Danzi D2 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 started life as a bassoonist’s side project. Ovidio Danzi was principal bassoon at La Scala in Milan for sixteen years (and at the RAI orchestra in Turin before that), and when he left the stage he went hunting for better cane. He found it (unsurprisingly) in the Var region of southern France, the biggest Arundo donax growing area in the world, and started selecting and supplying it to oboists and bassoonists. Danzi cane made its American debut at the 1994 double-reed conference in Bloomington; within a year or two, bassoonists like Klaus Thunemann and Sergio Azzolini were on it.

In 1996 the operation became Danzi SAS, a small workshop in Milan, and Ovidio’s wife Paola Frasson joined him making reeds. She has run the company since his death in 2013, and the reeds are still hand-finished and hand-tested there. The clarinet line came later—only in the 2000s did Danzi start cutting Bb clarinet reeds from the same organic Var cane that built its reputation with the double reeds.

Per their marketing, the D2 is the freer-blowing of Danzi’s two clarinet cuts, and I find it runs a little harder than the D1, personally. Like the D1 it’s a filed reed, but with a longer vamp, so it flexes more easily and speaks right away across the whole range. Danzi describes the sound as fluid and rich in harmonics, and I find it to be the more colorful of the pair. Honestly, this is like Danzi's V12 and the D1 is the Traditional.