Clarinetists have chemistry

I confess. I'm a clarinet player.

A totally unreconstructed lover of the licorice stick, from age 10 forward.

But that's not the only reason I'm recommending a very special concert this weekend, featuring Seattle clarinet maestro William O. Smith and two of his most illustrious students — Jesse Canterbury and Canadian François Houle.

The occasion is the release of a gorgeous album of new clarinet music played by Smith and Canterbury, "collage/décollage," to which Houle also contributed a piece. Trombonist Stuart Dempster and guitarist Tom Baker will be on hand, as well.

The performance is at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle; $5-$15 (206-789-1939 or www.gschapel.blogspot.com).

Canterbury, 34, has an unusual background. A university-trained physicist, he works days at the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, analyzing protein biochemistry.

"In science," he says, "I have to be extremely analytical and very detail-oriented. In music, a lot of the same things apply, but ... all that stuff is subsumed in the moment, when you're drawn into the intuitive and the ethereal."

Freedom is a big attraction of music for Canterbury, as well, or what he calls "performer choice." Raised in Tuscaloosa, Ala., he studied classical repertoire, but at Florida State University, in Tallahassee, he discovered free-improvised jazz, minimalism and contemporary classical music.

"There were two recordings that blew my mind," he recalls. "One was Ornette Coleman's 'Lonely Woman,' and the other was an album by Anthony Braxton, doing one of his contrabass clarinet free-improv things, with a couple of string players. It was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. I remember I was staring at the stereo system, knowing there was something coming out of there, but I didn't know what it was."

From FSU, Canterbury went to the University of Texas for more physics; but in 2000, when his significant other got a job in Seattle and a pal from FSU told him to look up Houle, in Vancouver, B.C., music moved to the fore.

Between 2000 and 2005, Canterbury took every music course he could at the UW and began studying with Smith, though he never entered a degree program.

One of the attractions of working with Smith and Houle — who play jazz as well as modern classical — is their command of "extended techniques," extracting new sounds out of the instrument.

From Houle, for example, Canterbury learned circular breathing, a technique for sustaining a note for long periods of time by storing air in the cheeks, like a bagpipe.

From Smith, Canterbury learned to play two clarinets at the same time and even halves of the instrument, blowing across the opening to make it sound like a flute.

"Variants For Two Clarinets," one of Smith's compositions on "collage/décollage," features half-clarinets, with eerily beautiful flute sounds and a deep, low humming produced by affixing a Harmon mute on the end of the horn.

People often think of modern music as austere and dissonant, but Smith's "Essay," the first piece on the disc, has a light and cheerful feel, with capricious fluttering and twinkling. Houle's "Polestar," which premieres at this show, has a poignant emotional touch, as the two clarinetists enact their mutuality, moving gradually apart and back together on the same notes.

The closing piece, Smith's "Quartet For Two Double Clarinets," has astonishing orchestral heft — "like a beehive," says Canterbury — given there are "only" four instruments playing.

Check these guys out. This could be one of the finest concerts of the year.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com