Ed ClutE plays a tunE on his mason-hamlin grand piano at his

Photos By John Fulmer

T
watkins glEns homE. ClutE will hEadlinE thE mountain homE wintEr
Jazz fEst on marCh 1 at thE pEnn wElls hotEl.
he ten-inch wide records used on the machines
are one-quarter-inch thick. The eighty-rpm discs,
Ed ClutE slips an Edison diamond disC on his Edison maChinE.
a transitional technology from the earlier cylinder- a prECursor to thE modErn phonograph, it is onE of his prizE
recording method and the thirty-three-rpm vinyl lp,

A
possEssions. thE first Edisons wEnt on salE in 1912.
are heavy as serving platters and made of an ungodly
chemical mixture of phenol, formaldehyde, wood-
flour and solvent. As the needle slips into the record’s
groove, a slightly scratchy ragtime stomp bleats out
from the “horn,” or speaker, hidden behind a grille.
Except for record collectors and amateur archivists
like Clute, the song, which regales the listener to the
joys and wonders of Wisconsin, has been long forgot-
ten. Clute himself can’t think of its title or the name
of the band off the top of his head.
But that’s understandable. Clute, who, along with his
Dixie Five Plus One, will headline the first Mountain
Home Winter Jazz Fest on March 1, is a professional mu-
sician, a classically trained pianist, and a lover of ragtime
and early jazz. His studio, in which the Edison machine
sits, is a minor museum, stuffed with sound stuff. There

Sound
are three pianos in the center of the room: two Mason-
Hamlin grands, one of which is also a player piano, and
a Foster upright foot-pump player.
It would take an assistant or two to catalog the
records, tapes, CDs, and piano rolls stacked in the
shelves that cover the studio’s walls. And since Clute is
blind, they all had to be coded with a braille writer and
By John Fulmer elaborately organized.
But instead of worrying too much about whether
he can identify a band or its nearly 100-year-old ditty,
Clute sways in front of his prize machine with a
childlike look of delight on his face, blissed out by a
song to which Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald might have

Home
danced The Charleston. Obedience to minutia, the
curse of too many collectors, doesn’t seem to be his
problem.
Clute also keeps an archive in his head. Ask him
to play a ragtime-era song or one of the standards
from the Great American Songbook, and he doesn’t
hesitate. Nor does he say much, except perhaps, “Oh,
that’s a great song.” He just plays it. And flawlessly. But
this talent took years of practice.

C lute, who is sixty-four, was born and, for the

first six years of his life, lived in the house next
to the studio. High on a hill in Watkins Glen, New

STANDING
York, it offers a stunning view of Seneca Lake. Clute
said his mother encouraged his interest in music.
“My mother says I was playing the piano at the age
of three” Clute said. “I went to the Batavia School
before his Edison machine, a chest-high cabinet of burnished oak, Ed Clute wound its for the Blind when I was seven and studied all the
subjects—math, English, history—but with a big
hand crank and gingerly set the stylus down on a record spinning on the turntable. emphasis on music.”
After graduating from Batavia in 1964, he headed to
the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he
the record, like the machine, is vintage, from the 1920s, when Edison’s diamond disc spent four “wonderful years.” During the summer, he
attended the Amherst Summer Music Center in Maine,
which is no longer in existence, but Clute described it
Phonographs were all the rage, a must-have for flapper-era audiophiles, equivalent as “a very good music school.”
After graduating from the conservatory, he met
perhaps to today’s top-of-line ipod or, better yet, a home-theater sound system. up with Jean Casadesus, a French classic pianist and
the son of Robert and Gaby Casadesus. Jean Casa-
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