The Ishimori Woodstone Kodama II ligature was introduced to me by two dear friends and amazing clarinetists, Jonathan Lopez and José Franch-Ballester. I liked the ligature immediately and since there was no Canadian dealer, ordered a selection for various sizes of saxophone and clarinet directly from Ishimori in Japan. They are very reasonably priced, about $150 Canadian, including very quick delivery within a week via Fedex.

I liked them even more when I realized that the lovely Grenadilla plate rails are not parallel, but are narrower on the bottom side than the top. No-one else playing these ligatures that I have met has noticed that! When you rotate the Grenadilla plate so that the narrower end is up top, the focus, projection and articulation are improved dramatically! I informed Jose of this with a voicemail and he called me back an hour later, saying “Chuck, you’re a genius.” Well, José is the genius player, so you don’t have to rely on my opinion!

….er…another opinion of mine….the JodyJazz Power Ring is the ultimate ligature …but it can be very slippery with Legere reeds and you cannot move the mouthpiece quickly between Bb, A, and C clarinets with a Power Ring ligature. I believe that the Grenadilla plate on the Kodama improves the sound of synthetic reeds, so for use with synthetic reeds and orchestral work, this is the ligature for me….in fact I prefer it to all the other non-Power Ring ligatures in my case…all GREAT ligatures, and three of them triple the price of the Power Ring or the Kodama! Here they are with my lovely Backun Lumiere clarinets. Lots of fun bringing these to rehearsals and reed-geeking out with my colleagues!

Here is a diagram from Ishimori Woodstone.