INTERVIEW: Evan Christopher travels down his Clarinet Road
For Evan Christopher, the clarinet has been his entry point to a wonderful world of early jazz and a history lesson on how interpreters in the 19th and 20th centuries mastered, challenged and evolved the distinctive instrument. He explores these connections in many collaborations and partnerships, which are almost too numerous to count, but always showcase his dedication to carve out a clear Clarinet Road.
“It’s looking like a pretty complete year,” Christopher said recently in a phone interview. “Certainly there’s a lot of things that can still fill in.”
Earlier this year, Christopher toured with Aaron Diehl, a young pianist, and Cécile McLorin Salvant, the up-and-coming jazz vocalist. Their tour was entitled Jelly & George, a musical juxtaposition of Jelly Roll Morton tunes and George Gershwin’s music.
He transitioned from this tour over to different collaborations with Hilary Gardner and others. “So that’s what I’m doing right now and then just scrambling around just trying to get the year put together,” he said. “I have a lot of shows in the spring that are going to demand a lot of attention.”
Christopher will bring his Clarinet Road project to French Quarter Fest Thursday, April 6 at 3:50 p.m. He will play his clarinet on the Jackson Square Stage, and Saturday, April 8, he heads to Snug Harbor on Frenchmen Street for two gigs. For the Snug shows, he will be joined by Ehud Asherie.
“I guess when I returned to New Orleans in 2008, I started saying, all right, let’s do some real sh– here, or let’s try to do some real sh– here,” Christopher said. “So I started working on a bunch of original tunes, figuring out what that was going to look like, started focusing on working on groups. I still had a little band based in Europe. It was sort of a New Orleans project that was looking at the music of Django Reinhardt through a New Orleans lens, but back here, I was trying to imagine a trajectory that was more personal. And so it started with some compositions. It started with some real small groups — bare bones, piano-clarinet duo projects and trios with just guitar and bass, really bare bones.”
These compositions were known as “sketches” in Christopher’s mind, and they have been percolating for years. “So now here it is, gosh six years later, and now I’m just itching to actually have some of these things come to life,” he said.
Another project that Christopher is testing out is with Yohan Giaume, a trumpeter-composer friend of his from France. They are exploring the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a New Orleans pianist-composer from the 1800s. Giaume and Christopher have worked on this initiative, called Whisper of a Shadow, for a few years. Now they are ready to showcase some of the music in the United States.
Christopher, ever the man of collaboration, will also work in the future with Chris Washburne, the trombonist and musicologist in New York City. They will explore the Pan-American roots of jazz music with nods to Scott Joplin and Haitian folk tunes.
“I guess [I’m] trying not just to put irons in the fire but really kind of find fun ways to continue trying to make some New Orleans clarinet understood as an ethnic style of clarinet playing, kind of like Turkish clarinet or Klezmer clarinet or Bulgarian/Macedonian clarinet,” Christopher said. “As opposed to thinking of New Orleans music and New Orleans clarinet as being a sub-genre of jazz, I always thought it being the opposite.”
Christopher’s relationship with New Orleans happened almost by mistake. He was always interested in the Crescent City’s legendary clarinetists and traditional music, including the tunes of Sidney Bechet, Barney Bigard and Omer Simeon, but he didn’t now too much about New Orleans itself.
“In college, you go through these music programs,” he said. “They basically groom you to be a saxophone player who doubles on clarinet and flute, and do every type of music and be in studios, whatever. It was more about commercial music, and I think what first happened is I realized there’s so many saxophone players. I decided I was going to eliminate a lot of the competition by focusing on my original instrument, which was clarinet. So that was the first thing is deciding, OK, saxophone is not even a dime a dozen. It’s a nickel a dozen.”
After his undergraduate career, he began touring with a singer-songwriter in San Diego. One of their tours in 1994 brought Christopher to New Orleans. “I don’t know if I would say New Orleans called me, but all of a sudden, I became aware of its significance to the musicians who I already admired,” he said. “It didn’t really have the significance to me until I saw it up close and personal that their cultural milieu was very significant to their musical contributions. … We did a gig at Tipitina’s in the summer of 1994, and I think the heat and alcohol and music, the confluence of those things just completely made me say, all right, I’m quitting the band and moving here.”
Over the years, Christopher hasn’t focused on large jazz festivals, and he admitted that decision might have been to his detriment. But this year, that changes. Not only will he play French Quarter Fest, but he’s also scheduled for the Newport Jazz Festival.
“I’ll actually expand these duo sketches, compositions for clarinet, rhythm section and then four-piece brass section,” he said. “So I think that’ll be the first time that I’ve actually really attempted to step up and imagine … what the clarinet can do in a larger arena.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Evan Christopher’s Clarinet Road will play French Quarter Fest Thursday, April 6 at 3:50 p.m. He will play his clarinet on the Jackson Square Stage, and Saturday, April 8, he heads to Snug Harbor on Frenchmen Street for two gigs. Click here for more information and tickets.
