If the plague persists, boards of education must call a conference of musicians to attack the problem and everything related to it. Bellison's article was written near the end of the big band era, in which clarinet front men and soloists like Goodman, Artie Shaw and Jimmy Hamilton in the Duke Ellington Orchestra were highly popular, and they freely used vibrato. Rusinek doesn't look down on other forms of music, but he thinks there is a definite connection between vibrato and ethnic music, like the rollicking klezmer songs of Yiddish folk tradition that he sometimes plays. I am a huge fan of Klezmer music, and when I play things that are in that style, I play with a little bit of vibrato. And the same when I play things in the jazz vein.
Jazz is the same way.
You really are constricted when you are a symphonic player. His first teacher when he was growing up in Cincinnati was a free-lance clarinetist who played classical and jazz music, and so Stoltzman learned to use a vibrato from him. In his solo career, Stoltzman has become known for using vibrato on several classical pieces, as well as on his CDs of jazz and other kinds of music. His own recording of the Copland concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra uses a noticeable but very delicate vibrato, particularly in the slow opening passages. Stoltzman's status makes him fairly bulletproof from criticism, but he says others have suffered a crueler fate.