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Virtuoso clarinetist to blow into in Eagle Rock

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Jazz has always had its share of mavericks, iconoclasts and will-o’-the-wisps. These outliers have continually spiked the music’s punch with their unique musical visions. New York-based clarinet virtuoso Perry Robinson has been all three, often at the same time.

Though he’s gone his own stylistic way, he’s been able to comfortably insinuate himself in any number of settings on the edge of the jazz margins.

Robinson has appeared in SoCal before — usually in the company of pianist Darius Brubeck’s Two Generations of Brubeck band of the 1970s. But Sunday’s recital at Alex Cline’s Open Gate Theatre series in Eagle Rock marks the first local date where the 76-year-old clarinetist works under his own name. It’s a much-anticipated event.

San Diego-based keyboardist Nobu Stowe is responsible for bringing Robinson west. Robinson added a facet of poetic and unpredictable clarinet mastery to Stowe’s “The Soul in the Mist” album (Ictus, ‘07). For such an infrequent visitor, Perry will take part in a relative flurry of activity: live dates and recordings in both locales. At Open Gate, Robinson heads a group with fellow reedman Peter Kuhn, guitarist GE Stinson and Cline on drums.

Though his chosen instrument had been coin-of-the-realm in jazz in the 1940s, when Robinson emerged in the ’60s it was rarely heard in contemporary settings. Saxophones, in the hands of John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Charles Gayle and many others, dominated the free jazz vanguard. Robinson wisely didn’t try to match the bigger horns in volume but instead spun beguiling sounds and added lyrical content to what were often tumultuous surroundings. As James Joyce did with language, Robinson’s improvisations revel in playful and fun-loving musical forays.

His father was folk songwriter Earl Robinson, author of “Ballad for Americans” and “Joe Hill.” Leadbelly bounced little Perry on his knee; Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and the Weavers were family friends. “That was definitely the first music I heard,” Robinson says, from his New York home. “I call myself the Woody Guthrie of jazz.”

At the High School of Music and Art, he met pianist Jon Mayer. “We were inseparable,” says Mayer, long a mainstay in SoCal jazz. “The folk influence is a big part of Perry’s playing and writing. He knows the clarinet inside and out: He can make it melodious, mellifluous and endearing. And then he can do this other stuff.”

That ‘other stuff’ includes playing free music with no set meter of chord changes. In 1959, Robinson had attended the School of Jazz in Lennox, Massachusetts and was very taken with the music of Ornette Coleman. When Mayer established the first resident jazz trio in Spain in 1959, he called for Robinson. “The first night,” Mayer chuckles, “we were playing standards and Perry went right out! The owner was screaming and fired him shortly after.”

“Ornette’s music just spoke to me,” says Robinson. “It freed me to play what I was feeling.” Tony Scott, jazz gypsy and perpetual explorer, also profoundly touched him. “Tony was my mentor,” Perry concedes. “He had the largest sound of any clarinet player and he was open to free playing.”

Kuhn studied with Robinson in the ’70s when the latter was a part of the New York loft scene. “He got the most incredible sounds from the horn,” Kuhn marvels. “He made it talk so that his playing was an extension of speech, rather than something orchestral.”

Robinson isn’t confined to the free form; the Brubeck band’s music navigated very difficult time signatures at fast tempos. “I went back to New York recently,” Mayer recounts, “and was playing some old-school tunes like ‘Nica’s Tempo.’ Perry sat in and astounded me by being able to immerse himself so well in the hard bop genre. I didn’t expect him to have that in his portfolio. He can walk into any musical context and just be a part of it.”

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What: Perry Robinson, Mezcla Music

Where: Center For the Arts, 2225 Colorado Blvd, Eagle Rock

When: Sunday, June 7, 7 p.m.

Admission: $10

More info: (626) 795-4989, www.centerartseaglerock.org
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KIRK SILSBEE writers about jazz and culture for Marquee.

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