Confetti Park Children's Workshop

Tag: clarinet

  • John Doheny recalls jamming cartoon theme songs as a kid

    John Doheny recalls jamming cartoon theme songs as a kid

    Saxophonist John Doheny jams with Chuck Bee (l) and Roger Lewis (r).
    Saxophonist John Doheny at a Confetti Park recording session with Chuck Bee (L) and Roger Lewis (R).

    In this episode of Confetti Park, we hear a childhood music memory from New Orleans-based saxophonist John Doheny.

    John has a long career as a professional jazz musician, band leader, writer, and educator. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, he first started playing clarinet as a child and was part of youth orchestras from an early age.

    John switched to saxophone as a teenager, and says he developed his chops playing six nights a week as a college student in Vancouver. He spent his twenties and thirties playing and recording with a slate of well-known pop and rhythm and blues artists such as the Coasters, the Platters, Bobby Curtola, Buddy Knox, the Temptations, Solomon Burke, Michael Buble, and Doug and the Slugs.

    In 2003, John moved to New Orleans and enrolled in the graduate school at Tulane University. In addition to earning an MA in Musicology (with a concentration in Early New Orleans Jazz), he served as Professor of Practice in the music department and directed the student jazz band. He also served as band leader of the Professors of Pleasure, and has released several straight-ahead jazz recordings. (We are honored that John appears on a track with the Confetti Park Players—The Clapping Song.)

    In this memory, John recalls how his mother made him practice every day, and how it led to a favorite jam.

    “My mother said you have to practice for 30 minutes after school or no cartoons. And so I would be sitting there playing with the Klose book, and then the cartoons would come on, and then because I already had the horn in my hand, I taught myself how to play the Bugs Bunny theme song. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was teaching myself how to play what I hear, which is kind of what you want to do.”

  • Music Memory from Ben Schenck

    Panorama Jazz Band photo by Greg Miles
    Panorama Jazz Band photo by Greg Miles

    Ben Schenck is the recognizable face of the Panorama Jazz Band (and Panorama Brass Band). Tall, lanky, wielding his clarinet like a snake charmer, Schenck leads his vivacious troupes through the streets of New Orleans and on stages around the world. Their music is celebratory and joyful, drawing from New Orleans jazz, the tropical rhythms of the Caribbean and the exotic melodies of Eastern Europe.

    In this episode of Confetti Park, Ben vividly recalls the elation of encountering a brass band during a parade when he was just a wee lad.


    Thank you, Ben, for sharing this beautiful childhood music memory.

  • Music Memory from Tommy Sancton

    Tommy Sancton. Photo by Sébastien Chaillot
    Tommy Sancton. Photo by Sébastien Chaillot

    In this episode of Confetti Park, Tommy Sancton shares one of his earliest music memories from Preservation Hall, a musical venue in the French Quarter founded in 1961 to protect, preserve, and perpetuate traditional New Orleans jazz. There, Tommy heard the sound that would guide the course of his life.

    Tommy Sancton has had an illustrious career as a journalist and musician. After studies at Harvard and Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar, he began a 22-year career with Time magazine as writer, editor, and Paris bureau chief. Music has always been part of Tommy’s life. As he traveled the world, he never stopped playing his clarinet.

    He also never stopped feeling the pull of home. In August 2007, Tommy left Paris for New Orleans. He now teaches at Tulane, continues to write, and plays and records frequently with numerous traditional jazz bands. Visit his website to learn more.

    Tommy has a beautiful memoir called Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White, published in 2006, which recounts his experiences at Preservation Hall and explores his childhood apprenticeship with clarinetist George Lewis and other musicians, as well as his relationship with his own father.