Maxwell Street
Benjamin David Goodman was born in Chicago on 30 May 1909, one of a large family of children born to poor Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman, had come to America in 1892 from Warsaw and worked as a tailor and at other hard, low-paid jobs; his mother, Dora Grisinsky, came from Kaunas in Lithuania. They had met in Baltimore and moved to Chicago, where the family settled near Maxwell Street, an overcrowded immigrant neighbourhood of Jewish, Italian, Polish, Irish and other newcomers beside the railway yards and factories.
Money was always short. On Sundays David Goodman took his children to free band concerts in Douglas Park. Hoping that music might keep his sons out of trouble and offer them a way out of poverty, in 1919 he enrolled ten-year-old Benny and two older brothers in the low-cost music classes run by the Kehelah Jacob synagogue, which lent out instruments. The oldest boy came home with a tuba, the next with a trumpet, and Benny, the smallest, with a clarinet.
A teenage professional
The boy learned astonishingly fast. He took two years of lessons from Franz Schoepp, a classically trained clarinettist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and played in the boys’ band at Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement. He listened closely to the New Orleans clarinettists then working in Chicago, Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds and Leon Roppolo, and by twelve or thirteen he was playing professionally, with his own union card, on Lake Michigan excursion boats and in dance halls. He soon left school to work full time and help support his family.
In 1925 he joined Ben Pollack’s band and in December 1926 made his first records. When he was seventeen his father, whom he adored, was killed by a car after stepping off a streetcar; Goodman later called it the saddest thing that ever happened to his family. He went on to New York, where through the early Depression years he made his living as a freelance musician on radio, in recording studios and in Broadway pit orchestras, supporting his widowed mother.
The night the swing era began
In 1933 Goodman met John Hammond, a wealthy young jazz enthusiast and record producer who became his champion and later his brother-in-law. In 1934 Goodman formed a big band, and from December it was one of three orchestras featured on NBC’s Saturday-night radio show Let’s Dance. Hammond helped bring in the great African American bandleader and arranger Fletcher Henderson, whose arrangements gave the band its driving, polished sound.
The national tour that followed in 1935 was at first a disappointment; audiences expecting sweet dance music were puzzled. Then, on 21 August 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, after a cool reception for the band’s safer numbers, Goodman launched into the Henderson arrangements. The crowd of young dancers, who had heard the band on the radio and on local records, erupted. The Palomar engagement is often described as the beginning of the swing era. For the next several years Goodman was the most popular instrumentalist in jazz, at a time when jazz was America’s most popular music, and the press crowned him the King of Swing.
Breaking the colour line
In the 1930s Black and white musicians could not perform together in most American clubs and concert halls, and in the South segregation was enforced by law. Goodman had recorded as a trio with the African American pianist Teddy Wilson and the drummer Gene Krupa in 1935, and in 1936 in Chicago he brought Wilson onto the stage with him in public. It is widely regarded as the first time a Black musician appeared as a regular member of a prominent white band. Later in 1936 he added the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton to form his celebrated quartet, and in 1939 he hired the young guitarist Charlie Christian, whose playing in Goodman’s sextet turned the electric guitar into a major jazz instrument.
This happened more than a decade before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. Teddy Wilson later recalled that audiences received the mixed group with almost universal enthusiasm. Goodman was not a crusader by temperament, and he insisted he hired musicians simply because they were the best. But he stood by that choice: Lionel Hampton recounted that when someone objected to Goodman playing with Wilson, Goodman threatened to break his clarinet over the man’s head, and according to Maclean’s magazine he refused to play concert dates in the South where audiences were segregated. In an era of Jim Crow, millions of Americans heard and saw Black and white musicians making music together as equals, on records, on radio and on stage.
Charlie Christian’s arrival in 1939 showed how this worked in practice. The pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams had told John Hammond about the young guitarist from Oklahoma City, and Hammond slipped him onto the stage at a Goodman engagement in Beverly Hills. Goodman, who was not keen on the electric guitar, called Rose Room, apparently expecting the newcomer not to know it; Christian’s playing so electrified the room that the number, according to Hammond, went on for more than three quarters of an hour. Christian played in Goodman’s sextet from 1939 to 1941, and the recordings they made became foundations of modern jazz guitar.
Carnegie Hall
On the evening of 16 January 1938 Goodman’s band played a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, the temple of classical music. It was a risk: the critics who reviewed the city’s concerts were classical music critics, many of whom regarded jazz as junk. Goodman brought with him guest musicians from the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, so that the stage itself was integrated, and the evening included a short history of jazz as well as the band’s hits, culminating in a long, exuberant performance of Sing, Sing, Sing.
The concert has been called the single most important jazz concert in history, jazz’s coming-out party to the world of respectable music. It announced that jazz, born in Black American communities, was an art to be listened to seriously, not merely music to dance to. A recording of the evening, made almost by chance and rediscovered years later, was released by Columbia in 1950 and became one of the first jazz albums to sell over a million copies.
Jewish roots in a hostile age
Goodman was not religious, and his music was not Jewish in any obvious sense. But his story is a classic Jewish-American one: the child of immigrants from the Pale, introduced to music through a synagogue programme and a settlement house, who climbed out of the ghetto through talent and relentless work. He was one of several leading swing-era musicians, among them the clarinettist and bandleader Artie Shaw, who were children of Jewish immigrants.
In Europe the music Goodman championed was treated as a racial threat. The Nazi party barred jazz from German radio, claiming it was part of a Jewish conspiracy against culture, and Fascist Italy banned the broadcast of music composed or played by Jews. During the Second World War his band recorded V-Discs, special records made for American troops overseas.
Mozart, Bartók and Moscow
Goodman loved classical music and pursued it seriously. As early as 1938 he was performing Mozart, and he commissioned or premiered works that are now standard repertoire for the clarinet: Béla Bartók’s Contrasts; Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto; Malcolm Arnold’s Second Clarinet Concerto; Morton Gould’s Derivations; and Francis Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata. In 1949, already famous, he began studying with the English clarinettist Reginald Kell and relearned his embouchure and fingering almost from scratch.
As big bands declined after the war he experimented with bebop, then returned to swing and small groups. He toured Asia and Europe in the 1950s, and in 1962, in the tense months of the Cold War, he led the first American jazz band to tour the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange. He performed until the end of his life.
The man behind the clarinet
Goodman was a perfectionist, and many who worked for him found him difficult. Musicians spoke of ‘the Ray’, the icy stare he fixed on anyone who fell short, and singers such as Helen Forrest remembered their time with him bitterly. His relationship with Louis Armstrong broke down during a joint tour in 1953. Yet he was also quietly generous: he paid for several people’s college educations, always in secret. In 1942 he married Alice Hammond Duckworth, John Hammond’s sister; they had two daughters, Rachel, a pianist who performed with him, and Benji, and he also raised Alice’s three daughters from her first marriage.
His honours included the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Columbia and other universities. He gave his last concert six days before his death. Benny Goodman died of a heart attack at his apartment in Manhattan on 13 June 1986, aged 77. His papers went to Yale University.
Legacy
Goodman’s clarinet playing, clean, swinging and technically dazzling, set a standard for the instrument in jazz, and Newsweek’s eulogy called him arguably the only white jazz player to be the best on his instrument. His bands launched the careers of musicians from Gene Krupa and Harry James to Peggy Lee, Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian. He took jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall and widened the classical clarinet repertoire with works that are played everywhere today. Above all, at a time when segregation was the law across much of the United States, the son of a Jewish tailor from Maxwell Street put Black and white musicians side by side on America’s biggest stages and showed a nation what that could sound like.
Sources & further reading
Benny Goodman, Wikipedia · Benny Goodman: Forever The King Of Swing, NPR (2009) · Goodman, Benny, Encyclopedia.com (Contemporary Musicians; Music Encyclopedia) · The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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