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New Orleans Clarinet Virtuoso Pete Fountain Dies at 86
from the musical-ambassador dept.
The Los Angeles Times reports [latimes.com]
Pete Fountain [born Pierre Dewey LaFontaine Jr.], the goateed clarinetist who became a global ambassador of New Orleans jazz with his flawlessly slippery technique and joyful sound, died Saturday of heart failure while in hospice care in New Orleans.
[...]Fountain combined the Swing Era sensibility of jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman with the down-home, freewheeling style characteristic of traditional New Orleans jazz to become a national star in the 1950s, when he was hired as a featured soloist on the "The Lawrence Welk Show".
[...]After Fountain played a typically loose and limber arrangement of the Christmas song "Silver Bells" during one show, the band leader known as the "Champagne music maker" fired Fountain, he noted in his autobiography, "A Closer Walk With Pete Fountain".
"Champagne and bourbon don't mix", Fountain quipped about the incident to an interviewer later.
[...]Fountain [...] often performed at his own club in New Orleans' French Quarter, regaling audiences with his performances of New Orleans standards, gospel songs, and reworked versions of pop hits.
The Washington Post continues [washingtonpost.com]
Pete Fountain, whose rousing performances on clarinet made him a star of Dixieland music, a familiar figure on television and in nightclubs, and one of the most popular musical ambassadors of his native New Orleans, died Aug. 6 in his home town. He was 86.
[...]From 1957 to 1959, when Mr. Fountain was a standout soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show [youtube.com], he was perhaps the most widely recognized jazz musician on TV.
[...]Known for his shaved head, goatee, and dapper wardrobe, Mr. Fountain was as effervescent as his music. For years, he owned Crescent City nightclubs in which he held court as the bandleader, featured performer, and raconteur.
Few musicians, with the possible exceptions of trumpeter Al Hirt and the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, were so deeply identified with the early music of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.
He appeared nearly 40 times at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and was a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show [youtube.com] more than 50 times. He performed at five White House state dinners and before Pope John Paul II during a 1987 papal visit to New Orleans.
