The jazz saxophonist and clarinet player Barney Bigard was a highly respected and popular player during the heyday of the jazz boom in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in 1906 into a New Orleans Creole family and as a teenager studied music under the famous clarinet player Lorenzo Tio. Tio was an enthusiastic exponent of the jazz solo and his influence helped to shape Bigard into the outstanding soloist he was later to become. At the age of 21 Bigard joined Duke Ellington's orchestra in New York and remained in Ellington's ensemble for the next 15 years during which time he toured constantly, mainly as the featured clarinet soloist but also playing tenor saxophone. Bigard moved to California in the 1940s and landed a role in the all-star musical romance 'New Orleans' (1947) playing in Louis Armstrong's band and he later wrote an autobiography titled 'With Louis and the Duke'.
Bigard eventually created his own band known as Barney Bigard and the Jazzopaters who recorded a well-known version of the song 'Caravan' and towards the end of his playing career recorded under his own name as a solo artist.
He died in California in 1980 at the age of 74.
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