Spice Vivaldi With Jazz to Get ‘Five Seasons’

Eddie Daniels is on a mission: He wants fans of both classical music and jazz to share his boundless affection for the pure, liquid tones and deep emotion that can emanate from a clarinet.

Daniels, 54, is a virtuoso clarinetist and saxophonist at home in both jazz and classical fields. He hopes to win fans over with his innovative version of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Aided by arranger Jorge Calandrelli, Daniels has adapted, and enlarged, the great Baroque piece for clarinet and jazz quartet, and has recorded the new work as “The Five Seasons” (Shanachie), featuring the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

“ ‘The Five Seasons’ lets me be who I am,” said Daniels during a phone conversation from his home in Santa Fe, N.M. “This is the animal that studied classical music from age 12, and that is also a jazz animal. I’m able to bring the two musics together as a natural language, as opposed to, say, a classical artist doing jazz because they like it, but it’s not really their language.”

Daniels, accompanied by the orchestra (conducted by Bernard Rubenstein), and his quartet--Alan Broadbent on piano, Dave Carpenter on bass and Peter Erskine on drums--will give “The Five Seasons” its West Coast premiere on Friday at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach and on Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.

To concoct “The Five Seasons,” Daniels transposed all the lead violin parts from “The Four Seasons,” making them fit the clarinet, he said, “so that Vivaldi’s music would shine forth.”

He then judiciously added jazz sections, as in a portion of “Autumn,” which starts with Daniels improvising with the rhythm section, then smoothly returns to the original theme.

“We wanted the transition between jazz and classical to work in a way that would have made Vivaldi happy,” said Daniels. “It was a task to find a door, a connection, that led us from the classical to another room where the jazz quartet is waiting. Then after we improvise, we find the door back to the orchestra in a way that hopefully surprises and delights the listener. I want this music to be delicious and explosive and also intellectually stimulating.”

Daniels, who comes from New York, was first known in the ‘60s as a tenor saxophonist who led his own bands and was featured with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. He started performing on the clarinet in the early ‘80s, and made a powerful jazz-classical orchestral album, “Breakthrough” (GRP). Subsequently, the clarinet became his focus and he began employing it almost exclusively, playing both jazz and classical repertoire. But the demands of learning, then recording, “The Five Seasons,” Daniels said, raised his awareness of the musical possibilities inherent in the smaller wind instrument.

“The clarinet, a deliciously difficult instrument that offers beauty, finesse and delicacy, showed me that it has so much to offer in terms of color,” he said. “So it kind of lit up my heart again in a new way.”

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* Eddie Daniels plays “The Five Seasons” with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and his quartet on Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Tickets, $10 to $36 at the Alex box office, (818) 243-2539, or by calling Tele-Charge at (800) 233-3123.

Organ-Ized: Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, at the now-defunct Parisian Room in Los Angeles, Art Hillery, a member of the house band, played the Hammond B-3 organ. In recent years, though, he’s been mostly known as a pianist, appearing every Sunday at the Cat and Fiddle Pub in Hollywood.

But thanks to guitarist Doug MacDonald, Hillery has once again been playing that electronic keyboard beast.

“I love the sound of the organ,” said MacDonald, who brings Hillery and a Hammond on board for a Friday engagement at Chadney’s in Burbank. There, Hillery will employ his creamy chord voicings, his deft touch and his bluesy line approach to create compelling sounds that were plentiful in yesteryear, and are, thankfully, starting to be heard again today. For more information, call 843-5333.