dailylisten:

This is what I like to call early 90’s jazz.  At that time the current of jazz’s irrelevance to mainstream culture seems to have intersected with its acceptance of outside playing into inside circles, in a way which enabled all sorts of freaky normal stuff to happen.  Bill Frisell makes an appearance here, which is fitting because early 90’s jazz is the thing he did best - it’s too bad he stopped doing it in the late 90’s.

Before my thumb began complaining, I tried to play the clarinet for a while, and I frequently wondered why there are so few clarinetists in modern jazz.  I refused to believe that it was for sonic reasons, but continued to encounter that idea until I lost interest in the question.  Don Byron explains it well somewhere in this Fresh Air broadcast.  Basically, the saxophone, for example, uses the same fingering to play the same notes in different registers, so that Coltrane and his followers could play rapid scales in any octave more easily than clarinetists.  Byron and his ilk have to use a different set of fingers to play a high A, a low A, and whatever other A’s they can conceive of.  It’s like changing the tuning on a guitar - it’s not theoretically harder to play in nonstandard tunings (although one chord or melody may be harder, another will be easier), but it’s much harder to switch between two contrasting systems than to stay in one.