That Time We Recorded With Ken Peplowski

It’s got to be the only bit of unheard music in jazz icon Ken Peplowski’s vast catalog. He had an astounding career as a revered clarinetist and sax player. He died two days ago, just before a gig on a cruise ship. He fought multiple myeloma for five years.

Back in 1976, when Ken was a rising high school junior, my drummer colleague, Bob, and I were madly tracking original songs in the bedroom he shared with his little brother on a newfangled Dokorder 4-channel 4-track reel-to-reel recorder.

I knew Ken and his older brother, trumpet player Ted Peplowski, from high school. They played in jazz band and lived just a couple of streets away from Bob in Garfield Heights, a blown-out, rusting, hardscrabble Cleveland suburb.

Even though Ken was a couple of years younger than us — young enough for newly-minted, super-attitudinal college freshmen to actively ignore — we knew Ken absolutely kicked ass on the sax.

I’d written a song called “Don’t Let Her Fool Ya,” with teen-type lyrics that make me violently blush every time I think of them today. It’s a truly dopey juvenile rocker.

Bob and I had all the parts of the song recorded and mixed down to three tracks. We bounced down Bob’s drum track with my bass, rhythm and solo guitar parts, as well as my double-tracked vocal with our two-part backing harmonies (a vocal practice we later revived in our Boho Zen work, 20+ years later). That left a track wide open. We decided it’d be cool to ask Ken to come add a sax solo.

The Peplowski brothers were notoriously difficult to reach outside of school. Their father was a cop. He had a reputation for having a mean streak. He cloistered Ken and Ted in their rooms after school, demanding that they practice, practice, practice to the exclusion of all else. By then, they had started a Polish polka band, the Harmony Kings, and were doing regular paid wedding gigs (they later played my wedding!) Their father left them no time for horseplay.

We reached out to Ken, and he was immediately intrigued with the idea of recording a solo on a rock ‘n’ roll song, but told us he’d have to sneak out of the house with his horn to work with us because his father wouldn’t approve.

We played Ken the track all way through only once, and he told us he was ready.

Bob fired up the Dokorder’s record mode and Ken laid down a blistering solo in one take. Breathtaking. He fired off trills and frills throughout the track, effortlessly flying up and down keys.

Then he packed up his sax, walked home, and snuck back into his house past his dad.

It’s an amazing recording.

Like all of our other music, and consistent with this Substack, “Don’t Let Her Fool Ya,” and Ken Peplowski’s long-ago solo, is unheard (and unreleased). Fortunately, I did a digital transfer of the track a few years back, so I can still listen to Ken’s incredible solo today.

I’ve kept it to myself all these years as I watched Ken’s career explode and take the jazz world by storm.

I’m certain his father wouldn’t want our recording out there. I’m pretty sure Ken wouldn’t either. I have to respect that. So it continues its residency deep in my “recording vault” (a cardboard moving box in the back of a bedroom closet).

Bob let me know that Ken was sick a few years back.

After Googling around, I learned that Ken was still dragging himself to gigs because he didn’t have health insurance and needed the cash for mounting medical bills.

Someone set up a GoFundMe for him after his cancer diagnosis. My wife and I contributed. Though it was a small gesture, I’m glad there was a way to help a needy musician, who, like other musicians, struggle with health care because of the way the system works (or doesn’t) for people who gig for a living.

Now, Ken is free. The massive musical legacy of genius he leaves will continue to inspire, inform and delight us, and generations after us, I’d reckon. Bob and I were lucky to experience a small sliver of it firsthand, just as Ken was beginning to piece together his incredible ascent out of Garfield Heights to the pinnacle of the jazz world. And now, he has reached even higher heights.

Godspeed, Ken — say “hey” to Trane and Bird up there — and thank you.

“Since the advent of Benny Goodman, there have been too few clarinetists to fill the void that Goodman left. Ken Peplowski is most certainly one of those few. The man is magic.”

-Mel Torme

“Mr. Peplowski sounds the way (Benny) Goodman might if he had kept evolving, kept on listening to new music, kept refining his sound, polishing his craft, and expanding his musical purview into the 21st century.”

– Will Friedwald, Wall Street Journal, December 2012