Benny Goodman

Big band leader and virtuoso clarinetist Benny Goodman, known as the "King of Swing", was the ninth child (out of twelve) born in Chicago to poor Jewish immigrants from Poland. He encountered the clarinet at age 10 after his father David decided that he and his brothers should learn music, and discovered that a nearby temple offered free instuments. He was a passionate musician who practiced every day of his life. He obtained classical training from Franz Schoepp, a German-born clarinetist with the Chicago Symphony, and his skill and musicianship set him apart from his Chicago contemporaries who took up instruments so they could play jazz. Goodman loved the clarinet, but chose jazz as his preferred medium of expression, although by the end of his life he had recorded almost all of the major classical clarinet works and actually commissioned some of them to be written.

Goodman played with local bands and eventually was so busy that he dropped out of school before his 16th birthday, shortly before being hired by bandleader Ben Pollock, who was heading for a gig in California. When Pollock returned to Chicago, Goodman made his first recordings in 1926 as a member of Pollock's band.

By 1928, Goodman was in New York, and for the next six years, he was a rolling stone, in and out of dozens of bands and cutting hundreds of records as a a studio musician. There were a few pure jazz sides, some even with his name on the label, but mostly he was unknown to the general public. Tiring of commercial music, Goodman was at loose ends when he encountered John Hammond, jazz enthusiast and record producer, in the fall of 1933. Hammond signed Goodman to Columbia and recorded a few jazz sides with pickup groups.

By 1934, Goodman had decided that the only way he would be comfortable in music was to be his own boss. He formed a big band and was hired by Billy Rose's Music Hall, a nightclub in the building now called the Ed Sullivan Theater, where "Late Night with David Letterman" is taped. After a few weeks, Goodman was hired by Nabisco as one of the three bandleaders on a three-hour Saturday night radio extravaganza it was sponsoring on NBC, called "Let's Dance." The show was produced in Studio 8-H at 30 Rockefeller Center, now home base for "Saturday Night Live." Benny's hot jazz band began to catch the attention of younger listeners.

With Columbia in poor financial condition because of the Depression, Goodman signed with Victor Records and cut his first sessions there in April 1935. After the radio show was canceled in late May because Nabisco's workers went on strike, Benny and the band hit the road. The summer tour was a struggle, with a few hits and many flops, until a now legendary performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, on August 21, 1935. Benny discovered to his amazement that he was popular on the West Coast, thanks to the radio show and LA disc jockeys who played his records. Led by Goodman, the Swing Era had begun.

Benny followed up his success in LA with a six-month engagement in the Congress Hotel in Chicago, which featured weekly Monday night NBC broadcasts during the winter of 1935-36. In 1936, Benny's records started to sell strongly and he was hired for his own sponsored network radio shows: first "The Elgin Revue" on NBC, then the "Camel Caravan" on CBS.

By March 1937, Goodman was packing the Paramount Theater in New York for six shows a day, jammed by teenagers who danced in the aisles. The press picked up on this and Goodman became a superstar, capping off his prestige with the first jazz concert ever in Carnegie Hall. The Jan. 16, 1938, show was recorded and when issued on two LPs by Columbia in 1950, became a massive hit that remains in print to this day.

Benny, a onetime boyfriend of Billie Holiday, also pioneered racial integration on stage, hiring major black musicians to perform in the small chamber groups he used as a change of pace from the big band. The Trio with Teddy Wilson, a black pianist, later augmented to a Quartet with the black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, set new styles in small group jazz. By 1939, Benny "plugged in" with the hiring of Charlie Christian, the first great electric guitarist and another black jazz star. Christian played primarily in the Goodman Sextet until the tuberculosis that killed him forced him to leave the band in 1941.

Benny's big band arrangements also were mostly written by black musicians, primarily Fletcher Henderson and Jimmy Mundy. In late 1939, Benny freshened up his band with the radical modern arrangements of Eddie Sauter. His career hit the skids in July 1940 when he went to the Mayo Clinic for back surgery and had to break up the band. His back problems persisted for the rest of his life, but Benny returned to bandleading in October 1940, hiring trumpet star Cootie Williams away from Duke Ellington and pouring out more hit records.

Goodman broke up his band in late 1943 in a dispute with his booking agency, MCA, and concentrated on small group work until forming another orchestra in early 1945. Benny, who had returned to the Columbia label in 1939, left for Capitol in 1947, about the same time he dropped his full-time band and used studio musicians for radio shows and records. In 1948, he formed a new orchestra to play bebop, but he never really liked the sound and dropped the group and the style in late 1949.

From then on, Benny was primarily a nostalgia act, but the quality of musicianship in his ad hoc groups was so high and his prestige so great that his name practically guaranteed a sellout crowd anywhere in the world. He made many overseas tours, including a famous appearance at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 and a tour of the Soviet Union in 1962, both of which generated outstanding live albums. Benny Goodman died from a heart attack in New York City on June 13, 1986, at the age of 77.