Lord Byron

The most culturally important clarinetist since Benny Goodman is a mad, near-vaudevillian eclecticist. That’s on record — but on the record, speaking from his home in upstate New York, it’s a different story: Don Byron, the 43-year-old child of the Bronx, is as calm, wry and consistent as his chosen instrument is by reputation.

Though classically trained, Byron has unfurled a jazz-based, stylistic kaleidoscope of records, including avant-garde post-bop, Yiddish novelty music, ’70s funk, hip-hop and covers of Motown, Sondheim, The Beatles, Ellington and screwy Raymond Scott. Not that his experiments with all of the above lack heart, but listeners might wonder just where his heart lies. Byron says they can find the answer in the Afro-Latin exercises of his latest work, You Are Number 6: More Music for Six Musicians.

“I’m not some downtown guy who learned about Latin music last year,” he says. “This is the music that’s the most important to me.” It’s the music of the Bronx neighborhood of his childhood, of his West Indian roots, and of his father, bassist Don Sr., presented as a conceptual variety show.

Conceptual music has a long history of travesty, from pompous rock opera to poorly integrated jazz fusion, but Byron excels at understating overarching themes with pleasurable, accessible products. Sometimes it’s been the revival of an overlooked form — for example, the Yiddish novelty music of Plays the Music of Mickey Katz. Elsewhere, it’s been political: the reimagined ’70s milieu of Nu Blaxploitation, as indebted to Sartre as it is to Shaft. This time out, the concept is both musical and political. You Are Number 6 takes the African foundation of Latin music and lays it on top, where it can’t be denied.

The album is in some ways a tribute to Mario Bauza, arguably the father of Afro-Cuban jazz and a Byron mentor whom he recalls as a “sexy octogenarian.” The trumpeter came to New York from Havana in 1930. Through ensuing decades, he would create links between Cuban music and African-American jazz — including between Dizzy Gillespie and terminally hot-headed percussionist Chano Pozo and between the big band of Bauza’s own brother-in-law, Machito, and a host of renowned soloists. “He recorded with Canonball and Parker and cats like that, and he loved those guys,” Byron says. “Mario was really the bridge between Latin music and jazz.”

“A Whisper in My Ear,” with its crisp Cubanista percussion and piano, is a tribute to Bauza, while “Dark Room” melds the bustling, bursting Miles Davis-like trumpet of band member James Zollar to cycling ostinato rhythms inspired by Machito’s Orchestra.

The tributes don’t end there — Byron is, after all, as gracious toward his influences as anyone in jazz history, or pop for that matter. The hopping “Shake ‘Em Up” honors the Claude “Fats” Greene Orchestra, technically painting by the numbers of the original arrangement but preserving its warmth and party spirit. Byron Sr., who sits in on bass, was in Greene’s band. Recalls Byron, “I would often be dragged, sometimes involuntarily, to gigs.” But the weary child of a musician would find in Greene the pivotal inspiration of a clarinetist interacting with a rhythm section and playing outside stuffy classical confines.

“At that time, I was studying with classical clarinet teachers, and they had lots of snobbery about who could and who couldn’t play the clarinet,” Byron says, “but there was no doubt in my mind that Fats Greene could play a clarinet.”

The album, however, isn’t stuck on the New York-Caribbean axis. For one thing, it opens with the theme to a John Wayne film, 1961’s “Dark Continent” saga Hatari! But unlike on “Shake ‘Em Up,” Byron doesn’t play the Mancini original straight. Instead, he reinterprets the tune with Milton Cardona’s Afro-Caribbean, Santerian percussion right up front in the mix.

Free-jazzy solos and Brazilian sounds mingle in strange form on the dusky “Klang” and the nearly psychedelic “Belmondo’s Lip,” which uses the honking cuica drum like a vocal track. Both were composed for Walk Don’t Walk, a documentary on feet that interviews subjects ranging from parade-goers to fetish models about their foundational appendages. Says Byron of the film, “It shows that people have more philosophy in them than you might think.”

And speaking of philosophy, the album’s title track plays with Byron’s own existentially minded politics, with its reference to the single-season late-’60s TV show The Prisoner. In the program, a resigned British secret agent finds himself trapped in a mysteriously bureaucratic, strangely cushy island fortress. Byron’s composition brings to mind espionage as much as a tropical setting. His analysis of the show: “There’s an overwhelming sense of the comforts of life being provided in this almost strict way, and yet there’s no freedom. And I think that feeling is pretty much what contemporary life has been. Post-fascist life is pleasant; it’s nice, but I really don’t have any say in stopping the bombing of Afghanistan.

“A lot of the feeling of The Prisoner comes from the strange dichotomy between being a prisoner and having everything be pleasant,” he continues. “That’s what Sartre and them cats were writing about. That’s where a lot of the politics that I am into lead.”

It’s an elegant concept, conveyed through the album’s subtle musical skew, but a less high-minded ideal — the sheer spirited drive to innovate and entertain — makes You Are succeed. Byron seems to be aware of this. “Mostly it’s a representation of the band that’s probably been together the longest continuously of all of my bands, and now we have a document that shows how cool that band is,” he says with a laugh. “That’s the thing that I’m happiest about.”