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I’ve recently joined the Behn Mouthpieces Artists team. I first became acquainted with Brad Behn’s mouthpieces at the 2013 ClarinetFest in Assisi. I had tried some of his pieces for clarinet, and found one that I really liked in his Signature Collection. It was quite open (something like 1.56 tip opening… typical “classical” mouthpieces are between 1.0-1.10 or so), which I like for klezmer, jazz, and a lot of contemporary music. It blew quite freely, and I had a lot of flexibility for bending notes, multiphonics, and slap tongues. It’s also loud as hell! But what especially caught my attention was how clean and centered the tone still was. Usually with larger tip openings the sound is quite fuzzy, but with this piece I had a clean and pure core sound, with a lot of “space” around it depending on the reed I chose. Which is also another amazing thing with this particular piece… I can use a range of reed strengths depending on what sort of response I want, and rather than harder reeds just becoming dull and too hard to blow, they still maintain that core in the sound and just respond differently. The downside of this mouthpiece was the price… it’s hefty, even for artisan mouthpieces. But it comes with a lifetime warranty. If anything ever needs to be changed or adjusted on it, Brad will do so for free. And hey, a good mouthpiece is worth the price.

Due to the price I wasn’t able to buy it in Assisi, but I had it in my mind for a whole year, until ClarinetFest 2014 in Baton Rouge. Behn Mouthpieces was present again, and still had the exact same mouthpiece. Brad even remembered me and said he kept it and brought it in case I was still interested. I wasn’t too surprised that nobody had bought it, as most clarinetists don’t usually look for something so open. But I took it as a sign. After a few more hours of testing, playing, and trying other ones, I kept coming back to the same one. So I bought it. After more than a year of playing on it, I still love it.

Jump ahead to ClarinetFest 2015 in Madrid, where I was asked to play contrabass clarinet in Arthur Gottschalk’s piece The Kaleidoscopic Pocket Hockets Boogaloo for 8 bass clarinets and 2 contrabass clarinets in the D’Addario Artists concert. I had an old Selmer C* contra mouthpiece that did the job, but it wasn’t great. I only know of two custom contra mouthpieces, by Walter Grabner and Clark Fobes. I know both Walter and Clark, and they both make fantastic mouthpieces. In fact I have two clarinet and one bass clarinet Grabner mouthpieces, and my current Eb clarinet and bass clarinet mouthpieces are Fobes. But the problem with a contra mouthpieces is, they’re expensive! Especially for how relatively less I play contra than my other clarinets.