My two favourite jazz clarinettists are Benny Goodman and Pee Wee Russell. They're as different as night and day. While it's fashionable now (especially amongst critics) to dismiss Goodman as a populist who made a fortune by dumbing-down jazz for the masses, I don't think there was a jazz musician back then who didn't marvel at (and envy) his blazing technique, ivory tone, hard-driving swing, and ability to invent melodic lines of high drama. Pee Wee Russell, on the other hand, had a limited technique, a smearing, screechy, piping tone (someone said it sounded like he was playing a drain pipe), and a jagged, elliptical melodic sense; but, he was seen then (and increasingly now) as the true artist of the clarinet. He really produced some achingly beautiful music, and played with a nakedness that made it sound more like poetry than jazz. (He struggled with demons his whole life, and lived mostly on a diet of whiskey and cans of tomato soup.) I play the clarinet, and probably have as much technique as Pee Wee did, but I can’t make the kind of music he did, not even close. And I don’t have the technique that Goodman had, not even close, so all I can do is produce pale (and much slower) versions of his great solos.
So: is there any parallel here to gca? How important is technique? Can one compensate for a lack of technique with poetic vision? In the old days or now, who was/is the Benny Goodman of architects, and who the Pee Wee Russell, i.e. who the craftsman and who the artist? Does critical taste move in cycles, i.e. are we in the days of the technician or the artist?
Peter
By the way, it’s Benjamin David Goodman and Charles Ellsworth Russell, from Chicago and Maplewood (later St. Louis) Missouri, respectively.