Well Beneath The Sleeping Floor

Vinny Golia, contrabass clarinet; Brian Walsh, Andrew Pask and Cory Wright, bass clarinet; Jim Sullivan, A clarinet and bass clarinet

Unless you’ve spent several semesters in a wind band, you probably have never realized just how many possible members there are of the clarinet family: they range from a high Ab clarinet all the way down to a contrabass. Multi-reed composer/improviser Vinny Golia plays all of them and on Music for Like Instruments: The Clarinets, he lets other folks in his ensemble in on the fun. Take Well Beneath The Sleeping Floor for the unlikely combination of four bass clarinets and solo contra. Okay, one of the guys occasionally pulls out a good ol’ A clarinet, but that only provides some temporary above-C-level relief to an otherwise really deep groove.

—FJO