Promoting sonic growth

It isn’t every musician who records eight albums’ worth of first-rate performances then releases them all simultaneously. In fact, it might only be one: Dr. Ronald L. Caravan.

Well, technically, it’s two. On all eight volumes of the Naxos-distributed Single Reed Expressions (Mark), the pianist Sar-Shalom Strong accompanies Caravan. Together, they’ve created a fairly comprehensive overview of the best-known and the should-be-better-known compositions for the woodwind instruments specified in the discs’ collective subtitle: A Clarinet & Saxophone Recital Series.

The two met in the late 1990s at Syracuse University, where Caravan was a professor and Strong a master’s student. “He ended up accompanying a lot of my students for their juries,” Caravan recalls, “and I ended up having him do my faculty recital with me. I could tell early on that we were kindred spirits.”

They began recording in 1999 with two main goals. One was to provide clarinetists and alto and soprano saxophonists with a high-quality, one-stop repository of trustworthy renditions of repertoire-worthy works for their respective instruments. To that end, each volume of Single Reed Expressions can be purchased separately, sparing musicians who only want to inspect, for instance, Weber’s virtuosic Grand Duo Concertante (Volume 1), Ernst Krenek’s 12-tone Suite for Clarinet and Strings (Volume 6), Paule Maurice’s programmatic Tableaux de Provence (Volume 5), or Caravan’s own extended-technique “Sketch” (Volume 2) from having to purchase the entire set in one fell swoop.

The project’s other, more ambitious goal was to demonstrate the sonic destination at which Caravan believes the saxophone must arrive if it’s ever to take its place alongside the clarinet and the double-reed woodwinds as an instrument capable of articulating musical ideas more refined than those usually found in pop, rock, or jazz.

“I think the clarinet has matured more,” Caravan observes, “but then it’s had more years to do it. The saxophone’s not quite 180 years old, the classical saxophone not yet a century. Except for a few things like Debussy’s Rhapsody for Orchestra and Saxophone, it really didn’t get going until [Sigurd] Raschèr and, in France, [Marcel] Mule started really being active pre–World War II and beyond.”

Caravan likes to describe the mature clarinet sound as a combination of the French (“shrill”) and the German (“dark”). It’s a sound to which he has given a great deal of thought over the years, even going so far as to market his own line of symphonic-clarinet and classical-saxophone mouthpieces, mouthpieces that he has designed specifically to facilitate the reproduction of his ideal French-German blend. And it’s the sound that characterizes the fluid lyricism of his playing throughout Single Reed Expressions ’ 43 alto or soprano saxophone performances.

It’s also a sound, he believes, toward which serious saxophonists are finding themselves increasingly drawn.

“Something is making it go in that direction,” he says, “and it’s more than just Eugene Rousseau’s mouthpiece being maybe a better version of the French mouthpiece than what preceded it. I’d like to think it’s an overall musical momentum. I mean, I heard Kenneth Fischer a few years before he died, and he sounded darker than I’d ever heard him before. So something’s happening. And I hope these recordings are just one small contribution to pointing the saxophone that way.”

Not that Caravan would mind their making a big contribution.

“I just think,” he says, “that the beauty of the sound is an essential element of the musicianship. It took me a lot of years to get there, but I can’t rationalize bad sounds anymore.”