Respectable Rabbit

At 15, it seemed to Reginald Kell that "there must be some easier way out than engineering." So he took up the clarinet. After one day, because he had once studied violin, he could play a couple of tunes. In ten years, he was a professor of clarinet in the Royal Academy of Music, which later made him a Fellow, "a fate I thought reserved only for respectable musicians, like an organist at St. Paul's."

Last week, tall, ruddy Clarinetist Reginald Kell, recognized as one of the world's best, let Manhattan judge his respectability in person for the first time. Snowbound in the suburbs, he stomped in the stage door just ten minutes before he was scheduled to start Brahms's B Minor Quintet with the Busch Quartet. But listeners, when they could hear his clarinet over the Busch's whirring blizzard of sound, found nothing snowbound about his playing. Instead, in the slow movement, which he had more, to himself, they heard the kind of soft, singing tone and delicate phrasing which won him fame alike among "straight" players and what he calls "the other kind"--meaning lowbrow jazz musicians.

Both kinds will get plenty of chance to hear him. At 40, Yorkshireman Kell has come to the U.S. to stay. Says he: "All I could see ahead over there was the same old sort of thing. I thought I'd get out a bit and see what America might offer!"

He also feels that the U.S. has been made "clarinet conscious" by some of the "other kind" of tootlers, e.g., Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. "What the jazz boys have done with the clarinet," says Kell, "is colossal." Goodman was one of the first to greet him on his arrival, and at lunch later at the Stork Club, complimented him on his "free and warm" playing on records of Schubert's Der Hirt auf dem Felsen. As for playing "the other kind" himself, Kell once made a record of Swing Low, Sweet Clarinet, but admits that "In a jam session, I'm like a rabbit at a stoat's tea party."

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