The Sax Life of Bill Clinton : President’s Impromptu Performance at Czech Club Is Immortalized on CD

Poor Bill Clinton. The media is after him again and this time they are calling him “unfocused,” “limpid,” “raw.” And those are just the polite reactions.

Where does this name-calling come from? Is it more backlash over the crime bill? A few verbal rounds in the battle over health care reform? Or maybe some analytical commentary on his diplomatic skills?

Nope. This time it’s the President’s work on the tenor saxophone.

“Bill Clinton Jam Session--The Pres Blows,” a CD chronicling an impromptu jam session in the Czech Republic, has been released by Daybreak, a small, jazz mail-order record company. The 17-minute album was recorded live at the Reduta Jazz Club in Prague on Jan. 11, 1994. It includes three tracks: a brief Smetana fanfare celebrating President Vaclav Havel’s awarding of a Czech-made Amati tenor saxophone to Clinton, a five-minute version of “Summertime” and a 10-minute reading of “My Funny Valentine.”

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On the album, Clinton sits in with an excellent six-piece Czech band, which includes baritone saxophonist Jan Konopasek, a veteran of the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands.

“It was broadcast live over Czech radio,” says Bernard Brightman, president of Daybreak, “and a friend of mine brought me a tape. We thought it would make a great collectible, so we decided to release it and donate a part of the proceeds to the Coalition for the Homeless.”

Copies sent to the White House elicited a cordial letter from Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, thanking Brightman for the CD and noting that “everyone who received a copy enjoyed it.”

However, an offer by Brightman to make the CD available as “a promotional item for the committee that is raising funds for the President’s legal defense” has not yet received a response. A similar offer to the Democratic National Committee has also met with no reply.

There’s not much chance that the CD, which has sold about 5,000 copies so far, will be hitting the charts any time soon. And it would be a kindness to call the critical reaction mixed. Comments range from Entertainment Weekly’s description of Clinton’s “surprising creativity” and FanFare’s report that the President’s solos “lope like a dope” to Billboard jazz columnist Jeff Levenson’s expectation that the album might bypass gold and platinum and “go aluminum.” (Copies of the CD were spotted in the comedy section of a Tower Records store in Manhattan.)

Brightman thinks most of the reaction misses the point:

“Look, the positive aspect is that here we have a President who supports jazz and likes to play the horn. He goes into a nightclub in the Czech Republic, they give him a new saxophone and he plays it. He tries to get through one number and stumbles a bit. But then he plays a second number and plays fairly respectably.

“Sure, it wasn’t anything that would make any of our major jazz musicians nervous. But it was the President of the United States playing jazz. That’s got to be good for something.” At the very least, it has to be considered a marginal improvement over the pedal-heavy piano renditions by Harry Truman of “The Missouri Waltz” and Richard Nixon of “Home on the Range.”

Viewed in perspective, and granting the fact that Clinton hasn’t had a lot of time for woodshedding his horn lately, the playing he does on the CD is about at the level of a moderately talented college jazz student. Typically, his melodic expositions are superior to his improvising, which leans toward repetitious riffing--not always precisely in sync with the chord changes. In his worse moments, usually when he works himself into a tight corner, he has a tendency to revert to agitated trilling.

On the up side, Clinton’s melodic phrasing reveals an easy, sometimes even appealing familiarity with the airy openness of jazz rhythm. In one or two instances, most notably in his improvisation on “My Funny Valentine,” there is a sense of drama and continuity to his line suggesting that, under different circumstances, he may have matured into an interesting player.

Is it world-class jazz? Only in the astonishing picture it presents--unimaginable a decade ago--of an American President jamming with a Czech jazz band in a nightclub in a city that once was behind the Iron Curtain.

And as for the musicd, look at it this way: Bill Clinton, the Pres, will never be mistaken or Lester Young, the Prez. But hearing Clinton play, even in his more fumbling passages, is far more entertaining than listening to speeches by Bob Dole or Phil Gramm.

* “Bill Clinton Jam Session--The Pres Blows” may be ordered from Daybreak Mail Order, 140 W. 22nd St., 12th Floor, New York 10011. (800) 666-5277. Price: $10. Also available in some stores.