Clarinetist takes pride in covering the classics.

Byline: Fred Crafts The Register-Guard

Give clarinetist-saxophonist Ken Peplowski a good old song - a standard - any time. Maybe a Cole Potter, George Gershwin or Jerome Kern tune. He loves them. His records are loaded with them - unlike his contemporaries who stuff theirs full of originals.

"That kind of drives me crazy, to be honest," Peplowski said by phone from his home in New York City. "I think people have these delusions of grandeur, and they all think they're composers, and they all have these dreams of getting a lot of publishing money on their songs.

"But not everybody is a George Gershwin or an Irving Berlin or a Thelonius Monk or a Duke Ellington. I am certainly not, and I will admit it. And I wish other people would admit that about themselves."

Peplowski has jammed his nearly 20 recordings with songs out of the so-called Great American Songbook. They are songs he learned playing with the Tommy Dorsey Band, the Benny Goodman Band and many others.

"I would not dare to put a song of mine of on a record just because of some vanity reason," he says. "There's so much material there to mine in all those composers. Take Duke Ellington: There's thousands of songs that he and Billy Strayhorn wrote. Irving Berlin - there's probably 500 songs."

At this year's Oregon Festival of American Music, Peplowski is playing plenty of old favorites; he is on just about every program. Yet, despite Peplowski's proficiency in breathing new life into old songs, he says critics have tended to dismiss his work.

"If you choose to play standards, they put you in this category of `old-fashioned' or `retro' or `swing musician' or whatever. And they fail to see that the music is still just a vehicle for our own voice, I just don't care."

"When I play an old stan- dard, I don't consider it any kind of nostalgic exercise. I'm just trying to play it my own way," he goes on. "I just happen to like those songs. They're such a part of our history. Why should we ignore them?

``The funny thing is, all these new tunes all sound like B-level Miles Davis Quintet rejects. They're not really that interesting to me."

Peplowski believes one reason young jazz musicians are turning away from the standards in favor of their own pieces is "because they mistake everything new with being cutting edge. It's not necessarily so. Just because you write something new doesn't necessarily mean it's good or top-of-the-line."

Peplowski insists "there's a reason why those old songs are so popular and why they still sound great. The test of time is always the best test you can have, and those songs still hold up, you know."

Peplowski's ability to embroider old songs has gained him a large following. Audiences flock to hear him; musicians demand to work with him.

Playing the standards, he says, "hasn't hurt my career so far."

"I'm doing great," he says. "I get good reviews; I get bad reviews. And I tend to ignore all of them, and just play what I like to play."