I’m of the generation of men whose parents told them to tuck their shirts into their pants. A bass clarinet makes me think of someone who doesn’t. It seems to hang too long and not neatly tucked in like a soprano clarinet. In any event, both types of clarinets, an oboe, a bassoon, and a saxophone comprise the five instruments played by the members of the Akropolis Reed Quintet at this week’s Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert at the Chicago Cultural Center.

After the first selection, I watched as the musicians dried the insides of their instruments by pulling swabs through the bores. It reminded me of a magician apparently pulling streams of cloth out of his mouth, only these swabs were black and one-piece, not multicolored and knotted together. Also, the musicians didn’t say “tada” when they were done, though they may have been thinking it as they finished with a flourish. Fortunately for the audience, the musicians were deft not only at drying their instruments, but also at playing them. I played the trumpet briefly and badly as a preteen. I now wonder if the problem was that I just wasn’t good enough at emptying out the spit valve. Yes, that must have been it.

The musical highlight of the concert was the group’s rendition of An American in Paris. Although I loved the music, it reminded me of how much I didn’t like the play when I saw it last year. Also, I wondered whether a French composer had ever written about being in America? Well, it turns out that the French composer Darius Milhaud was commissioned by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra in the 1960s to write a companion piece for An American in Paris, and thus composed A Frenchman in New York. See, it wasn’t such a stupid question.