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Best Clarinet Set-Up: Under £2,000 (Non-Classical!)

4th October 2023

In this blog with accompanying video, we discuss and demonstrate a range of Clarinets and mouthpiece/reed set-ups for under £2,000. The emphasis is on non-classical playing such as jazz, commercial and band. We compare models from Buffet, Yamaha and Backun. We also get the input of a professional player on his preferred mouthpiece and reed set-up for this combination.

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Jazz Clarinet Mouthpieces – Which is Best?

25th November 2021

We asked leading UK professional player Simon Bates to demonstrate and discuss a range of jazz clarinet mouthpieces and ask “which is best?”. We looked at the leading models from Vandoren as well as alternatives from Otto Link and Meyer.

If you’re wanting to play in a more jazz oriented way on Clarinet we would advise selecting a jazz designed mouthpiece to really help. Check out the video and our info on how to choose below…

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Which Instruments are used in Jazz Music?

10th October 2019

As with all different genres of music, Jazz music tends to use a certain selection of instruments, known for blending that perfect jazz-style sound that has made the jazz genre so popular and well loved. Jazz is certainly known for a specific sound and style – and that’s what makes the music so well loved. 

However, because the genre of jazz music is so flexible and unpredictable, it’s a genre that generally tends to be quite experimental with instrument choices. This means that a lot of modern jazz try to vary their instrumental choices – saying that though, there does tend to be a few instruments that feature in the majority of jazz bands, so we’ll discuss these below in more detail. 

Jazz Musicians
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“Faz” by Peter Gardner

9th March 2018

The number of great clarinet players who were born or learned to play in New Orleans when jazz was in its infancy is quite amazing.  Johnny Dodds, Edmond Hall, Albert Nicholas, Omer Simeon, Leon Roppolo, Jimmy Noone, Barney Bigard, Sidney Bechet and Irving Henry Prestopnik are just some that come to mind. If the last of these is not too familiar, maybe you know him under the Mediterranean name for ‘beans’, possibly acquired as a term of commendation, or because in his early days he only played from music in a prim and proper or ‘fah-so-lah’ kind of way.  Still, whatever its etymology, ‘Fazola’ replaced the east European name of his father, ‘Henry’ was dropped and for most of his adult life he was known as Irving Fazola or ‘Faz’.

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Artie Shaw – The Last, the Very Last, the Final Gramercies

8th December 2017

Join jazz aficionado Peter Gardner as he discusses the excellent late recording work of clarinettist Artie Shaw…

It wasn’t until about twenty years ago that I realised that such marvellous recordings existed.  I was in a large bookshop in the north of England and I had been told the bookshop also stocked some jazz CDs.  As I recall, there weren’t too many jazz CDs there and most seemed to be by John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But somewhere near the end of the jazz shelves, perhaps between Rollins and Tatum, I came across a double CD whose attention-grabbing title had the words ‘…The Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased’.

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