Crash Course Timeline, No. 35: The Rajah of Rhythm, The King of Swing, Benny Goodman

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.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

Think of the date as beyond time...

This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.

William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.

Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.

For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…