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| Know that I know what it took to make him smile.... |
Somewhere in the middle of 1935, shortly after a strike at Nabisco put NBC’s Let’s Dance on ice and gently flopping as a replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Grill, Benny Goodman reformed an orchestra and took it on a cross-country tour. Or something like that; Wikipedia’stimeline is fer shit.
The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.
After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:
“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”
Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:
“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.”
Benjamin David Goodman was born in 1909 as the ninth child of twelve in a struggling family. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia at a time when Russia really sucked for Jews, met in Baltimore, but moved to Chicago before their ninth child was born. Despite having twelve mouths to feed and (allegedly) never making more than $20/week, Goodman’s father, David Goodman, valued culture enough to take his kids to free band shows in Chicago’s Douglass Park and, in the hopes of helping them escape poverty, to provide music lessons for three of his sons. Connections with a charitable outfit called Hull House and an area synagogue gave Goodman remarkable mentors (you wouldn’t know ‘em), but he still showed unusual aptitude on the clarinet; with his first union card in his back pocket, he was playing Lake Michigan excursion boats and a dance hall called Guyon’s Paradise by age 14. Sadly, Goodman’s considerable family would need Benny’s support before he knew it; what little income his father made evaporated the day a passing motorist killed him as he stepped off a streetcar.
Goodman called it “the saddest day that ever happened in our family,” but Goodman, then 17, kept walking the path his father laid out for him. A bandleader named Ben Pollack hired him for his orchestra, hauling him to Los Angeles from 1925-29…maybe. I got that from Goodman’s official bio - so maybe defer to that - but Wikipedia’s admittedly messy bio/timeline never mentions LA, only the songs Goodman recorded between time in Chicago (and/or LA) and his session work in New York City - e.g., “When I First Met Mary,” which he recorded with Glenn Miller, Harry Goodman and Pollack, a song called “He’s Not Worth Your Tears,” and, one he apparently wrote with Miller, “Room 1411.” Near as I can tell, he published and/or played under someone else all those before 1930, but, again, Wikipedia’s timeline is a messy.
However Goodman landed in New York, he found steady work playing for radio shows, in Broadway orchestra pits and in-studio recording sessions; this became his bread and butter for the first half of the 1930s. The job came with the massive upside of giving him the opportunity to play with literally everyone - e.g., in bands and orchestras led by Red Nichols, Ben Selvin, Ted Lewis and Isham Jones, in recording sessions with Fats Waller (profiled here), Ted Lewis and Bessie Smith (profiled here), and under Nathan Shilkret with Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Joe Venuti. Goodman continued with songwriting/arranging as well: a particularly fertile 1934 saw hits like “Ain’t Cha Glad” and “I’m Not Lazy, I’m Just Dreamin’” with Jack Teagarden on vocals, “Ol’ Pappy” with Mildred Bailey, and “Riffin’ the Scotch” with Billie Holiday. In a sign his personal brand was heating up, he landed a four-month residency at Billie Rose Music, an opportunity that gave Goodman a chance to form his first orchestra. More hits followed - e.g., “Moonglow,” “Take My Word,” and “Bugle Call Rag” - all of which attention landed him a time-slot to call his own slot on NBC’s Let’s Dance. Sponsored by Nabisco, as noted above.…which is where things went sideways.
First, work started drying up to where an indebted Goodman had to dissolve his band. Moreover, he didn’t land the best of spots on Let’s Dance: his orchestra’s time-slot started at 10:30 p.m. EST, and wrapped up near 4:30 a.m. (per a PBS quick-hit bio) - e.g., the time when most people on the East Coast slept. Goodman strived to keep things going, he even hired Henderson’s band to sharpen up his own band’s playing; Henderson also started arranging songs for Goodman, as noted above. It’s not entirely clear what motivated Goodman to book that fateful tour that ended at Palomar Ballroom in August 1935, but a decision to put his head down and keep going feels as plausible as any of them. A mild quirk of fate had accidentally primed those West Coast audiences for his tour - 10:30 p.m. on the East Coast is the start of prime-time on the West - but he still parlayed that tour into another eight-plus years as one of the hottest jazz acts of the late 1930s and early ‘40s.
Goodman’s career peaked in January 1938 with a concert at Carnegie Hall. This would go down as, and I quote (second-hand), “the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music,” and, unbeknownst to Goodman, et. al., several people made recordings of the evening. Though lost for a while, Goodman’s sister-in-law found the original he received from a guy named Albert Marx (with one being a gift to his wife) in his apartment and passed it on to the proper authorities. Columbia released the recording in 1953 as The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. And the crowd went wild…and yet, this is where the story within the story emerges.
Benny Goodman had a terrible talent for pissing off friends and alienating colleagues. John Hammond, the man behind 1938’s and 1939’sFrom Spirituals to Swing musical revues, spotted his talent and helped him along - Goodman even married Goodman’s sister, Alice Frances Hammond Duckworth - but a slight at the second revue (something about Hammond a guitarist named Charlie Christian, who Goodman had only worked with a short time, and dropping him in with the band that played before Goodman’s), eventually mushroomed into a full-blown falling out between the two that wouldn’t be healed until the 1980s. On the day-to-day level, a singer he worked with for a time, Helen Forrest, shared this steaming memory:
“The twenty or so months I spent with Benny felt like twenty years. When I look back, they seem like a life sentence.”
More prosaically, many musicians who worked with Goodman recalled the glare he directed at anyone who fluffed a note - “The Ray,” they called it - and he was remembered as “an unfriendly employer” by just as many. A random (and sometimes inaccessible) website summed up his broad working relationship with his peers with this:
“Goodman continued performing for many years after the end of the Swing Era, but his success was tempered by two problems. First, the star caliber of many of his musicians enabled them to leave and develop their own careers as band leaders. Second, Goodman’s personality made it hard for him to maintain a stable group. In his quest for musical perfection, he had little patience with personnel issues, and while adored by fans, he was sometimes disliked by fellow musicians.”
The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.
After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:
“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”
Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:
“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.”
Benjamin David Goodman was born in 1909 as the ninth child of twelve in a struggling family. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia at a time when Russia really sucked for Jews, met in Baltimore, but moved to Chicago before their ninth child was born. Despite having twelve mouths to feed and (allegedly) never making more than $20/week, Goodman’s father, David Goodman, valued culture enough to take his kids to free band shows in Chicago’s Douglass Park and, in the hopes of helping them escape poverty, to provide music lessons for three of his sons. Connections with a charitable outfit called Hull House and an area synagogue gave Goodman remarkable mentors (you wouldn’t know ‘em), but he still showed unusual aptitude on the clarinet; with his first union card in his back pocket, he was playing Lake Michigan excursion boats and a dance hall called Guyon’s Paradise by age 14. Sadly, Goodman’s considerable family would need Benny’s support before he knew it; what little income his father made evaporated the day a passing motorist killed him as he stepped off a streetcar.
Goodman called it “the saddest day that ever happened in our family,” but Goodman, then 17, kept walking the path his father laid out for him. A bandleader named Ben Pollack hired him for his orchestra, hauling him to Los Angeles from 1925-29…maybe. I got that from Goodman’s official bio - so maybe defer to that - but Wikipedia’s admittedly messy bio/timeline never mentions LA, only the songs Goodman recorded between time in Chicago (and/or LA) and his session work in New York City - e.g., “When I First Met Mary,” which he recorded with Glenn Miller, Harry Goodman and Pollack, a song called “He’s Not Worth Your Tears,” and, one he apparently wrote with Miller, “Room 1411.” Near as I can tell, he published and/or played under someone else all those before 1930, but, again, Wikipedia’s timeline is a messy.
However Goodman landed in New York, he found steady work playing for radio shows, in Broadway orchestra pits and in-studio recording sessions; this became his bread and butter for the first half of the 1930s. The job came with the massive upside of giving him the opportunity to play with literally everyone - e.g., in bands and orchestras led by Red Nichols, Ben Selvin, Ted Lewis and Isham Jones, in recording sessions with Fats Waller (profiled here), Ted Lewis and Bessie Smith (profiled here), and under Nathan Shilkret with Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Joe Venuti. Goodman continued with songwriting/arranging as well: a particularly fertile 1934 saw hits like “Ain’t Cha Glad” and “I’m Not Lazy, I’m Just Dreamin’” with Jack Teagarden on vocals, “Ol’ Pappy” with Mildred Bailey, and “Riffin’ the Scotch” with Billie Holiday. In a sign his personal brand was heating up, he landed a four-month residency at Billie Rose Music, an opportunity that gave Goodman a chance to form his first orchestra. More hits followed - e.g., “Moonglow,” “Take My Word,” and “Bugle Call Rag” - all of which attention landed him a time-slot to call his own slot on NBC’s Let’s Dance. Sponsored by Nabisco, as noted above.…which is where things went sideways.
First, work started drying up to where an indebted Goodman had to dissolve his band. Moreover, he didn’t land the best of spots on Let’s Dance: his orchestra’s time-slot started at 10:30 p.m. EST, and wrapped up near 4:30 a.m. (per a PBS quick-hit bio) - e.g., the time when most people on the East Coast slept. Goodman strived to keep things going, he even hired Henderson’s band to sharpen up his own band’s playing; Henderson also started arranging songs for Goodman, as noted above. It’s not entirely clear what motivated Goodman to book that fateful tour that ended at Palomar Ballroom in August 1935, but a decision to put his head down and keep going feels as plausible as any of them. A mild quirk of fate had accidentally primed those West Coast audiences for his tour - 10:30 p.m. on the East Coast is the start of prime-time on the West - but he still parlayed that tour into another eight-plus years as one of the hottest jazz acts of the late 1930s and early ‘40s.
Goodman’s career peaked in January 1938 with a concert at Carnegie Hall. This would go down as, and I quote (second-hand), “the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music,” and, unbeknownst to Goodman, et. al., several people made recordings of the evening. Though lost for a while, Goodman’s sister-in-law found the original he received from a guy named Albert Marx (with one being a gift to his wife) in his apartment and passed it on to the proper authorities. Columbia released the recording in 1953 as The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. And the crowd went wild…and yet, this is where the story within the story emerges.
Benny Goodman had a terrible talent for pissing off friends and alienating colleagues. John Hammond, the man behind 1938’s and 1939’sFrom Spirituals to Swing musical revues, spotted his talent and helped him along - Goodman even married Goodman’s sister, Alice Frances Hammond Duckworth - but a slight at the second revue (something about Hammond a guitarist named Charlie Christian, who Goodman had only worked with a short time, and dropping him in with the band that played before Goodman’s), eventually mushroomed into a full-blown falling out between the two that wouldn’t be healed until the 1980s. On the day-to-day level, a singer he worked with for a time, Helen Forrest, shared this steaming memory:
“The twenty or so months I spent with Benny felt like twenty years. When I look back, they seem like a life sentence.”
More prosaically, many musicians who worked with Goodman recalled the glare he directed at anyone who fluffed a note - “The Ray,” they called it - and he was remembered as “an unfriendly employer” by just as many. A random (and sometimes inaccessible) website summed up his broad working relationship with his peers with this:
“Goodman continued performing for many years after the end of the Swing Era, but his success was tempered by two problems. First, the star caliber of many of his musicians enabled them to leave and develop their own careers as band leaders. Second, Goodman’s personality made it hard for him to maintain a stable group. In his quest for musical perfection, he had little patience with personnel issues, and while adored by fans, he was sometimes disliked by fellow musicians.”
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| Goodman's better side. |
To his credit, Goodman seized whatever opening he could to push for integration in the music business. After returning to Chicago for a residence in the Joseph Urban Room at the Congress Hotel Ballroom, Goodman invited Henderson to sit in; he and Krupa regularly played in a trio with a black pianist named Teddy Wilson and Goodman worked frequently with Lionel Hampton. When someone asked him about the latter and spiced the question with the “n-word,” he shot back with “I’ll knock you out if you use that word around me again.”
By way of closing, it’s worth contrasting the cultural weight of the Swing Era with how briefly it dominated American popular music. Some version of “swing” existed before Goodman’s defining concerts - e.g., the Palomar Ballroom show in 1935 and his Carnegie Hall concert in 1938 - but the genre faded out of popularity between…something like 1942 and 1944. The famous musicians strike of 1942-44 played some role in that the people who made the big band orchestras stopped recording more or less anything that didn’t go straight to the GIs (the so-called “V-discs” for soldiers abroad), but the strike did end (if only to have an echo strike in 1948) and sales didn’t rebound for most of the big bands. Wikipedia suggests that vocalists - e.g., Bing Crosby (profiled here), Frank Sinatra, and The Andrews Sisters - started hogging the spotlight, a suggestion I’ll be exploring as this series continues. The arrival of new genres - e.g., jump blues - offers another argument, including one in which Benny Goodman dabbled.
With the exception of a long, late detour into classical music/forms, Goodman more or less stuck with the swing sound until his passing in June 1986 (of which, all sources agree he died from a heart attack, but Wikipedia says it happened while napping, while that PBS bio says it hit as he played a Brahms sonata). When bop/bebop became the leading sound in jazz, Goodman tried to adapt, and to the point of putting out a couple well-received recordings with a fresh set of musicians and reportedly admiring the work of Thelonious Monk. Given his prickly personality, it’s hard to know whether he genuinely liked it or was just doing the commercial thing of grinning and going along, but Goodman would later dismiss bop by 1953: “Basically it's all wrong. It's not even knowing the scales ... Bop was mostly publicity and people figuring angles.”
All in all, I’d say Goodman’s virtues outweigh his faults; then again, I never worked with him. He has the compelling story of the self-made man, if nothing else, and I started the post with the seat-of-his-pants resurrection for that reason. I almost certainly stiffed some important milestones in his career (they made a movie about him! Starring Danny Thomas as him!) and muted some side-stories that I’d get to if I didn’t mind this post prattling on into eternity - e.g., Gene Krupa (whose drum solo on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” one of the pearl’s of the era, was the first extended drum solo ever recorded) was one of the many musicians who Goodman offended, and he would have skipped that West Coast tour all together if it wasn’t for famous trumpeter Bunny Berrigan signing on. For what it’s worth, Berrigan’s a fascinating and tragic in his own right (profiled by association here) and even that raises the question of how a needling perfectionist like Goodman (or “an arrogant and eccentric martinet”) worked with a reckless alcoholic like Berrigan.
Maybe all that goes back to something that walks parallel to something Goodman once said about hiring and working with black musicians. From the bio on Benny Goodman's official page, if on a different subject:
“Benny once said, ‘If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.’”
About the Sampler
As often happens with these older artists, I slipped a fair amount of the sampler into the narrative above. I picked from a low-hanging source for the majority of it, a mega-collection called The Essential Benny Goodman, but tried to diversify the sampler where I could. That said, I did make a little effort to select at least a few of the songs that featured Goodman playing in smaller groups; when he wasn’t leading his full orchestra, he played a succession of trios, quartets and even sextets that gave a leaner sound to his compositions. I repped those on the sampler with “The Man I Love,” “Flying Home,” a quartet version of his early hit, “Limehouse Blues.”
It's more or less a grab-bag from there, so, in no particular order: “Don’t Be That Way,” “Get Happy,” "Vibraphone Blues,” “Ridin’ High,” “You Didn’t Have to Tell Me,” “Peckin’,” “Body and Soul,” “When Buddha Smiles,” “Wholly Cats” (which features Charlie Christian), “Life Goes to a Party,” and “Let’s Dance.”
For the record, the only Swing Era bandleader I knew at all well going into this post/project was Glenn Miller. I recognized a couple of Goodman’s more famous tunes from movies and TV shows about the era, but it was good to fill in the blank slate. That specific project will continue with a two-week/before and after exploration of the Dorsey Brothers…
…from what I gather, most of the big bandleaders were at least minor tyrants. Till then...
By way of closing, it’s worth contrasting the cultural weight of the Swing Era with how briefly it dominated American popular music. Some version of “swing” existed before Goodman’s defining concerts - e.g., the Palomar Ballroom show in 1935 and his Carnegie Hall concert in 1938 - but the genre faded out of popularity between…something like 1942 and 1944. The famous musicians strike of 1942-44 played some role in that the people who made the big band orchestras stopped recording more or less anything that didn’t go straight to the GIs (the so-called “V-discs” for soldiers abroad), but the strike did end (if only to have an echo strike in 1948) and sales didn’t rebound for most of the big bands. Wikipedia suggests that vocalists - e.g., Bing Crosby (profiled here), Frank Sinatra, and The Andrews Sisters - started hogging the spotlight, a suggestion I’ll be exploring as this series continues. The arrival of new genres - e.g., jump blues - offers another argument, including one in which Benny Goodman dabbled.
With the exception of a long, late detour into classical music/forms, Goodman more or less stuck with the swing sound until his passing in June 1986 (of which, all sources agree he died from a heart attack, but Wikipedia says it happened while napping, while that PBS bio says it hit as he played a Brahms sonata). When bop/bebop became the leading sound in jazz, Goodman tried to adapt, and to the point of putting out a couple well-received recordings with a fresh set of musicians and reportedly admiring the work of Thelonious Monk. Given his prickly personality, it’s hard to know whether he genuinely liked it or was just doing the commercial thing of grinning and going along, but Goodman would later dismiss bop by 1953: “Basically it's all wrong. It's not even knowing the scales ... Bop was mostly publicity and people figuring angles.”
All in all, I’d say Goodman’s virtues outweigh his faults; then again, I never worked with him. He has the compelling story of the self-made man, if nothing else, and I started the post with the seat-of-his-pants resurrection for that reason. I almost certainly stiffed some important milestones in his career (they made a movie about him! Starring Danny Thomas as him!) and muted some side-stories that I’d get to if I didn’t mind this post prattling on into eternity - e.g., Gene Krupa (whose drum solo on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” one of the pearl’s of the era, was the first extended drum solo ever recorded) was one of the many musicians who Goodman offended, and he would have skipped that West Coast tour all together if it wasn’t for famous trumpeter Bunny Berrigan signing on. For what it’s worth, Berrigan’s a fascinating and tragic in his own right (profiled by association here) and even that raises the question of how a needling perfectionist like Goodman (or “an arrogant and eccentric martinet”) worked with a reckless alcoholic like Berrigan.
Maybe all that goes back to something that walks parallel to something Goodman once said about hiring and working with black musicians. From the bio on Benny Goodman's official page, if on a different subject:
“Benny once said, ‘If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.’”
About the Sampler
As often happens with these older artists, I slipped a fair amount of the sampler into the narrative above. I picked from a low-hanging source for the majority of it, a mega-collection called The Essential Benny Goodman, but tried to diversify the sampler where I could. That said, I did make a little effort to select at least a few of the songs that featured Goodman playing in smaller groups; when he wasn’t leading his full orchestra, he played a succession of trios, quartets and even sextets that gave a leaner sound to his compositions. I repped those on the sampler with “The Man I Love,” “Flying Home,” a quartet version of his early hit, “Limehouse Blues.”
It's more or less a grab-bag from there, so, in no particular order: “Don’t Be That Way,” “Get Happy,” "Vibraphone Blues,” “Ridin’ High,” “You Didn’t Have to Tell Me,” “Peckin’,” “Body and Soul,” “When Buddha Smiles,” “Wholly Cats” (which features Charlie Christian), “Life Goes to a Party,” and “Let’s Dance.”
For the record, the only Swing Era bandleader I knew at all well going into this post/project was Glenn Miller. I recognized a couple of Goodman’s more famous tunes from movies and TV shows about the era, but it was good to fill in the blank slate. That specific project will continue with a two-week/before and after exploration of the Dorsey Brothers…
…from what I gather, most of the big bandleaders were at least minor tyrants. Till then...
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