Music: Back to Chicago

In the U.S. popular music business, five years amounts to a cycle, and this week a cycle was completed: Band Leader Benny Goodman returned to his native Chicago.

It was from Chicago, in 1936, that Benny Goodman turned swing music loose on the U.S., set millions of jitterbugs cutting their first rugs. The swing of which he became “King” was an inevitable commercial outgrowth of an earlier music—jazz, which drifted up the Mississippi from New Orleans in the ’20s. By coincidence jazz, too, completed a cycle this week, and in Chicago. Some of the pioneer Chicago jazzmen whom reverent connoisseurs know as the “Austin High School Gang”—although few of them actually went there to school—assembled in their native city for the first time in many a year, to play in a minuscule Loop joint, the Brass Rail.

The Chicago jazz style, rough, nervous, backed by a driving pulse, got its start when Austin High boys played in their gym on Friday afternoons in 1923 and 1924. One of them, the late, great Clarinetist Frank Teschmaker, taught Benny Goodman some stuff. Another, Tenor Saxophonist Bud Freeman, was one of many who later played in the Goodman band and now lead their own. Still another was husky, florid Trumpeter Jimmy MacPartland, who assembled the small band at the Brass Rail this week. Three of that group are men who began in the Austin High period: bespectacled Joe Sullivan, who learned his piano at the Chicago Conservatory; gaunt, elfin “Pee Wee” Russell, famed for his thin, jetting runs and husky growls on the clarinet; boyish-looking, elliptical-screwball-talking Eddie Condon, who can make his guitar a whole rhythm section.

The Brass Rail boys have always played hot, intricate, free-ranging music, without ever making much money from it. Benny Goodman dressed Chicago jazz up, quieted it down and turned it to profit. Returning to Chicago this week to play at the Hotel Sherman and broadcast a big commercial series (for Holland Furnace Co.), Benny Goodman could still call himself “King of Swing,” although he would not want to. For one thing, he is now a concert artist, not the least of whose achievements is to convince the young that there must be something good about Mozart.

Last week Benny Goodman, before departing for Chicago, attracted 10,000 people to Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell for the concert José Iturbí refused to conduct (TIME, July 7). Clarinetist Goodman not only rippled through the Mozart concerto, with Edwin McArthur conducting, but he waved a stick—a pencil—over the Philadelphia Orchestra in the première of a Tango by Stravinsky. Drawled Benny later: “I felt kinda funny.”

James Caesar Petrillo, boss of the American Federation of Musicians, decreed that the 138,000 members of his union shall play The Star-Spangled Banner at the beginning and end of every program. It was estimated that around New York City alone, The Star-Spangled Banner would be stood up for some 20,000 times a week.