Celebrating the Clarinet

Thank you for participating in our Jazz Appreciation Month Listener Poll…today we celebrate the clarinet. Be sure to tune in to hear all of your favorites, including one the most acclaimed clarinetists, Paquito D’Rivera.

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Paquito D’Rivera was a well-respected and successful musician in Cuba when he began to artistically restrained by the communist regime. Born in 1948, he had grown up in Havana, studied at the Havana Conservatory of Music and learned to play the clarinet, saxophone and flute. At 10, he performed with Cuba’s National Theatre Orchestra and at 17 he was a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony. He founded the also  a founding member of the innovative group Irakere, which played a mixture of jazz, rock, classical and rarely heard traditional Cuban music. Irakere was rewarded for its boldness with a Grammy in 1979. Clearly, D’Rivera was becoming a cross-over artist and, today, he hold the distinction of being the only musician to win a Grammy in both Classical and Latin Jazz categories.  

D’Rivera once said in a television interview that he began to feel musically oppressed around 1980 as the government came to regard jazz and rock and roll as “imperialist.” He said Che Guevera was one of several influences that resulted in his decision to seek asylum in the U.S. in 1981. His mother and sister were already here, both naturalized citizens and successful entrepreneurs, so he had a relatively smooth acclimation. His first two albums ­­­­–  “Paquito Blowin’” (1981) and “Mariel” (1982) — were critically acclaimed and quickly rose to the top of the jazz charts.  He has gone on to release more than 30 albums and has toured worldwide with his popular ensembles; a big band,  a quintet and a chamber jazz ensemble.

A respected classical composer, D’Rivera has also performed with symphony orchestras in London, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Poland, and throughout the United States and was a founding member of the United Nations Orchestra. In his spare time, he authored two books; “My Sax Life” and the novel “Oh, La Habana.”

In his many decades of performing and composing, D’Rivera has received countless honors and awards, including 14 Grammys, and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. In 2005 he was the recipient of a National Medal of Arts and, from the National Endowment for the Arts, a prestigious Jazz Masters Award. NEA said of D’Rivera, “He has become the consummate multinational ambassador, creating and promoting a cross-culture of music that moves effortlessly among jazz, Latin and Mozart.”

We think Mozart would approve.