Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman was an American clarinetist and bandleader, known as the "King of Swing". His orchestra did well commercially.
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music."
Goodman's bands started the careers of many jazz musicians. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first integrated jazz groups, his trio and quartet. He continued performing until the end of his life while pursuing an interest in classical music.
Early years
Goodman was the ninth of twelve children born to poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman, came to the United States in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland and became a tailor. His mother, Dora Grisinsky, came from Kaunas. They met in Baltimore, Maryland and moved to Chicago before Goodman's birth. With little income and a large family, they moved to the Maxwell Street neighborhood, an overcrowded slum near railroad yards and factories that was populated by German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, and Jewish immigrants.Goodman grew up in poverty, where money was a constant problem for his family. On Sundays, his father took the children to free band concerts in Douglas Park; this was the first time Goodman experienced live professional performances. Hoping that music would offer his sons an escape from poverty and help keep them out of trouble, David Goodman enrolled ten-year-old Benny and two of his brothers in free music classes at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue, starting in 1919. His older brothers were given a tuba and a trumpet, while Benny, the youngest, received a clarinet. Additionally, Benny took two years of clarinet lessons from Franz Schoepp, a classically trained clarinetist and member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The following year, Goodman joined the boys' club band at Hull House, where he received instruction from the band director, James Sylvester. By joining the band, he had the chance to spend two weeks at a summer camp near Chicago, which was his only opportunity to escape his tough neighborhood. At the age of 13, he obtained his first union card and performed on excursion boats on Lake Michigan. In 1923, he played at Guyon's Paradise, a local dance hall.
In the summer of 1923, he met the cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. He attended the Lewis Institute in 1924 as a high school sophomore and played clarinet in a dance hall band. When he was 17, his father was killed by a passing car after stepping off a streetcar, which Goodman called "the saddest thing that ever happened in our family".
Career
Early career
His early influences were New Orleans jazz clarinetists who worked in Chicago, such as Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds, and Leon Roppolo. He learned quickly, becoming a strong player at an early age, and was soon playing in bands. He made his professional debut in 1921 at the Central Park Theater on the West Side of Chicago. He entered Harrison Technical High School in Chicago in 1922. At fourteen he became a member of the musicians' union and worked in a band featuring Bix Beiderbecke. Two years later, in 1926, he joined the Ben Pollack Orchestra and made his first recordings.From sideman to bandleader
Goodman moved to New York City and became a session musician for radio, Broadway musicals, and in studios. In addition to clarinet, he sometimes played alto saxophone and baritone saxophone. His first recording pressed to disc occurred on December 9, 1926, in Chicago. The session resulted in the song "When I First Met Mary", which also included Glenn Miller, Harry Goodman, and Ben Pollack. In a Victor recording session on March 21, 1928, he played alongside Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Joe Venuti in the All-Star Orchestra directed by Nathaniel Shilkret. He played with the bands of Red Nichols, Ben Selvin, Ted Lewis, and Isham Jones and recorded for Brunswick under the name Benny Goodman's Boys, a band that featured Glenn Miller. In 1928, Goodman and Miller wrote "Room 1411", Miller's first known composition, which was released as a Brunswick 78.He reached the charts for the first time in January 1931 with "He's Not Worth Your Tears", featuring a vocal by Scrappy Lambert for Melotone. After signing with Columbia in 1934, he had top ten hits with "Ain't Cha Glad?" and "I Ain't Lazy, I'm Just Dreamin sung by Jack Teagarden, "Ol' Pappy" sung by Mildred Bailey, and "Riffin' the Scotch" sung by Billie Holiday. An invitation to play at the Billy Rose Music Hall led to his creation of an orchestra for the four-month engagement. The orchestra recorded "Moonglow", which became a number one hit and was followed by the Top Ten hits "Take My Word" and "Bugle Call Rag".
NBC hired Goodman for the radio program Let's Dance. John Hammond asked Fletcher Henderson if he wanted to write arrangements for Goodman, and Henderson agreed. During the Depression, Henderson disbanded his orchestra because he was in debt. Goodman hired Henderson's band members to teach his musicians how to play the music.
Goodman's band was one of three to perform on Let's Dance, playing arrangements by Henderson along with hits such as "Get Happy" and "Limehouse Blues" by Spud Murphy.
Goodman's portion of the program was broadcast too late at night to attract a large audience on the east coast. He and his band remained on Let's Dance until May of that year when a strike by employees of the series' sponsor, Nabisco, forced the cancellation of the radio show. An engagement was booked at Manhattan's Roosevelt Grill filling in for Guy Lombardo, but the audience expected "sweet" music and Goodman's band was unsuccessful.
Goodman spent six months performing on Let's Dance, and during that time he recorded six more Top Ten hits for Columbia.
Catalyst for the swing era
On July 31, 1935, "King Porter Stomp" was released with "Sometimes I'm Happy" on the B-side, both arranged by Henderson and recorded on July 1. In Pittsburgh at the Stanley Theater some members of the audience danced in the aisles. But these arrangements had little impact on the tour until August 19 at McFadden's Ballroom in Oakland, California. Goodman and his band, which included trumpeter Bunny Berigan, drummer Gene Krupa, and singer Helen Ward were met by a large crowd of young dancers who cheered the music they had heard on Let's Dance. Newspaper columnist Herb Caen wrote, "from the first note, the place was in an uproar." One night later, at Pismo Beach, the show was a flop, and the band thought the overwhelming reception in Oakland had been a fluke.The next night, August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, Goodman and his band began a three-week engagement. On top of the Let's Dance airplay, Al Jarvis had been playing Goodman's records on KFWB radio. Goodman started the evening with stock arrangements, but after an indifferent response, he began the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. According to Willard Alexander, the band's booking agent, Krupa said, "If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing." The crowd broke into cheers and applause. News reports spread word of the exciting music and enthusiastic dancing. The Palomar engagement was such a marked success that it is often described as the beginning of the swing era. According to Donald Clarke, "It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off."
The reception of American swing was less enthusiastic in Europe. British author J. C. Squire filed a complaint with BBC Radio to demand it stop playing Goodman's music, which he called "an awful series of jungle noises which can hearten no man." Germany's Nazi party barred jazz from the radio, claiming it was part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the culture. Italy's fascist government banned the broadcast of any music composed or played by Jews which they said threatened "the flower of our race, the youth."
In November 1935, Goodman accepted an invitation to play in Chicago at the Joseph Urban Room at the Congress Hotel. His stay there was extended to six months, and his popularity was cemented by nationwide radio broadcasts over NBC affiliate stations. While in Chicago, the band recorded "If I Could Be with You ", "Stompin' at the Savoy", and "Goody Goody". Goodman also played three concerts produced by Chicago socialite and jazz aficionado Helen Oakley. These "Rhythm Club" concerts at the Congress Hotel included sets in which Goodman and Krupa sat in with Fletcher Henderson's band, perhaps the first racially integrated big band appearing before a paying audience in the United States. Goodman and Krupa played in a trio with Teddy Wilson on piano. Both combinations were well received, and Wilson remained.
In his 1935–1936 radio broadcasts from Chicago, Goodman was introduced as the "Rajah of Rhythm". Slingerland Drum Company had been calling Krupa the "King of Swing" as part of a sales campaign, but shortly after Goodman and his crew left Chicago in May 1936 to spend the summer filming The Big Broadcast of 1937 in Hollywood, the title "King of Swing" was applied to Goodman by the media.
At the end of June 1936, Goodman went to Hollywood, where, on June 30, 1936, his band began CBS's Camel Caravan, its third and its greatest sponsored radio show, co-starring Goodman and his former boss Nathaniel Shilkret. By spring 1936, Fletcher Henderson was writing arrangements for Goodman's band.
Carnegie Hall concert
In late 1937, Goodman's publicist Wynn Nathanson suggested that Goodman and his band play Carnegie Hall in New York City. The sold-out concert was held on the evening of January 16, 1938. It is regarded as one of the most significant concerts in jazz history. After years of work by musicians from all over the country, jazz had finally been accepted by mainstream audiences—according to Stan Ayeroff, "the concert helped jazz evolve from being strictly dance music to music worthy of a discerning listening audience. It was the start of jazz being recognized as an art form on a par with classical music."Recordings of the concert were made, but even by the technology of the day the equipment used was not of the finest quality. These recordings were made on acetate, and aluminum studio masters were cut. The idea of recording the concert came from Albert Marx, a friend of Goodman's, for the purposes of a gift for his wife Helen Ward, as well as gifting a second set to Goodman. Sometime in or before 1950, Goodman recovered the acetates from his sister-in-law's closet, who had informed him about them, and took them to the audio engineer William Savory. The pair took them to Columbia, with Goodman realising the recordings could be used as leverage to make a recording contract with Columbia. A selection was then released as an LP entitled The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert.