Ken Peplowski, a critically acclaimed jazz clarinetist known for his warm, woody tone and fluency on a finicky instrument and whose early experience playing with Benny Goodman established his reputation as a bridge between the swing era and the genre-blurring modern age, died on Feb. 2. He was 66.
His death was confirmed by his brother, Ted Peplowski, who said the apparent cause, pending an autopsy, was a heart attack. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, in 2021.
Mr. Peplowski, who was also a noted tenor saxophonist, died at sea in the Gulf of Mexico after a morning performance on the Jazz Cruise, a floating jazz festival featuring nearly 100 musicians. He failed to show up for an afternoon gig and was found dead in his cabin. He was a regular performer and host on the cruise since its founding in 2001.
Wildly prolific, Mr. Peplowski released more than 60 albums, either as leader or co-leader. The British jazz trombonist and television critic Russell Davies once called him “arguably the greatest living jazz clarinetist.”
A longtime fixture of New York City clubs, Mr. Peplowski also performed at venues like the Hollywood Bowl and at festivals around the world, including the Newport Jazz Festival, as well as on soundtracks for films including Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown” (1999).
Mr. Allen’s cinematic love letter to 1930s jazz was a tribute to a golden age for Mr. Peplowski’s primary instrument — played by such star-bandleaders as Mr. Goodman, promoted as the “King of Swing,” and Artie Shaw, dubbed the “King of the Clarinet.” By the time Mr. Peplowski was emerging as a professional musician in the late 1970s, it was hardly the hippest of instruments, having ceded primacy in jazz to the saxophone in particular.
Mr. Peplowski had received his first clarinet as a hand-me-down from his father when he was about 8. He kept at it and, by his 20s, had played in the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, a tribute band to the music of the trombonist-bandleader who died in 1956, and the final swing band of Mr. Goodman, who died in 1986.
Mr. Peplowski’s career soon blossomed. Along with contemporaries like Anat Cohen, Paquito D’Rivera and Don Byron, he became “one more convincing bit of evidence that the swing era of the 1940s is being reborn and extended in the work of a growing number of young jazz musicians who are picking up where the original swing era ran out of steam,” John S. Wilson wrote in a Times review of his 1988 album “Double Exposure.”
While Mr. Peplowski honored the past, he was not stuck in it. “I love playing that music,” he once said. “I like playing it my way without it being a musical dress-up situation.”
Mr. Peplowski drew influences from avant-garde jazz, classical music, Dixieland and 1960s pop. His “Maybe September” album from 2013 sprinkled interpretations of the Beach Boys, Harry Nilsson and the Beatles among songs by Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin and a piece by the French composer Francis Poulenc.
A review of the album in the British magazine Jazzwise called his clarinet tone “exquisite, free of vibrato, quite pristine in its sound, often ethereal and unlike anyone else.”
That was no small challenge on an instrument prone to shrillness and squeaks. As Mr. Peplowski said in an interview last year with the jazz writer Lee Mergner for WBGO, the Newark-based jazz station, “I can tell you that if you put that thing away for a day, it lets you know.”
Kenneth Joseph Peplowski was born on May 23, 1959, in Cleveland, the younger of two sons of Norbert Peplowski, a police officer, and Estelle (Hamacek) Peplowski, who managed the home.
He grew up in the suburb of Garfield Heights and started performing in public in the sixth grade. In his teens, he and his brother, a trumpet player, formed a professional polka band.
After graduating from high school in 1977, he attended Cleveland State University for a year before leaving to join the Dorsey big band, whose director, Buddy Morrow, encouraged him to add sax to his arsenal. He gained proficiency studying with the jazz standout Sonny Stitt.
On both instruments, Mr. Peplowski said he felt free to roam. “Jazz is like poetry,” he said in a 2011 interview with Japan’s Min-On Concert Association. “I don’t need to think, but just express myself.”
In addition to his brother, Mr. Peplowski is survived by his two children, Marty and Juliana Peplowski. His three marriages ended in divorce.
In recent years, after his cancer diagnosis, Mr. Peplowski continued to earn strong notices. In a Wall Street Journal review of the clarinetist’s 2024 release “Live at Mezzrow,” the jazz critic Will Friedwald singled out the interpretation of “Here’s to Life,” a reflective song often associated with the jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn.
“He plays it in a manner that makes it clear he’s not only exploring every nook and cranny of the melody,” Mr. Friedwald wrote, “but gazing inwardly, making the number even more moving than it is with lyrics.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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