play the music of Mickey Katz in Virginia Beach.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY KLEZMER JAZZ by CNB