Klezmer’s Outer Limits : Clarinetist Don Byron is the king of genre-hopping. But his eclecticism is less a reflection of his wide-ranging taste than the instrument he plays

Don Byron just might have the weirdest curriculum vitae in jazz. He has recorded rock ‘n’ roll with the black metal group Living Color, cabaret with singer Mandy Patinkin, big-band charts with saxophonist David Murray, futurist funk with Brooklyn’s Steve Coleman and Jewish folk music with the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

His debut album as a leader, “Tuskegee Experiments,” featured social-protest poetry right next to a 19th-Century song by German composer Robert Schumann; his new album, “Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz,” is a tribute to the late, Los Angeles-based novelty-tune maestro of the 1950s.

Such eclecticism is partly a reflection of Byron’s wide-ranging tastes. But mostly it’s a reflection of the fact that he plays one of the least-fashionable instruments in jazz.

“A jazz clarinet player?” he asks rhetorically, pausing between mouthfuls of cole slaw at a diner in mid-town Manhattan. “Doing what? . . . Some kind of Benny Goodman revival band? There ain’t no brothers playin’ that (expletive).”

Byron chuckles, delivering the spiel with a hipster drawl that’s a perfect corollary to his outfit, a mismatched collection of pre-loved clothing, wire-rim glasses, multiple necklaces and battle-scarred white Reeboks.

“I mean, even now,” he adds, “of the band leaders in jazz, who really wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Yo, man, I’ve really got to get a clarinet player’ . . . “

Despite such odds, this 34-year-old East Bronx native has risen to the front ranks of new jazz instrumentalists over the past 18 months. “Tuskegee Experiments” was almost unanimously decreed one of the best jazz albums of 1992, and last year’s Down Beat magazine critics’ poll voted him the musician most worthy of wider recognition in its “Jazz Artist of the Year” category.

Then, of course, there was Byron’s singular achievement two weeks ago in Los Angeles, when he became the first dreadlocked African-American clarinetist to perform Jewish klezmer music on “The Tonight Show.” Not everybody seemed sure how to react to this momentous event as Byron led the “Tonight Show” band through the frenetic polka-like rhythms of Mickey Katz’s “Wedding Dance.” Jay Leno called it “Jewish wedding music,” and one band member remarked that he gave up playing bar mitzvahs years ago. But Byron is accustomed to such blasphemy. He is unwavering in his belief that Katz, father of actor Joel Grey and the author of such Yiddish pop parodies as “Haim Afen Range” and “Kiss of Meyer,” was an American musical visionary.

Klezmer--Eastern European folk music brought to this country by Jewish refugees in the early part of this century--is undoubtedly the most curious of Byron’s many musical pursuits. With its two-step rhythms, folk violin melodies and shouted lyrics, the music has an in-built hilarity that causes some to wonder whether Byron, as a black man, approaches it as some kind of absurdist joke. Nothing could be further from the truth, however; before recording his new album, the clarinetist spent hundreds of hours listening to records like “Mickey Katz Plays for Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and Brisses.”

“When I first put together this Mickey Katz project, it was very hard to find people who weren’t going to make fun of it,” he says. “To me . . . Jewish music should be heard in the same kind of new-music context that you hear jazz or classical or any other kind of music. There’s this history of marketing music on the basis of its race or ethnicity, and I think klezmer music essentially is lumped into that world.”

Byron’s pluralistic sensibility is at least partly attributable to his upbringing in the East Bronx of the 1960s, an era when that neighborhood was still multiethnic and the radio was not yet carved into myriad niche markets. His father was a postal worker by day and bass player in a calypso band at night. Musical excursions with his parents ranged from local salsa bands to jazz gigs at the Village Vanguard and Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” at Lincoln Center.

Byron initially picked up the clarinet on the advice of a family doctor after being diagnosed with asthma. Later, he went to the Bronx School of Music and Art and the New England Conservatory, where he trained as a classical player.

But it didn’t take long for his iconoclastic side to assert itself, and he was soon playing be-bop while listening to avant-punk noise bands such as Pere Ubu and James White and the Blacks. He was also attracted to the hyperkinetic musical mischief in klezmer--not least because the clarinet plays such a prominent part--and became a founding member of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.

The klezmer connection came in handy when Byron returned to New York in 1986: He made a living playing Jewish weddings with his own klezmer ensemble. Meanwhile, he became part of the burgeoning “downtown scene” that centered around the Knitting Factory, the tiny club where musicians such as saxophonist John Zorn and guitarist Bill Frisell were twisting jazz into abstract shapes with the aid of cellos, accordions and sundry other post-modern touches.

Frisell recalls that he first met Byron around this time when the two found themselves occupying adjoining rooms in a hotel in Austria. “I was going to sleep when I heard this clarinet in the next room playing something like the Mozart Clarinet Concerto,” recalls Frisell. “It sounded beautiful, and I thought it was maybe some guy from an orchestra. Then it started to get . . . weirder, ya know? In the course of 15 minutes, he went through the whole history of music--on a clarinet.”

Frisell and Byron have collaborated often since, most recently on Frisell’s acclaimed new album, “Have a Little Faith,” which mixes compositions by such disparate American composers as Charles Ives, Muddy Waters and Madonna. Frisell also helped out on Byron’s ambitious “Tuskegee Experiments,” which took its title from the heinous U.S. Public Health Service “study” in which as many as 400 syphilitic black men in Alabama were falsely led to believe they were receiving treatment--while doctors merely observed the progression of their disease.

The title was emblematic of the risks Byron took musically, ranging from the opening unaccompanied solo to the angry poetry of the title track and the closing stateliness of Schumann’s “Auf einer Burg.”

“I don’t have any hidden parts of my repertoire, and at any given point I can play out of a lot of different bags,” says Byron. “But a cat like Charlie Parker, he liked all kinda stuff, man--Bartok and all kinda (expletive). And, in fact, if he didn’t have the wide-ranging tastes he did, he wouldn’t have come out with the new music that changed everything.”

“Tuskegee Experiments” was greeted with effusive praise, most notably from jazz critic Gary Giddins, who called it “a momentous debut.” But Byron’s restless genre-hopping causes some problems in today’s purist jazz scene, as he discovered during a recent conversation with George Wein, head of New York’s prestigious JVC Jazz Festival.

“He said, ‘I heard that you play jazz,’ ” recalls Byron with some incredulity. “I won a Jazz Musician of the Year award last year and this guy, who is the most powerful promoter in America, is just finding out I can play like a jazz dude.”

Byron’s approach to klezmer has also caused some Angst among the cultural guardians of that music. On the cover of his Mickey Katz tribute album, Byron is pictured with his hand wrapped around the throat of a dead plucked chicken; on stage with his 10-piece klezmer ensemble--trombonist J.D. Parran is the only other African-American in the group--Byron plays up the incongruity with sly stage announcements like: “This next song is ‘Litvak Square Dance,’ a Yiddish rap number, knowhumsayin’?”

There is actually something heartening about watching Byron dish out this shtick, considering the abject state of relations between blacks and Jews today, although Byron himself is anxious not to attribute too much political significance to his klezmer band. Hence, even though he agreed to appear last week at an “Increase the Peace” concert in New York alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Henny Youngman, he expressed some misgivings about the feel-good slogan that went with the event.

“That kind of talk usually means that whoever’s on the bottom stays dismissed,” he says caustically. “I just hate little catch-phrases. I hate peace! Basically, there ain’t no peace--America is about warring bands of people.

“I’m not gonna make any trendy points,” he adds. “I’m responsible to two communities and both of them are special to me. I’m not gonna be a Benedict Arnold just because I play Jewish music, you know what I mean?”

Byron is already moving to his next stylistic leap. By the time he next appears on the West Coast, in October at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, he will have moved on to another bag: his Latin jazz ensemble.

“I really hate most Latin jazz stuff,” Byron says. “I’m not necessarily saying I’m going to be the one who’s going to change Latin jazz forever. But I come from my own Afro-Caribbean background; I have a comfort with that family of percussive instruments. And I just want to do something weird with it.”