Clarinetist discusses Paris attacks ahead of Bay Area concerts

Clarinetist discusses Paris attacks ahead of Bay Area concerts

David Krakauer, the blazing clarinetist whose klezmer-based music is suffused with the sounds of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet while naturally flavored with funk, classical minimalism and hip-hop, was sitting in his Paris hotel room Nov. 20 — a week after the terrorist attacks — telling his Facebook readers that his show the next night at La Cigale, the famed concert hall in the Pigalle district, was being canceled because of security concerns.

The clarinetist wanted deeply to play for French audiences last month because “I feel there’s a way that we as artists need to react.”

The quote was posted online the day after the Paris attacks by Selmer, the storied instrument maker whose Parisian clarinet shop is a block from restaurants where people were slaughtered.

A jazzer at New York’s High School for the Performing Arts, Krakauer went to Juilliard and performed in the classical realm for a decade.

In certain pieces I’ve instructed the string players not to play all the notes on the page, to choose their own and improvise.

Marijuana in California, opening in April at the Oakland Museum of California, is apparently the first museum exhibition to “explore the complex issues” surrounding the ancient and controversial weed.

The show looks at pot from multiple vantage points in sections like Cannabis Science, Profitable Pot, Politically Loaded and Recreational Reefer.

“The Sacred Ganga section looks at religions that believe the use of marijuana helps them connect with the divine,” says Kelly McKinley, who oversees the museum’s curatorial departments and exhibition development.

Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.