Ken Peplowski

Kenneth Joseph Peplowski was born on May 23, 1959, to Norbert and Estelle Peplowski. Most obituaries (DownBeat, WRTI, The Guardian) place his birth and childhood in Garfield Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb with a strong Polish community; Wikipedia and The New York Times give Cleveland. His father was a police officer and amateur accordion player, and his mother was a homemaker.

Norbert started a family polka band, the Harmony Kings, with older brother Ted on trumpet and Ken on clarinet, an instrument he did not choose but liked straight away. The band played Polish weddings and social functions around Cleveland, and Ken made his professional debut at 10. As a teenager he fell for Benny Goodman's recordings, went to hear the touring big bands and Goodman himself, and took up the tenor saxophone.

Peplowski took private clarinet lessons through his youth and continued them as a student at Cleveland State University, which he attended only briefly before going on the road. He practised the classical clarinet repertoire throughout his life (he told Anat Cohen in 2026 that he still practised mostly classical clarinet) and studied saxophone with the bebop master Sonny Stitt, whom he met while touring with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and later honoured on the 1989 album Sonny Side.

While at Cleveland State, Peplowski led a quartet at the Cleveland Jazz Festival on a bill with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra under trombonist Buddy Morrow. Morrow hired him to play lead alto saxophone, gave him a nightly clarinet feature, and toured with him from about 1978 to 1980. On Morrow's advice he moved to New York, where he sat in at Eddie Condon's and Jimmy Ryan's, subbed for Ed Polcer, played weekends at Waterloo Village for the New Jersey Jazz Society, and was mentored by Milt Hinton, Buddy Tate, Flip Phillips and pianist Dick Hyman.

In 1984 Loren Schoenberg brought him into a big band that Benny Goodman took over for his last band; Peplowski played tenor saxophone with Goodman until Goodman died in 1986. He signed with Concord Records in 1987 and recorded Double Exposure, the first of more than 40 Concord albums and more than 70 as leader or co-leader overall. He toured Japan with Mel Torme (1988 and 1992) and Hank Jones (1992), worked for years with Leon Redbone, and recorded with Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, Charlie Byrd, George Shearing, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Howard Alden, Randy Sandke, Kenny Davern, Alan Barnes, Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops, Marianne Faithfull and Madonna.

He was music director of the Oregon Festival of American Music in Eugene (2007 to 2014) and of the Oregon Coast Jazz Party in Newport, and a longtime performer and consultant for The Jazz Cruise. Later albums included Noir Blue (2010), In Search Of (2011), Maybe September (2013), the big band record Sunrise (2018), Amizade with Diego Figueiredo (2019), Live at Mezzrow (2024) and Unheard Bird (2024).

Peplowski was married three times, and all three marriages ended in divorce, according to The Guardian. At his death his companion was Pam Stark. He had a son, Marty, and a daughter, Juliana, both living in Sweden, and was survived by his older brother Ted, his first bandmate in the Harmony Kings.

He loved older American humour, naming New Yorker writers S. J. Perelman, James Thurber and Robert Benchley and The Jack Benny Show among his heroes, and he kept notebooks of comic ideas on the road. Friends recalled him talking about the Beatles and Bob Dylan as much as jazz.

Peplowski resisted being filed as a traditionalist. "I like playing it my way without it being a musical dress-up situation," he said of trad jazz in 2016, adding that loving one style did not mean it was all he could do. He wanted listeners to hear the wood in the clarinet and, as Loren Schoenberg put it, played the clarinet like a clarinet rather than like a saxophone. He believed the old rivalries between clarinetists were over: "there's few enough of us, so we need to support each other and just get up there and have fun." He also wrote about improvisation outside music, co-authoring a 1998 Organization Science paper with Frank Barrett analysing small structures within the song "All of Me."

The New York Times credited Peplowski with helping to revive the jazz clarinet and called him a bridge between the swing era and the genre-blurring modern age. Pianist Emmet Cohen called him "a brilliant musician, a pioneer of the clarinet, and a gentle soul." Loren Schoenberg, senior scholar at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said he had "that rare combination of virtuosity and velocity and outright swing," and called his dark, controlled tenor saxophone sound underappreciated. Musicologist Jerry Rife noted in The Clarinet that he started jazz students with breath and air support and a pure classical sound. Tributes poured in from Tierney Sutton, Nicki Parrott, Ted Rosenthal and the jazz organisations of Oregon and New Jersey, and a jazz memorial for him was streamed by Saint Peter's Church in May 2026.

Best Jazz Record of the Year, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics' Award), for The Natural Touch (1992).

Elected to The Jazz Cruise Hall of Fame (2013).

Satchmo Award, presented by the Jazz Club of Sarasota (March 2014).

Selected albums as leader: Double Exposure (1988), Sonny Side (1989), Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool (1990), Illuminations (1991), The Natural Touch (1992), Live at Ambassador Auditorium with Harry "Sweets" Edison (1994), A Good Reed (1997), Grenadilla (1998), Dearest Duke with Carol Sloane (2007), Noir Blue (2010), Maybe September (2013), Sunrise (2018), Counterpoint: Lerner and Loewe (2019), Live at Mezzrow (2024) and Unheard Bird (2024).

Film: he played on the soundtrack of Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999).

Writing: "Minimal Structures within a Song: An Analysis of 'All of Me'", with Frank Barrett, Organization Science, Vol. 9, No. 5 (September to October 1998).

Peplowski had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2021. He was technically in remission but in poor health, Pam Stark told WRTI, and tried to keep his suffering private. In early February 2026 he was performing on the week-long Jazz Cruise aboard the Celebrity Summit in the Gulf of Mexico, including three-clarinet sets with Anat Cohen and Paquito D'Rivera. On February 2, the cruise's final day, he and Cohen held a morning Coffee Talk for passengers; he then went to his cabin to rest before an afternoon gig. When the famously punctual musician failed to appear, he was found dead in his cabin. He was 66.

His brother Ted told The New York Times that the apparent cause, pending an autopsy, was a heart attack. Burial or resting place details have not been made public. A jazz memorial for him was streamed by Saint Peter's Church in May 2026.