Search - Don Byron :: Tuskegee Experiments

Clarinetist-composer Don Byron declared his liberation from the tyrannies of both style and history with this 1992 release, one of the most significant debut recordings of the 1990s. The sheer span of Byron's musical reach is awe-inspiring, including Ellington's "Mainstem" and Robert Schumann's tender "Auf Eiener Burg" in a program that ranges from the klezmer-suffused "Waltz for Ellen," an unaccompanied solo, to the Latin beat of "Next Love." Part of the album's magnificence, too, is just how extraordinarily well Byron plays the clarinet. He's joined by a shifting cast of sidemen that includes several regular associates, like bassist Reggie Workman, for the atmospheric dialogue with bass clarinet on "In Memoriam: Uncle Dan," pianist Edsel Gomez, and guitarist Bill Frisell, whose bending, soaring electric-guitar solos often match Byron's own leaping, virtuosic performances. The title track, with a powerful reading by the poet Sadiq, is a riveting poem inspired by the notorious "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." The grotesque medical experiment provides a subject potent enough to make the fusion of jazz and poetry work, melding the two into one. --Stuart Broomer