Benny Goodman

Diese Musik in meiner Werbung BIOGRAPHY

As a boy, Benjamin David Goodman got group instruction in music at Jane Addams’s famed Hull House and private, classical instruction on clarinet from Franz Schoepp. He came in contact with the Austin High School Gang (Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, and Frank Teschemacher) and was influenced by a number of New Orleans–style clarinetists (Jimmie Noone, Buster Bailey, and Barney Bigard).
Goodman followed Ben Pollack to Los Angeles in 1925, returned to Chicago the next year, and there recorded his first solo. He then rejoined Pollack in New York and stayed in his band until the dawn of the Depression. He worked steadily over the next few years, in the studios with the commercially successful bands of Red Nichols, Ted Lewis, and Paul Whiteman, as well as with lesser-named units, and in a number of Broadway pit bands. But the most important association for Goodman, which began in fall 1933, was with a young record reviewer and aspiring producer, John Hammond, who persuaded Goodman to record the hot jazz that he knew him to be capable of. Goodman first made sides with such brilliant African-American instrumentalists as Chu Berry, Coleman Hawkins, and Frankie Newton, and then, within a few weeks, backed two vocalists—Bessie Smith, on her last record date, and Billie Holiday on her first.

Goodman put together a unit in 1934 for a series of NBC radio broadcasts, Let’s Dance; he hired Fletcher Henderson, the genius bandleader, to write his arrangements, but Goodman rehearsed the band to his exacting standards. Still, once the broadcasts ended, in May 1935, a hotel engagement failed to get much attention. Nonetheless, the Benny Goodman Trio, for which he hired another genius, pianist Teddy Wilson, made groundbreaking studio sides (e.g., “China Boy” and “After You’ve Gone”) that summer. Goodman then took his orchestra, without Wilson, on the road and, on August 21, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles (and before a nationwide broadcast audience), was a crowd sensation: It was later said that this was the night that the Swing Era began.

Smash successes followed Goodman and his orchestra across the country. By the middle of 1936 Wilson was a fixture at the piano and, when Lionel Hampton was drafted, the historic Benny Goodman Quartet was formed. It made thrilling chamber swing music, smashing racial barriers wherever it went.

From the formation of the quartet through 1939, Goodman’s success in all kinds of endeavors, with his small group and his orchestra, was so overwhelming as to justify his moniker, the King of Swing. There were: weekly radio appearances; Hollywood films; a landmark appearance at the Paramount Theater, in 1937, at which young fans jitterbugged in the aisles; the addition of such instrumentalists as Harry James; the January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, at which he tore things up with “Sing, Sing, Sing”, a performance of Shakespearean theatricality; and his continued hectic recording regimen, mostly for the Victor label. Among the soon-to-be-trademark hits were “Stompin’ at the Savoy”, “Don’t Be That Way”, “Let’s Dance”, “Avalon”, and “One O’Clock Jump”.

Goodman also managed to record Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, with the Budapest String Quartet, in 1938, and then commission Bartòk to write for him. The work, Contrasts was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1939 and then recorded, with the composer at the piano, in 1940.

Goodman added to his band electric guitarist Charlie Christian, an improviser as innovative as Goodman at his peak. With trumpeter Cootie Williams, who joined in 1940, they cut “Wholly Cats”, “Breakfast Feud”, and “Air Mail Special”—among the greatest jazz records of Goodman’s career. He continued to record, for the war effort; its high caliber was thanks, in part, to the addition of composer–arranger Eddie Sauter. But in 1947, with the country not as interested in dance bands, Goodman abandoned for good maintaining a fulltime swing orchestra. He played and recorded, for a few years, in the new style, bebop.

In the Fifties Goodman returned to playing swing but only in orchestras and combos that he assembled for specific tours or recordings. He played Europe and, later in the decade, under the sponsorship of the State Department, the Far East. His life got the Hollywood treatment, with the biopic, The Benny Goodman Story, in 1956. But a high point was reached at the end of another European tour, when he played at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.

An even more ballyhooed tour was that of the Soviet Union, in 1962; for it, a visit was prepared to the town that Goodman’s ancestors had lived in. The tributes and reunions continued through the rest of his life—the nostalgia obscuring that, when he felt like it, he could still play brilliant clarinet. He particularly warmed in his last decades to his classical-music commitments. A 1978 Carnegie Hall concert marked the fortieth anniversary of his legendary performance there; in 1982 he was honored by the Kennedy Center. His estate donated his recordings, scores, and memorabilia to Yale University.