VIRTUOSO CLARINETIST ED DANIELS

Eddie Daniels is a clarinet player who makes other clarinet players wish they had taken up the kazoo, or accountancy or hydroponic farming.

Daniels, with a back-up trio, has been doing a three-night gig inaugurating a new jazz policy at the Beverly Hills Saloon, and he is simply a phenomenon. He produces multi-octave runs and arpeggios, trills and shakes and great vaulting leaps around the scale that seem well beyond the capabilities of mortal fingers, lips and tongue.

You don’t have to play the clarinet to sit in slack-jawed awe of what he does, but if you do play the clarinet (at any level from novice to pro), you have to feel a mixture of wonder and despair at his cascading virtuosity.

Daniels is a likable, bearded fellow who closely resembles the actor Mandy Patinkin from “Ragtime” and other works. Daniels is a man of engaging modesty who says with evident sincerity that even now he never quite feels he has mastered the instrument.

He carries 14 mouthpieces, he confessed the other night, hostages to his reedy fates--hoping that one will prove just right for the night, the room, the state of his chops and the altitude (he has just been playing at 7,000 feet in Santa Fe). But he still chases some elusive perfection.

Part of the astonishment at listening to Daniels is that he not only produces such lightning strings of notes but also that every one of them sounds wonderful: cool, distinct and well-rounded, whether at the top or bottom register of the instrument. His tone control at high velocities makes musicians look at each other and shake their heads. His idol, early and late, is the late Charlie Parker and, like Parker’s, Daniels’ agile runs and soaring improvisations are full of quick, faintly boppy surprises, perky, angular and exploratory. His handling of a slow and moony standard like “Getting Sentimental Over You” is no longer slow, moony or sentimental, but still inherently melodic in its permutations on the theme.

He has been playing forever. His longtime friend, the bassist on the current engagement, Herb Mickman, says that as early teen-agers in Brooklyn, they played for $15 a week. Daniels went to the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan (the prototype of the “Fame” setting) and took a master’s from Juilliard.

He spent six years with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, playing saxophone, and like Benny Goodman, he is as comfortable in symphonic and chamber forms as in jazz. His album, “Breakthrough” (on the Digital Master label), was with the London Philharmonia Orchestra and featured a concerto for jazz clarinet and orchestra by Jorge Calandrelli that obliterated the nominal distinctions between jazz and “serious” music.

There are styles in clarinet playing, of course: the cool virtuoso fires of Goodman, Daniels and Buster Bailey, and the soulful, sparser-noted blues clarinet of Pee Wee Russell, to take a prime example. Artie Shaw, who has written admiringly of Daniels, combined a virtuoso command of the instrument (including a big, glorious tone) with a real jazz feeling and an unsurpassed gift for lyrical invention.

Daniels so far plays what you might call a different kind of soul, more cerebral than visceral, reflecting the virtuosity and the intricate improvisations, rather than bluesy emotional traumas of earlier jazz.

It is thrilling in its own way, artistry to hear rather more than to feel. I hazard a guess that with time Daniels’ music may come to embrace those more subjective qualities, along with his electrifying fluency.

Sharing the Saloon date are Billy Mintz on drums and Mike Wofford on piano. Wofford’s driving style handsomely matches Daniels’, and they are something to hear.

As a footnote, it is fascinating and refreshing to hear jazz in a non-smoke-filled room.