Pete Fountain: The Clarinet King of Bourbon Street

The Clarinet King of Bourbon Street

Pete Fountain was the most famous jazz clarinetist to ever come out of New Orleans, which in a city that practically invented the jazz clarinet is saying something extraordinary. He was heavily influenced by Benny Goodman, had the chops to play with anyone on the planet, and chose to spend the bulk of his career doing exactly what he wanted: playing in his own club, on his own terms, in the city he loved. He was New Orleans royalty in the truest sense — a musician who could have gone anywhere but stayed home because home was the only place that made sense.

Fountain started playing in clubs on Bourbon Street as a teenager, back when Bourbon Street was still a place where serious musicians performed and the tourists came to hear them rather than the other way around. He cut his teeth with the Junior Dixieland Band, graduated to the Basin Street Six and the Dukes of Dixieland, and by the late 1950s was appearing regularly on national television as a featured performer on The Lawrence Welk Show, introducing Dixieland jazz to millions of living rooms across America.

His Own Stage

Fountain eventually opened his own club, The French Quarter Inn, and played there regularly for decades. It became one of the essential stops on any visit to New Orleans — a place where you could hear one of the greatest living clarinetists in an intimate setting, playing the music of his city with the ease and authority of a man who had been doing it since before most of his audience was born.

His sound was warm, fluid, and technically flawless — the kind of playing that made difficult things look effortless, which is the highest compliment you can pay a musician. He could swing, he could wail, he could float a melody over a rhythm section with the delicacy of a feather landing on water. He made the clarinet sing in a way that reminded people why the instrument had been at the center of New Orleans jazz from the very beginning.

Half Fast and Full Heart

Fountain was also famous for leading the Half-Fast Walking Club on Mardi Gras Day, a marching group whose name was a cheerful play on words that captured the spirit of the event perfectly. The club paraded through the streets with Fountain at the front, playing his clarinet and leading a crowd of revelers in what amounted to a mobile jazz concert that wound through the city on the biggest day of the year. It was pure New Orleans — music, celebration, and a joke that worked on multiple levels.

He retired from the nightclub business in 2003 but remained a presence in the city until his death in 2016 at the age of eighty-six. Pete Fountain was Bourbon Street when Bourbon Street was worth bragging about — a musician of extraordinary talent who chose to use that talent in service of his city's greatest tradition. The clarinet has never sounded quite the same since.