Billy Novick

Woodwind master Billy Novick plays clarinet, most of the saxophone family and knows his way around a pennywhistle. Growing up in New York, he was given his first clarinet as a hand-me-down when his older brother moved on to bassoon. And though the young Novick listened to all kinds of music on the radio (rock, blues and contemporary jazz included), by the time he was 14 he had immersed himself in the stylings of artists like Jellyroll Morton, Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.

Berklee, David Bromberg, Guy Van Duser, New Black Eagles

By 16, he was getting paid to play clarinet, in a Blood, Sweat & Tears-type band at proms on Long Island. After dropping out of college, he moved to Boston, attended Berklee for a year, met some musicians and fell into the local ’70s music scene. He worked in various blues and R&B bands, fronted his own avant-garde jazz trio, joined the David Bromberg Band and hooked up with guitarist Guy Van Duser, with whom he still plays as a duo today. In 1986, he became a member of the New Black Eagles Jazz Band.

Composing, Arranging

But along with playing, Novick, a longtime Lexington, Massachusetts, resident, has also done loads of composing and arranging. “When I was a kid I wanted to be a composer even more than a musician,” he said recently. “It was something about the grandness and permanence of it that appealed to me.”

He wrote and arranged both fusion and straight-ahead jazz for his own bands; he improvised melodies while playing for modern dance classes (eventually developing them into structured compositions); and he became part of Mason Daring’s film scoring team (specializing in jazz and “ethnic” sections of the scores). A right time-right place situation got him in touch with Scott Speck, a conductor with the Washington Ballet, which led him to compose original music, and transcribe/rearrange several 1920s compositions and public-domain songs for a 2010 production of “The Great Gatsby.”

Current activity

Novick worked with the same people on a ballet of “The Sun Also Rises,” which premiered in May 2013. He still finds time to play, regularly appearing with a couple of duos and trios, and with the New Black Eagles, Guy Van Duser and his newest group, The Blue Syncopators, who perform music from ballets. In rare spare moments, he continues to be a studio musician for hire. “I mostly stick to clarinet and alto and soprano saxes at this point, but I’ve played tenor and baritone, mostly on recording sections,” he said. “Sometimes they need a whole horn section, so they’ll hire me to put down all four sax parts.”

(by Ed Symkus)