Felix and All the Cats

YAGED, SOL(OMON): Clarinetist.

Sol Yaged

He was inspired to take up the clarinet by Benny Goodman's broadcasts for the National Biscuit Company (1935) and studied for several years with Simeon Bellison of the New York PO; he declined the offer of a chair in the Buffalo PO. He played at the Swing Club, New York, in 1942 and, after army service, worked at Jimmy Ryan's for a year beginning in 1945. He continued to work mainly in New York: after playing with various renowned musicians, notably Phil Napoleon's Memphis Five, from the mid-1950s he usually led his own trios, quartets, and quintets. He was a technical adviser for the film The Benny Goodman Story (1956) and taught Steve Allen to play the clarinet.

Among the numerous clubs in New York at which he played were the Metropole (1954-1961), the Gaslight (from 1966), and Jimmy Weston's (1970s); in 1977 he was said to be the city's busiest musician. Yaged established a reputation as Goodman's most fanatical admirer, and an unabashed imitator of the style that Goodman perfected in the 1930s and early 1940s; this reputation has tended to overshadow his own proficiency as a performer as well as his leaning towards a Dixieland idiom. He is heard to advantage on his album It Might as Well be Swing.