Danzi D1 Bb Clarinet Reeds - Singles

Note: These are priced per reed. One of 'em. Feel free to buy one reed, a few reeds, or mix strengths. I don’t charge a premium for breaking up the box.

What is it about Italian reeds?? First CARBEC, now Danzi!  Perhaps not as consistent as the CARBEC, they all played out of the box without requiring me to put some aside "to work on later." So definitely consistent enough!

Danzi is a name double-reed players have known for decades, but it’s still new to most clarinetists. Ovidio Danzi spent sixteen years as principal bassoon at La Scala in Milan, and before that held the same chair with the RAI orchestra in Turin. When he retired from the stage he became a cane obsessive: he went looking for the best plots in the Var region of southern France, home to the world’s largest Arundo donax cultivation, and started supplying his hand-selected cane to bassoonists and oboists. It landed in America at the 1994 double-reed conference in Bloomington and was picked up almost immediately by players like Klaus Thunemann and Sergio Azzolini.

The Milan workshop opened as Danzi SAS in 1996, the same year his wife Paola Frasson joined him at the bench. She still runs it today (Ovidio died in 2013), and every reed is still finished and tested by hand in Milan. Clarinet reeds are the newer chapter—the company only added them in the 2000s, using the same organic Var cane it had been sending to the double-reed world all along.

Per Danzi's marketing, the D1 is the "more focused" of Danzi’s two clarinet cuts: a filed reed with a shorter vamp, which gives it a denser, more controlled response. Danzi’s own advice is to give it two or three days of playing before you judge it—the sound opens up, and then it stays put for a long time.

As a practical starting point, figure a Danzi D1 plays about the a 1/4 strength to 1/2 strength harder than a Vandoren Traditional.