ARMY MADE HUCKO INTO CLARINETIST

Peanuts Hucko is one of the most revered clarinetists in jazz-based music. He has played with such giants as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden and Eddie Condon, and he remains very active both in the states and Europe.

But if it hadn’t been for a hitch in the armed services that began in 1942, Hucko--who leads “A Salute To Benny Goodman” through Friday at Disneyland’s Carnation Gardens--might have been just another tenor saxophonist who, if he ever touched his clarinet, did it with displeasure.

“I was stationed in the Army band in upper New York State, near my hometown of Syracuse,” Hucko said over an afternoon coffee and Danish, “and it was a base set up for desert training, so we had to march through sand all the time. Well, I didn’t want to ruin my tenor, so I started marching with the clarinet.”

Hucko, who started on soprano saxophone at 16 and later switched to tenor, had already showed disdain for the clarinet while playing with Will Bradley’s band in 1940-41. “I used to play all the clarinet parts on the low register of the tenor sax,” he said, “and Ray McKinley (who was the drummer and co-leader) fired me for that. Clarinet was too difficult. But after I started playing it steadily for a while, I suddenly realized that I liked it.”

Hucko began a rigid practice regimen, working out on clarinet every chance he got. “At officers club dances,” he recalls, “I played all the clarinet solos, because nobody else wanted them.”

In 1943, Hucko, through efforts generated by then-Maj. Glenn Miller, ended up at Yale University in New Haven, where Miller’s Army Air Corps bands were headquartered. Soon Hucko was in a band led by McKinley and when he played a hot clarinet solo, “Mac almost fell off the drums,” Hucko said. “He said, ‘You used to hate it; now you sound great.’ ” Later, Hucko had grabbed the lead clarinet chair in Miller’s own band, where he spent the remainder of his service time.

Hucko went on to play with Goodman (1945), McKinley (1946-47), Armstrong (1958-60) and others, and took over the Glenn Miller orchestra for a brief time in 1974 from its ghost-leader, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. “But that was absolutely too much,” said Hucko, now a spry 69-year-old. “Louise (Tobin, Hucko’s wife and a former Goodman singer who also headlines at Disneyland) and I had three days off in eight months,” he said, so they called it quits. In recent years, Hucko and Tobin have appeared regularly with their sextet, playing material made famous by Armstrong and Goodman.

Leading the Goodman Alumni big band--which this week includes such players as reed man Bill Tole, trombonist Bob Havens and drummer Alvin Stoller--”came as a complete surprise” to Hucko, who knew that Goodman didn’t want a ghost band after his death. But Hucko’s agent, Irv Dinkin, made arrangements with Goodman’s estate for a salute to the great clarinetist (who died June 13, 1986), which took place last June at Disneyland.

That week was so successful--”The audience was so excited and we got such a great reaction”--that Disneyland picked up the option in Hucko’s contract for another week, which is unusual since bands rarely repeat during the summer big band season.

Hucko enjoys playing at the theme park. “The people come to dance--I call them the old jitterbugs, because they get out and dance just like they did 20, 30, 40 years ago--and to listen,” he said. “They love to hear big bands. And it’s prestigious to play there because they only have the best bands.”

The clarinetist said working with a big band “is a different kind of fun. In a small jazz band, you might do four, five numbers in the same time you’d do 12 numbers with a big band, because most of the (big band) arrangements were written to be recorded on 78 (RPM records), so they don’t run more than three minutes.”

Hucko’s repertoire includes “all the things that Benny did,” he said. “We have a lot of the original charts, and we do some of the real old ones.”

Playing a Benny Goodman tribute is a perfect way for Hucko to honor one of his primary musical inspirations. “Benny had fire, he was exciting,” Hucko said. “He could play a wrong note and make it sound good. He knew his instrument. Everything he played, he played with authority, and I think that’s what a good musician does. Me,” he added, laughing, “I play with as much authority as I can muster.”