Music: Ill Woodwind

When the younger jazzmen did away with Dixieland and big-band swing and dove into the cool depths of bop and progressive jazz, they also left behind the sweet, lucid sound of the clarinet. Once known as an ill woodwind that nobody blows good, this relatively new instrument suddenly struck the U.S. mass ear in the 1920s in the hands of Ted Lewis, who made it wail, and reached peak popularity in the pre-World War II days of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, who made it swing. It is still a must in every Dixieland...

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