Ben Goldberg Releases Another Werewolf

Cover design for Ben Goldberg’s Thoughts of a Werewolf album (from the Bandcamp Web page for the album)

Some readers may recall that, in January of 2022, jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg recorded and released a series of nine mini-albums, all organized around the topic of werewolves. The longest of the albums was Werewolf in Therapy, clocking in at 21 minutes for twelve tracks, the longest of which was just short of four minutes and the shortest being the coda lasting only twenty seconds. At the end of this past March, Goldberg released a tenth album in the series. This one is entitled Thoughts of a Werewolf, consisting of fourteen tracks for an overall duration of fifteen minutes.

Each of the tracks has a dedication; and, unless I am mistaken, each of the dedicatees is a clarinetist. The “thoughts” of this album may have been triggered by its most recent predecessors, Werewolf Awareness, whose fifteen tracks include five dedications. The dedication that particularly registers for me is the one for Beth Custer, who founded Clarinet Thing. She and Goldberg were members of a quartet of clarinetists, the other two being Sheldon Brown and Harvey Wainapel; and I still remember when they presented a Salons at the Rex program for San Francisco Performances in January of 2011.

The other name is Steve Lacy, who dates back to a period when I was just beginning to collect jazz albums. I have two CDs, both of which are duo performances with pianist Mal Waldron (another personal favorite). One of these, Hot House, is a studio album; and the other, Let’s Call This… Esteem, captured a live performance in Oxford (England) in May of 1993.

It is therefore easy to appreciate Thoughts of a Werewolf as a highly personal undertaking. To be fair, however, I do not feel qualified to interpret each of the tracks in terms of the associated dedicatee. On the other hand, I would be surprised if I encountered anyone (possibly even including Goldberg) that could explain the connections! To be fair, however, when I wrote about the first nine releases, I concluded with the following passage:

Listening is likely to be most engaging if taken simply at the auditory equivalent of “face value.” If each of the tracks in this collection is a product of Goldberg’s own self-actualization [in the spirit of Abraham Maslow], then each listener is free to find his/her own self-actualization simply by accepting the content of each “auditory stimulus.”

In other words, as I have listened to Goldberg’s werewolf tracks in the past will probably direct the way I listen to Thoughts of a Werewolf.