5 Bits About Benny

Benny Goodman was a big influence on me as a young Music Zombie.  He played clarinet like me!  Well, he played the clarinet a lot better than me, but like me, he played the clarinet.  You know what I mean.  Here are five things about the "King of Swing" that you may not know.

1.  Grew up in the not-so-nice part of Chicago; the ninth of twelve children.  Got his first clarinet lesson at the age of 10 and was getting paid for his playing within two years of picking it up.

2.  He was the first successful band leader to hire (and often defend) black musicians.  This all happened nearly ten years before Jackie Robinson was allowed to play Major League Baseball.  Charlie Christian on guitar, Teddy Wilson on piano, and vibraphone master Lionel Hampton were all hired by Goodman for their virtues as musicians.  In the end, the music was all that mattered to Goodman, and he didn't care what color you were, as long as you could play jazz.

3.  He funded several music conservatory educations and could be very generous, but he never talked about it and had no desire to make these things public.  When asked why he didn't want people to know, he responded that if everyone knew, more people would come to him "with their hands out."

4.  On January 16, 1938, Benny's band became the first real jazz band to play at Carnegie Hall.  With this performance, swing music was introduced to a larger audience and was the beginning of jazz music's acceptance into the mainstream.

5.  So what did he do that was so innovative?  He successfully blended "hot" jazz with the current format of a "sweet" sounding dance band.  Up until his big break at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in 1935, dance bands were employed to provide relatively sedate music for social dancers.  The current bands swung a bit, but nowhere near as hard as Benny's band, thanks in part to his shrewd taste for top-notch musicians, his clear vision of what he wanted, and his insistence on perfection. 

Bonus: 
 “Listening to Benny talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.”
-- Artie Shaw, quoted in the liner notes by Richard M. Sudhalter for the CD “Benny Goodman: The Complete Trios”