THE CLARINET SHAFT

I had my clarinet’s tone holes undercut, which means the clarinet repairman shaved some wood out of the clarinet’s bore.  Repairman . . . technician . . . the guy was my neighbor.  He spends his workday looking down clarinets and saxophones.  Like a coal miner.  He has a little light he drops down the clarinet shaft, looking for leaks.

So my axe has a very wide-open sound.  You can put a lot of air through it.  That’s the trick — to put as much air through as possible.  (The champ of  “big air” is Gary Gould from Los Angeles.   He’s plays a Claude Lakey 4* jazz clarinet mouthpiece — a loud and uncontrollable thing, like a two year old in a restaurant.)

But it’s not all about the bike, or horn.  The player needs to maintain a thin stream of air, like blowing a Superball across a table.  Not a golf ball or ping pong ball.   It has to be a Superball.  (Ilene Stahl used the Superball analogy at KlezKamp two decades ago.)

On a sax, you can put tons of air through because the physics of the sax are different than the clarinet.  All the sound of a sax comes out the bell; on a clarinet, only a bit of the sound comes out the bell, and the rest pops out the fingering holes.  There is a reverse air pressure on the clarinet.  Air coming back at you.

In the real estate biz the “back pressure” is water leaks.  Property management is all about water problems — roof  leaks, pipes bursting, or some guy flushing potatoes down his toilet.

I have a trio of plumbers: Ron, who goes in with a pneumatic pump.  If that doesn’t unclog the drain, we go to Bob, who has an electric snake.  He’s picky, though;  for example, he’ll say, “I’m not going in there.  There’s a ton of feces and the guy is a fat slob.”  If  Bob can’t — or won’t — fix the mess, we go with Bill, who charges 50 percent more than Bob and has a howitzer in his truck.

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Tomorow:
NEXT STOP PINSK . . . How to run your band like a train.

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