Cleveland-born clarinettist and tenor saxophonist Ken Peplowski, whose Dublin Jazz Society concert is at Renard's next Tuesday, is reassuringly mainstream enough in his approach to be called, at 38, a young fogey. But the mild put-down does less than justice to a player who, despite his stylistic roots in Benny Goodman - a style, by the way, not for the technically challenged - is a more inquiring musician than the idiom implies. Even his earliest recordings as leader, a decade ago, included material written by one-offs as far removed from Goodman's swing era felicities as Roland Kirk, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Hank Mobley.
Moreover, he has continued to seek these tests. Later recordings have featured pieces by Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Tadd Dameron, Sonny Stitt and even the arch-iconoclast, Ornette Coleman, all scattered through a repertoire that reaches back to the turn of the century, colliding fruitfully en route with Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, Kern and other doyens of what is still called the Great American Song Book. He has also ventured - less persuasively, to these ears - into classical music, but jazz is really his metier.
And that's the point. In jazz, it ain't whatcha do, it's the way that ya do it. What he has done is to apply his basic mainstream style, with some bop touches rhythmically and harmonically, to material that offers him more stimulation than endless reiterations of the standard repertoire. It's proof that he is part of the minor but significant revolution in jazz epitomised by his generation; unlike many of his predecessors, who behaved as if the music began with John Coltrane, Peplowski knows his history.
In fact, despite his comparative youth, he is part of that history. His career includes stints with swing era music of the big bands - the recreation of the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, and Loren Schoenberg's repertory big band, where he worked under Goodman in the final years of the star's life; hard-driving, Chicago-style, small group traditionalists such as Jimmy McPartland and Max Kaminsky; and mainstream notables including trumpeters Sweets Edison and Joe Wilder. But he has also recorded with such as the great pianist, Hank Jones, who embodies the sweep of the music's history, and that marvellous and utterly contemporary trumpeter, Tom Harrell.
He will have like-minded players to back him next Tuesday. Noel Kelehan, Dave Fleming and John Wadham know their jazz history, and if the exigencies of the touring musician's life mean the repertoire will have much of the tried and tested, Peplowski's record on previous visits - and his recordings - suggest it won't be entirely predictable.