With his breathtaking, vocabulary-expanding technique and distinctive, eclectic style, it's not difficult to understand why Don Byron has swept jazz critics' polls in the clarinet category since his debut album was released in 1990. But over the past two decades, Byron has proved to be among the most mercurial musicians in jazz. It's not easy to pigeon-hole him into any category.

He has explored the oeuvre of Klezmer clarinetist Mickey Katz; the frenetic compositions of Raymond Scott, John Kirby, and Duke Ellington ("Bug Music") and the music of r&b saxophone great Jr. Walker ("Do the Boomerang"). In concerts he has re-examined Earth Wind & Fire, Igor Stravinsky, and Tijuana Brass among others. When he plays at the Rochester International Jazz Festival, he will revisit the music from "Ivey Divey," his 2004 album exploring the bass-less trio of saxophone giant Lester Young.

Most of Byron's CDs also contain his own adventurous tunes. He recently was featured on "A Ballad For Many," an album of his compositions performed by a contemporary classical ensemble, the Bang On A Can All-Stars.

Over the course of his career Byron has recorded a dozen albums as a leader, most of them for Nonesuch and Blue Note. Both companies have given him absolute freedom. "I just invent my own things to do," says Byron. "I'm not just a jazz musician. I am a Klezmer musician; I am a pop musician. Somehow people think you can only really play one kind of music and there's a single way you're defined. If you can play classical music at a professional level and people use you, you're a classical musician. There's no argument about it."

Actually, there has been an argument. Prominent jazz critic (and Wynton Marsalis associate) Stanley Crouch famously denounced Byron in his Jazz Times column in 2003. By 2004 Crouch had been dropped as a columnist and Byron won the magazine's Jazz Album of the Year award for "Ivey Divey."

"The reason [Crouch] is like that is because he has one idea of jazz," Byron says. "There are as many ideas of jazz as there are people you talk to. Some people think jazz is fusion, some think Kenny G, some think Dixieland. He has a certain idea about jazz. Well, so do I and it's different than that. My ability to do other things has nothing to do with anything. Wynton can do other things too."

Not surprisingly, Byron's iPod contains a wide variety of music. Lately he's been listening to and researching early r&b. He's reading a biography of soul singer Sam Cooke and closely studying "the way he sings: what the notes actually add up to. The kinds of phrasing things instrumentalists don't think about that much."

While growing up in the Bronx, Byron was exposed to a variety of music. His father played bass in calypso bands; his mother was a pianist.

"My mom mostly would listen to Nancy Wilson and Gloria Lynne, the type of bitchy women singers that sing about how horrible men are. My father liked Oscar Pettiford --- he liked bass players," Byron says.

But when Byron took up the clarinet, he was headed in a classical direction, listening to Harold Wright, Guy Deplus, and Robert Marcellus. Unsatisfied with the limitations of classical clarinet, he stayed with the instrument but began to explore other avenues, including Klezmer and other kinds of Eastern European music. (Disclosure: Byron played in the Klezmer Conservatory Band led by my brother, Hankus Netsky, in the 1980s.)

"The clarinet is kind of an international instrument. There's indigenous Brazilian clarinet, Columbian clarinet, or Cuban clarinet. I started looking at those and applying some of the things I'd learned from classical music," Byron says.

When Byron visits Rochester, he'll have an additional instrument with him: a tenor sax.

"I had no intention of becoming a saxophone player," he says. "To really stay serious as a clarinet player I didn't do that. But I've always had a saxophone, which I used to check out things I wanted to put on the clarinet, just to see how they laid on the saxophone. Sometimes when you're studying an instrument you find out that certain things people do, even if they have a harmonic basis, there's a physical reason why they happen."

The sax became a major part of Byron's instrumental arsenal when he examined the music of Lester Young in preparation for "Ivey Divey."

"What I was detecting from Lester Young was a certain kind of discipline, and as I started figuring out what the discipline was that he employed to play the way he played, I started practicing those things on clarinet and saxophone. All of a sudden I was transformed by the whole thing of being fascinated by a person and how they were getting the effects they were getting," he says.

Byron believes Young's playing is deceptively light-hearted and breezy; in reality it's far more complex.

"He's an interesting guy with a lot of different sides," says Byron. "Some of the things that are most amazing about his playing are hidden behind this almost drunken lyricism thing that he does. He's a technical player, he's an accurate player, he's very heady. He doesn't really come off that way."

Byron has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. The financial award will support his work on an opera based on Laura Z. Hobson's 1946 novel, "Gentleman's Agreement." The book is about a reporter who investigates anti-Semitism by pretending he's Jewish. Byron's opera will be "a Black version of that," he says.

Byron is no stranger to social commentary. A song on his 1999 "Romance With The Unseen" album is titled "Bernhard Goetz, James Ramseur and Me," referring to the infamous 1984 New York subway shooting.

Byron's diverse interests as a musician are reflected in his lifestyle. After spending much of his life in New York City, he currently resides in the Catskills.

"I came up here 10 years ago in the summer. I realized I could live like this. I could step outside my house and it would be the country. I started going to county fairs and checking out 4H stuff. It was a world that didn't really exist for me.

"In some ways I'm fascinated with rural American culture: Nam vets who fish and hunt. The way that things were expressed in the environment of my upbringing was completely different. I can live in a place that's placid enough to be conducive to getting my work done," he says.

Lately Byron has been teaching at the State University of New York at Albany. Next year he will teach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because of his role as an educator he's given some thought to his philosophy of music. Not surprisingly, it's broad in scope.

"It's about knowing some theory and having good ears and studying people's music and trying to understand things very thoroughly," says Byron. "But it's not coming from a single place. It's coming from someone who loves Stravinsky and Eddie Palmieri in equal doses.

"There are people who get to a high level of abstraction just playing jazz or just playing Latin music or classical music. They get to a high level by their pursuit of one thing. I've just been able to go about it so that I can have objectivity about different things," he says.

Don Byron's Ivey Divey plays at Kilbourn Hall, 26 Gibbs Street, on Friday, June 15, at 6 and 10 p.m., as part of the Rochester International Jazz Festival. Free with Club Pass. $20-$25 tickets available at the venue, space permitting. For more information visit http://www.rochesterjazz.com/.