My daughter picks the licorice stick

I didn't see it coming, I guess. Not sure any parent really does.

But my daughter, Tess, has gone woodwind on us. Taken up the licorice stick, no less.

She's joining the fifth-grade band and will play, drum roll, the clarinet. No problem. We'll just add band lessons to a summer calendar that now looks like a protocol for enriching uranium. And by that, I mean it's complicated.

At Linn-Mar, students who want to join the band have an “interview,” during which they make a fateful instrument choice. It doesn't get any bigger than this, so I went along to witness the historic moment. She tried out the saxophone, flute, cornet, trombone, percussion and the clarinet.

In the end, it was the clarinet by a thin reed over the saxophone. I have to admit, as a former third-rate trumpeter, I felt a hint of regret that she didn't go brass. But her mother played sax, and the woodwind gene is dominant, or so I've read. What are you gonna do? At least she's not falling in with drummers.

Now I'm building my clarinet knowledge. I looked up some history. It has its origins in the Middle East and Europe in the Middle Ages. I did not know that.

I even looked up clarinet jokes. What's the difference between chopping up an onion and chopping up a clarinet? Nobody cries with the clarinet. I'm dismayed by the lack of good clarinet jokes.

I also wondered how I could encourage Tess to stick with it. So I skimmed the biographies of some of the greats, hoping to find a few parental insights in their upbringing.

Benny Goodman started playing at age 10, same as Tess. But by age 14, Goodman was playing in a band with Bix Beiderbecke. At 16, he was on the road. Artie Shaw left home at 15 on his way to big band fame. Woody Herman also was out the door and on the road as a teenager.

So it actually sounds like the key may be getting away from parental insight. Dang.

Luckily, that siren's song coaxing a young clarinetist to hit the open road has faded since the 1930s. I seriously doubt Tess' current favorite “band,” One Direction, is looking for that particular sound. A hairstylist and a publicist, maybe, but not a clarinetist.

That's also sort of sad. There was a time when a sweet clarinet lick could make 'em jump, jive and wail. Now, if Tess wants to play in jazz band, she'll have to take up the sax.

I'm a hopeless vinyl record accumulator and have some big band stuff. I played some Goodman, Shaw and Herman for Tess the other night. See, I said, the clarinet is really cool. She looked up from her dinner and said “Sure, dad.”

Wow. She's got that ignore-parental-insight thing down cold.