Venues
Events
MediaFeature
Clarinet Cool
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s tribute to the king of swing
Benny Goodman [third from left] and his band in rehearsal
In celebration of what would have been Benny Goodman’s 100th birthday, Lincoln Center Jazz is rolling out a series of events in honor of the man who made the clarinet cool. The highlight is a three-night run recreating Goodman and band’s famed 1938 appearance at Carnegie Hall, the first time jazz saw the inside of the monument to live music performance.
The road to Carnegie took a lot of work, ingenuity, and not a little luck. Goodman was born in Chicago in 1909, one of twelve children to poor Russian Jewish immigrants. He came to New York as a session musician, gathering what became a band of all-star talent. His drummer, Gene Krupa, produced a still unmatched lively sound. Goodman recruited his arranger, Fletcher Henderson, from one of Harlem’s hottest bands. Henderson, an African American son of an emancipated slave, turned to music after abandoning graduate studies in chemistry, then a field with few prospects for African Americans. Henderson wrote music with a new sound, the hot jazz style that became known as “swing.”
After a successful run on a regular radio show, Goodman’s band found itself out of work, so they hit the road. Receiving tepid responses while crossing the country, the band finally found its audience on the West coast, where its cancelled midnight radio gig had been broadcast earlier in the evening and earned them a loyal following. For a three-week residency, the band rocked the Palomar ballroom in LA. A new dance, the jitterbug, was all but perfected during those nightly concerts. Back then, a cultural phenomenon like “swing” spread organically through word of mouth instead of over manufactured television and internet buzz.
The Goodman band’s concert at Carnegie Hall brought contemporary music into the historically classical music venue, an audacious move. The night came as Goodman’s success was peaking, after his hit movie Hollywood Hotel and the release of many popular recordings including the iconic “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The concerts sold out and became the landmark of mainstream acceptance of jazz.
The tribute to the Carnegie concert will be performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with clarinetists Buddy DeFranco, Ken Peplowski, Bob Wilber and Victor Goines, paying their birthday respects to the man who made their instrument famous.