Wilton Crawley

Here is an early jazz artist who has largely been forgotten, yet if listeners had his clarinet blasting in their ears for a few days, that would hardly be the case. Perhaps not the most versatile musician on earth, Wilton Crawley still worked up a clarinet sound and style that utilized weird speech-like sound effects and extended use of slap tonguing, sometimes filling out whole lines of a solo with obnoxious little pops. The fact that one of his sidemen, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, went on to become an everlasting legend of early jazz has meant that many of the recordings orig...