Clayton Larson’s love of music found its first outlet when he played cornet with a dixieland group while in high school at Andover and later with the Red Hot Stompers at Cornell University. He began formal music studies in Switzerland at the Lausanne Conservatory.
Larson then returned to US and went to Yale music school until graduation 1960, after which he drove down to Key West, where he played cornet and valve trombone in all joints and bars. He also played the Howard Theatre and Bohemian Caverns in Washington D.C., Damato's in Hartford, and various venues in Boston and Providence.
In January 1968, Larson started teaching band in the Danbury, CT school system, and did so for the next 37 years. In 1971, while studying for a music-education degree at the University of Bridgeport, he began working with electronic music and continues in this medium to the present day, creating original compositions and sound environments.
Larson boasts a lovely wife, Jeri, two grown daughters, and lives on Martha's Vineyard. His primary instruments are now piano, flute, percussion, and synthesizer. He plays with the Vineyard Haven Town Band (one of the oldest town bands in the country, est. 1867), takes seriously long walks, enjoys life as a beach bum, and writes arrangements of music with Jeri. He composes everyday and produces a constant stream of new music.
Larson is inspired by the music of Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, all the European classics, Debussy, Bartok, Varese, Ives, etc., and the writing of Walt Whitman and William Faulkner.