Music: A Different Era

One day last winter, seven-year-old Rachel Goodman, rummaging through a closet in her family’s Manhattan apartment, came across a dusty tin box full of acetate (test) records. It took her father, Bandleader and Clarinetist Benny Goodman, a minute or two to recall what they were (“I put them away so carefully I couldn’t find them”).

Last week, with the test records rerecorded by Columbia (4 sides LP), jazz fans could stomp to the music of the landmark night nearly 13 years ago when Manhattan’s dignified Carnegie Hall rocked to the first “swing” concert in its history (TIME, Jan. 24, 1938). Columbia, confident that the title will be self-explanatory, has called the recording The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert.

Don’t Be That Way. In 1938, Benny was 28 and at the height of his big (14 pieces) band fame. But he was almost as nervous as he was delighted at the idea of giving a swing concert in Carnegie Hall. He bought his first set of tails. To be on the safe side, he buttressed his band with some special soloists: Negro Pianist-Composer William (“Count”) Basie, Trumpeter Bobby Hackett; and from Duke Ellington’s band, Soprano and Alto Saxman Johnny Hodges, Baritone Saxer Harry Carney, Trumpeter Cootie Williams.

The concert started cold, but it didn’t take the full house of fans long to warm up. Benny gave the beat for Don’t Be That Way. From then on, as Benny himself remembers it, “they were shrieking. They wanted to tear the place down.” For three solid hours it went on, through One O’Clock Jump, Dixieland One-Step, I’m Comin’ Virginia, Shine, Big John’s Special. A roar went up after Trumpeter Harry James’s first solo. There were screams after Benny’s first liquid clarinet work, and Pianist Jess Stacy’s five choruses in Sing, Sing, Sing. For the last half-hour, Drummer Gene Krupa, openmouthed and gibbering, never stopped the beat.

A Little Digging. Some jazz pedants think that Benny’s old records may start a younger generation on a backtrack to swing. Benny himself is not so sure.

“For one thing,” says Benny, “it would take a little digging to find a band like that today. To get Harry James you’d have to call him from Hollywood. Gene Krupa used to make our tops—$165 a week. Now he has his own band. Remember Gordon Griffin, our third trumpet man? . . . We used to throw him a bone once in a while; now he’s probably making $600 a week. Another thing: in those days jazz was not a big business like it is today. You never really had a manager in those days. Today you have 18. Besides . . . it was a different era of jazz.”

Time for the Classics. It is also a different era for Benny Goodman. He still feels “more comfortable” playing jazz. Last summer, he toured Europe with a sextet, now plays with another one on DuMont’s Star Time television show. But, at 41, he spends more time with the classics.

In a kind of turnabout of his 1938 invasion of Carnegie Hall, he does a classical disc-jockey program for Manhattan’s WNEW. Having tucked away some of his heyday earnings, Benny has also become a patron of long-haired composers. Early this month, playing with the NBC Symphony, he gave the first performance of the new Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra that he commissioned from Aaron Copland.

Next month, Benny will play another new concerto, commissioned from Yale’s Paul Hindemith, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Last summer, he also commissioned a young French composer to write a concerto for two clarinets. When it is finished, he hopes that his friend and recent mentor, top British Clarinetist Reginald Kell, will agree to play one of the two parts. Says Benny, with a faintly nostalgic grin: “He’d play his part straight, and I’d jazz mine up a little.”