Most clarinet players who came up in the swing era stayed there. Rolf Kühn did not. Born in Cologne in 1929, he started out sounding like a product of the big band world, but he had the restlessness to chase whatever jazz was doing next, decade after decade, long after most of his clarinet contemporaries had settled into nostalgia gigs.

He actually went to America in the 1950s, which was not a small thing for a German musician at that point. He played with Benny Goodman, worked in the States, and absorbed bebop up close rather than secondhand through records. When he came back to Germany he brought that fluency with him, and it set him apart from most European players still catching up on American jazz through import LPs.

What makes him worth hearing is the way he kept adapting the instrument itself. The clarinet is not a natural fit for bebop's speed or free jazz's noise, but Kühn found ways to make it work in both, and later in his career he pushed into fusion territory with electric bands, which is not where you expect to find a clarinetist at all. His younger brother Joachim Kühn became one of Europe's major pianists, and the two worked together off and on, which gives you a sense of how seriously music ran in that family.

If you only know the clarinet from Benny Goodman records, Rolf Kühn is the corrective. He treated the instrument as something still capable of surprise, not a museum piece from the swing era. Start with his recordings from the 1960s and 70s if you want to hear him stretching the horn into places it rarely went, and stick around for the later work if you want to hear a musician who never stopped being curious about where jazz was headed next.