Ken Peplowski – Clarinet

Tardo Hammer – Piano

Martin Wind – Bass

Phil Stewart – Drums

There can be few readers of The Clarinet who are unfamiliar with the outstanding artistry and career of Ken Peplowski. He is one of the finest jazz instrumentalists on the scene today. Russell Davies of BBC Two hailed him as the greatest living jazz clarinetist. The Siletz Bay Music Festival in Oregon referred to him as “the living Benny Goodman.”1

Ken is also one of the most recorded jazz players to date, with over 50 CDs as soloist and nearly 400 as a featured sideman. He has performed with Charlie Byrd, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, Hank Jones, Peggy Lee, Bill Charlop, Woody Allen, Benny Goodman and many other legendary musicians. Centered in New York City, Ken travels about half the year playing in clubs, colleges, jazz societies, parties, concert halls and festivals. He is a longtime performer on and consultant to The Jazz Cruise, and in 2013 was elected into the Jazz Cruise Hall of Fame. In addition, Ken is the artistic director of the Newport Beach (California) Jazz Party and the Sarasota (Florida) Jazz Festival, where he was awarded the “Satchmo” award for his “unique and enduring contribution to the living history of jazz.”2 Much of his work on the road is done with his big band or his quartet. Wherever he plays, Ken is received with great admiration by his audiences.

Immediately noticeable at a Ken Peplowski performance or on his recordings is his amazing technical fluency. He has complete command of the instrument at every tempo and a rock-solid sense of rhythmic drive in ballads, standard songs, and up-tempo traditional jazz tunes. His sound is full, rich and warm in all registers. When students come to him with an interest in learning how to become jazz players, he starts with the importance of breath and air support and works with them on the rudiments of a pure classic sound and even finger technique.

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s he heard Robert Marcellus in the Cleveland Orchestra and on recordings, and studied for three months with Ted Johnson, a member of the clarinet section in the orchestra. Ken’s main teacher at this time was Alan Blazer. He also “practiced like crazy.”3 His career in performance started with professional jobs at age 9 in the local polka band that he formed with his brother. This is where he honed his technique and trained his ear. A defining moment in his early musical life was when he bought his first jazz record with money he made playing in the polka band: Stan Getz, More West Coast Jazz (Verve Records, 1956). In 1978, Ken joined the Tommy Dorsey Band led by Buddy Morrow and went to work on the road. Three years later he moved to New York to begin a career of studio dates, concerts, recording sessions, and international touring. Recognition quickly followed.

What sets Ken apart from many other jazz players is his abundance of ideas and an abiding interest in exploring all types of music in performance. Jazz players know that brilliant virtuosity is only part of a rewarding performance, and that collective improvisation is at the heart of jazz music and has been since the earliest years. Ken is a catalyst for much of the dazzling interplay that occurs in his great ensemble jazz. He has a very quick mind and a telepathic rapport with the other musicians on the stand. The result is a rich collaboration that is the hallmark of every performance he gives. In any musical performance, the interaction of the performers is a critical component of a successful musical experience. With a defining emphasis on improvisation, jazz is perhaps explicitly reliant on the spontaneous interaction of the musicians, and, when performed by Ken Peplowski and the musicians in his groups, the results can be transformative. His duo albums with Howard Alden (Concord, CCD-4556, 1993; CCD 4654, 1995 and Pow-Wow on Arbors Records, ARCD 19340, 2007) and Dick Hyman (Live at the Kitano, Victoria Company, 2013) attest to the musical intelligence of two superb musicians playing off each other’s musical ideas.

In his performances, Ken has embraced a huge breadth of styles and periods of jazz. For him the entire century of jazz music has become an endless well of possible tunes to play and record. His albums contain traditional jazz tunes, selections from the Great American Songbook, bebop, big band styles, third-stream and avant-garde jazz and even ethnic folk and dance music. There is always a fresh variety of textures and styles. The quintet and quartet albums often include a few duet pieces and even some tunes performed on clarinet unaccompanied. These require a harmonic structure that can be realized and communicated by a single instrument. Occasionally the decision to record a work for clarinet alone happens in the recording studio. Ken likes the spontaneity of the moment and the challenge of creating something special at the moment the recording is made.