Michael's Pub is packed. The green-and-white-checked tablecloths are jammed so close together that the waiters can hardly squeeze between, and patrons find themselves knocking knees with their dinner companions. No matter. They have come from around the world -- Japan, Italy, France, Scandinavia, South America -- to savor this moment. The random babel of a hundred conversations suddenly turns into an excited murmur as a sandy-haired man in an open-necked white shirt and corduroy trousers saunters in and heads for an empty table. He nonchalantly opens a tattered case and removes, then hooks together, the sections of an antique clarinet. Peering through his familiar black-rimmed glasses, he hops up onto the bandstand and takes his usual seat next to the piano. The trumpet player snaps his fingers twice, and suddenly the whole room is reverberating to the strains of a 1905 pop tune, In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.
For the past 18 years, with rare exceptions, Woody Allen has spent every Monday night on this bandstand. He even skipped the 1978 Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his appearances not be advertised and has repeatedly turned down offers of big- time recording contracts.
The fact is that Woody, by his own admission, is "obsessed" with jazz. Not Dixieland, not swing -- definitely not bebop. He is devoted to the pure New Orleans style that developed early in this century and was recorded by his pantheon of clarinetist heroes: Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone and George Lewis. Woody is so passionate about jazz, in fact, that he says he would have preferred to be a full-time musician if only he "had been born with a massive talent" for it. "It's the best life I can think of if you're a really talented musician because communication in music is so emotional in every way."
Long before young Brooklyn-born Allen Konigsberg had sold his first joke or even dreamed of making a film, he was scouring record stores in search of New Orleans music. Woody first caught the bug at age 14, when he happened to hear a Saturday-morning radio show devoted to Bechet, one of the all-time great clarinet and soprano saxophone players. "I heard it, and it just sounded wonderful," he recalls. "It was sort of like an opening of the dike." With the facility for self-teaching that he would later demonstrate as writer and filmmaker, he laid his hands on a soprano sax and started to learn it. Bechet's driving, growling virtuosity on the sax, however, proved too difficult to emulate, and Woody soon switched to clarinet.
About that time, he heard his first recordings of Lewis and was immediately enthralled by the clarinetist's lyrical, emotional style. To this day, Woody models his own playing on Lewis' and speaks of him with a reverence he accords to only a handful of his culture heroes, including Willie Mays, Groucho Marx and Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. "He was a great, great artist on the clarinet," enthuses Woody. "He had that sort of sweet, soulful, just beautiful, beautiful sound."