Clarinet Marmalade

Larry Shields could play the clarinet like it owed him money. While Nick LaRocca was out front giving interviews and claiming he'd invented jazz, Shields was in the background doing something considerably harder — actually playing it at a level that made real musicians pay attention. Clarinet Marmalade is his showcase, and it's the ODJB recording that holds up best under serious musical scrutiny, because Shields treats the three-minute runtime like a personal mission to prove that this band was more than a novelty act.

The title is wonderfully absurd. Marmalade. For a clarinet piece. The ODJB named their compositions the way a sleep-deprived person names a pet — whatever sounded funny in the moment. But the music underneath the silly name is sophisticated in ways the band rarely gets credit for. Shields weaves through the ensemble with a fluidity that anticipates the great New Orleans clarinetists who would follow him — Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet — all of whom were Black musicians who had been playing this style long before the ODJB brought it to a white audience.

Shields learned to play in New Orleans, where racial boundaries in music were both rigid and permeable. White musicians couldn't play in Black venues and vice versa, but they listened to each other constantly. Shields heard the Black clarinetists of Storyville and absorbed their vocabulary — the blue notes, the vocal inflections, the way a clarinet could laugh and cry in the same phrase. He translated that vocabulary for a white audience that had never heard it, which makes him either a cultural ambassador or a cultural translator depending on how generous you're feeling.

The recording itself has a looseness that the ODJB's more famous sides lack. You can hear the band listening to each other instead of just playing at each other, and Shields takes the spaces that open up with an improviser's instinct. It sounds, for three minutes, like actual jazz — not the vaudeville version the ODJB usually sold, but the real thing, messy and alive and a little bit dangerous. Shields died in 1953, largely forgotten. The clarinet playing on this record argues he shouldn't have been.