Możdżer+
Leonard Bernstein on one (not solely jazz) musician: “Eddie Daniels combines elegance and virtuosity in a way that makes me remember Arthur Rubenstein. He is a thoroughly well-bred demon.”
Eddie Daniels
Eddie Daniels was born in New York City in 1941. He took interest in jazz as a teenager, looking up to musicians who at the time played with Frank Sinatra. Daniels was first noticed as a tenor saxophonist with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in 1966. Soon, a single clarinet solo recorded with that group won him the Downbeat Magazine's International Critics “New Star on Clarinet” award. Since then he has won Grammy nominations and awards many a time – in 1989, for example, for Memos from Paradise. His goal is to reach the widest audiences possible, so that he can open both jazz and classical music to them. And, naturally, blur the differences between the two, where possible. Eddie Daniels makes Mozart equally intriguing as Charlie Parker. Therefore it is not sufficient to say that he is a brilliant jazz clarinetist. Eddie Daniels is one of the greatest woodwind instrument musicians, both on the classical and on the jazz side of the business. At the 2010 Solidarity of Arts, together with Leszek Możdżer, Aukso and the Polish Baltic Philharmonic, he performed the 10-minute Chopin impression written by Charles Fox exclusively for the festival and ran a saxophone and clarinet workshop at the Stary Rower club in Sopot.
Photo: Paul Slaughter