Buddy DeFranco born 17 February 1923

Buddy DeFranco (February 17, 1923 – December 24, 2014) was an Italian-American jazz clarinetist. In addition to his work as a bandleader, DeFranco led the Glenn Miller Orchestra for almost a decade in the 1960s and 1970s. 

He was born Boniface Ferdinand Leonardo De Franco in Camden, New Jersey, but raised in south Philadelphia. He learned to play the mandolin at five, and took up the clarinet four years later. By the age of 14 he had won a national Tommy Dorsey swing contest, and broadcast on the radio programme Saturday Night Swing Club with the star drummer Gene Krupa. At 16 he was on the road with Johnny “Scat” Davis, and a year later working for Krupa, then for Charlie Barnet’s successful orchestra, and for several years – with a brief interlude in Boyd Raeburn’s compositionally advanced band – in a principal soloist’s role with Tommy Dorsey. 

DeFranco worked in a variety of small bands in the late 40s and early 50s, which reflected the journey he was beginning to make from swing to bop. Perhaps the months in the 1940s with Raeburn’s group had triggered DeFranco’s interest in more challenging uses for the clarinet. He appeared with the Metronome All-Stars and won twenty awards from DownBeat magazine, nine awards from Metronome, and sixteen Playboy All-Stars awards. 

The popularity of bop in the early 1950s, and the tough post-war economic realities threatening expensive big bands, led several swing players to investigate it, including George Shearing and Count Basie, and DeFranco played for both between 1948 and 1950. In 1952 he was a cornerstone of a swing-to-bop band featuring drummer Art Blakey, initially with the pianist Kenny Drew and then the short-lived Sonny Clark – a version of which band introduced DeFranco to international touring in Europe in spring 1954. 

The clarinettist also joined the impresario Norman Granz’s successful Jazz At The Philharmonic all-star package. In 1958 DeFranco was the principal soloist in a premiere of Nelson Riddle’s Cross Country Suite, and he also began conducting jazz education workshops. Though he was not the kind of radical experimenter to join the free-jazz movement about to explode over the early 1960s scene, departures from jazz orthodoxies clearly fascinated DeFranco. The group he led between 1960 and 1963 – featuring clarinet, accordion, bass and drums – was one of the most unusual in the history of the music. 

Despite the burgeoning reputation of Eric Dolphy on the same instrument, DeFranco also attracted admiration for his handling of the sonorous but technically demanding bass clarinet, notably on a fine recording, Blues Bag (1964). But specialising in the clarinet always cramped DeFranco’s creative options, because most progressive leaders in post-bop music had little use for it. 

He was thus forced back to the styles of an earlier era, leading a legacy orchestra playing Glenn Miller’s music from 1966 to 1974. This project and his teaching work occupied him largely to the exclusion of recording on his own account. 

In the next decade De Franco did, however, develop a creative relationship with a virtuoso of similarly divided loyalties, the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, and his work was also encouraged by the Pablo record label. He also worked regularly with the British guitarist Martin Taylor, the bassist George Duvivier, and the pianists Oscar Peterson and Dave McKenna. 

(Edited mainly from Guardian obit by John Fordham)

Here’s a clip recorded April 1991@Cliff Side(Yokohama, Japan) / clarinet:Buddy DeFranco / vibraphone:Terry Gibbs / guitar:Herb Ellis / piano:Larry Novak / bass:Milton Hinton / drums:Butch Miles.