Play

By Thomas A. Sancton

Michael's Pub is packed. The green-and-white-checked tablecloths are jammed so close together that the waiters can hardly squeeze between, and patrons find themselves knocking knees with their dinner companions. No matter. They have come from around the world -- Japan, Italy, France, Scandinavia, South America -- to savor this moment. The random babel of a hundred conversations suddenly turns into an excited murmur as a sandy-haired man in an open-necked white shirt and corduroy trousers saunters in and heads for an empty table. He nonchalantly opens a tattered case and removes, then hooks together, the sections of an antique clarinet. Peering through his familiar black-rimmed glasses, he hops up onto the bandstand and takes his usual seat next to the piano. The trumpet player snaps his fingers twice, and suddenly the whole room is reverberating to the strains of a 1905 pop tune, In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.

For the past 18 years, with rare exceptions, Woody Allen has spent every Monday night on this bandstand. He even skipped the 1978 Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his appearances not be advertised and has repeatedly turned down offers of big- time recording contracts.

The fact is that Woody, by his own admission, is "obsessed" with jazz. Not Dixieland, not swing -- definitely not bebop. He is devoted to the pure New Orleans style that developed early in this century and was recorded by his pantheon of clarinetist heroes: Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone and George Lewis. Woody is so passionate about jazz, in fact, that he says he would have preferred to be a full-time musician if only he "had been born with a massive talent" for it. "It's the best life I can think of if you're a really talented musician because communication in music is so emotional in every way."

Long before young Brooklyn-born Allen Konigsberg had sold his first joke or even dreamed of making a film, he was scouring record stores in search of New Orleans music. Woody first caught the bug at age 14, when he happened to hear a Saturday-morning radio show devoted to Bechet, one of the all-time great clarinet and soprano saxophone players. "I heard it, and it just sounded wonderful," he recalls. "It was sort of like an opening of the dike." With the facility for self-teaching that he would later demonstrate as writer and filmmaker, he laid his hands on a soprano sax and started to learn it. Bechet's driving, growling virtuosity on the sax, however, proved too difficult to emulate, and Woody soon switched to clarinet.

About that time, he heard his first recordings of Lewis and was immediately enthralled by the clarinetist's lyrical, emotional style. To this day, Woody models his own playing on Lewis' and speaks of him with a reverence he accords to only a handful of his culture heroes, including Willie Mays, Groucho Marx and Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. "He was a great, great artist on the clarinet," enthuses Woody. "He had that sort of sweet, soulful, just beautiful, beautiful sound."

Lewis, who died in 1968, spent most of his life playing obscure New Orleans dance halls and parades until his "discovery" in the mid-'40s. Yet he had something that touched people all over the world. Wherever his records were available, young musicians strove to copy his sound. Woody first confronted this phenomenon in 1971, when he went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage ! Festival and sat in on some French Quarter jam sessions. "There was a Japanese George Lewis and a British George Lewis and a Jewish George Lewis. It was really hilarious."

Woody remembers that trip, along with two earlier jaunts to the Crescent City, as high points of his life. Accompanied by Diane Keaton, he scurried around the French Quarter with his clarinet under his arm, looking, listening and sitting in with local jazzmen. "It was like watching Willie Mays all your life and then finding yourself in the outfield with him," Woody recalls. Festival producer George Wein even talked him into playing a set at one of the official concerts.

That unscheduled appearance prompted New York Times music critic John S. Wilson to hail Woody's playing as "one of the most invigorating and encouraging evidences of the continuity of the New Orleans jazz tradition." Other critics have not been so effusive. "I wouldn't rate him as a professional," says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. "It's cute; it doesn't do any harm."

Cute is the last thing Woody wants to be. Though he calls jazz his hobby, he pursues it with the utmost seriousness. He practices religiously -- up to two hours a day -- usually in the bedroom of his two-story Fifth Avenue penthouse. But even when he's working on location, he makes time for the horn. "There have been times when I would film all day long and wouldn't get to my hotel room until 10:30 at night," he says. "So I would get into bed and pull the quilt over my head so I wouldn't offend the neighbors." Missing a single day's practice, says Woody, makes him feel "absolutely consumed with guilt. You know, it's like when people break their diet or something."

Woody, who neither reads nor writes music, is the first to admit his technical shortcomings. "I feel that I don't really have much of a musical talent at all. I have enthusiasm and affection and obsession for the music. But I wasn't born with the real equipment for it. I mean, I'm totally eclectic and derivative of the guys I've heard and loved." His one advantage for playing the old-style New Orleans stuff, Woody feels, "is that I am genuinely crude." Another advantage is his ability to reproduce the powerful, wailing tone of the original jazzmen. The biggest compliment he ever got as a musician, Woody says, was when he was jamming in New Orleans and local people told him how "indigenous" his sound was. Jazz clarinetist Kenny Davern agrees: "He has sought to get that New Orleans plaintive sound, and he has really captured the thing."

Woody goes after that sound in two ways. First, by using a wide open mouthpiece and a very hard reed -- a Rico Royale No. 5 -- which provides a lot of volume but requires cast-iron lips to play. (Benny Goodman once borrowed Woody's clarinet for a sit-in and had to shave the reed down with a kitchen knife before he could get a toot out of it.) Second, by playing an Albert System clarinet -- an antiquated, wide-bore instrument based on a virtually obsolete fingering method. Why the Albert System? "Because all the guys I liked played the Albert," says Woody.

The instrument Woody uses these days is a patched-together twelve-key Rampone, made in Italy in about 1890. Like many of the horns in Woody's collection, it was supplied by fellow clarinetist Davern, who picked it up in a New York City pawn shop. Davern once offered to lend Woody a horn that had belonged to the great New Orleans clarinetist Albert Burbank, another of Woody's idols. Woody hesitated. "What if somebody steals it?" he said. "So what?" replied Davern. "They'll probably steal it while I'm playing it," said Woody.

That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after the owner's child tugged on trumpeter John Bucher's sleeve and begged, "Please, mister, don't play anymore."

Michael's Pub, where the band finally landed a regular gig in 1971, has been the scene of more than a few light moments. When the Mets were in the 1986 World Series, sports-junkie Woody showed up with a tiny transistor television and propped it up on his music stand so he could watch the game while he played. Trombonist Dick Dreiwitz and his wife Barbara, the tuba player, tell of a surprise visit by Groucho Marx. "After one of Woody's solos," says Barbara, "Groucho reached up and handed him a few pennies as a tip." Psychiatrist Ron Brady, a friend of Woody's, recalls the time a man claiming to be a biologist walked into Michael's and asked Woody for a skin sample. "He said he was working on a clone."

Most fans, however, do not get near their hero. Michael's Pub owner Gil Wiest aggressively fends them off, which is just fine with Woody. He makes no bones about the fact that he's there for his own kicks, not to strike up a rapport with the audience. "I'm not somebody who smiles and bows," he says. "You know, I'm up there to play. It's strictly business with me." Yet many patrons expect something different from the former stand-up comic. "Most of them are shocked that he doesn't speak or tell jokes," says banjoist Eddie Davis. "But after a few tunes, they get caught up in the music."

Allen's standoffishness with the public is echoed in his relations with the other band members. Although many of them have played with him for nearly two decades, he does not socialize with them or hang around making small talk after a gig. Nor do the other musicians, most of whom come from the slick Dixieland school, share Woody's abiding passion for the rough-hewn New Orleans style or his aversion to tuning up. Despite the different approaches, says pianist Dick Miller, the band tries mightily "one night a week to create the collective sound that resembles the music he loves."

In an effort to get even closer to the music he loves, Woody has been quietly rehearsing with a group of more New Orleans-oriented musicians for the past year or so. He remains vague about his ultimate plans for the group, but banjoist Davis says there is talk of booking it in a jazz club one night a week, and there have been feelers from several European jazz festivals. The tapes are always rolling during the rehearsals, moreover, so there is a chance that the sessions could ultimately produce something Woody has long resisted: a record featuring him on clarinet.

Whether or not that ever happens, music has already left a deep mark on Woody's artistic achievement. No one who has seen his films can fail to appreciate how effectively he uses the scores to reinforce the visuals -- from the Gershwin themes of Manhattan to the Django Reinhardt and Louis Armstrong ballads of Stardust Memories to the brooding Schubert string quartet of Crimes and Misdemeanors, which premiered last week. For the sound track of Sleeper, Woody even went to New Orleans in 1973 and recorded himself playing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. (The old musicians there had never heard of Woody's films, and one of them, trombonist Jim Robinson, called him Willard.) He hopes one day to devote a whole film to "the birth of jazz."

It would be a mistake to see Woody Allen's obsession with the clarinet as an eccentric hobby or psychological crutch. In ways both direct and indirect, concrete and spiritual, his musician's ear and instincts have helped make him the remarkable artist he is in other domains. "Jazz is a perfect music for him," says Eric Lax, who is writing a book on Allen. "It hates authority. It is a quirky, individual style requiring great discipline to play right. It is all the things that fit his comic character." So play it again, Woody.