The Night Swing Was Born

Insight on the News, Feb 1, 1999 by Ralph De Toledano

During a Carnegie Hall concert in 1938, Benny Goodman and some of the brightest stars in jazz ushered in the swing era with performance for the ages.

We thought it was lost: that tremendous night 60 years ago when Benny Goodman, his band and some of the greats of jazz broke loose in the staid confines of Carnegie Hall. Irving Kolodin, one of the few journalist music critics who knew what jazz was about wrote for the following day's New York Sun that "an earthquake of violent intensity rocked a small corner of Manhattan last night as swing took Carnegie Hall in its stride." I suspect that I am one of a tiny company still alive and able to report the excitement of the Benny Goodman Jazz Concert in 1938 and the impact of that invasion on the public's musical perceptions.

The usual Sunday quiet of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue was shattered that night, and we -- we being myself and Eugene Williams, later to become one of the most prescient and sensitive jazz critics -- literally had to fight our way into Carnegie Hall, where it was standing room only (even Goodman had to pay scalpers' prices for the tickets he belatedly sought for members of his family). Some of the Carnegie regulars were there, but for the most part it was college kids like us and the older types with whom we rubbed elbows in Greenwich Village, Harlem and 52nd Street jazz joints.

Until some 23 years later, we did not know that what was heard that night at Carnegie Hall had not perished but had been picked up by a single overhead microphone and fed to CBS, one copy of the tape going to the Library of Congress and the other to Goodman, who threw it in his closet. When the LPs were is-sued in the 1950s we hesitated to play them, fearful that our golden recollections would be shattered. We were wrong, and new generations who have it on compact discs will back us up (Sony Music, B000002657, 2 CDs, $19.97). But more is on those CDs than the music that rocked Carnegie Hall -- the excitement of those who lived through the time when jazz burst through the longhairs' transom in the swing era.

It was a time of the new and the old blending, when the music went `round and `round and came out here. We drove through the dark avenues of Staten Island to hear the after-hours piano of Art Hodes, toothpick-thin as he hunched over the keyboard out of the barrelhouse school and playing beer-hall gigs until he got his Local 802 card. We walked the streets of Harlem, to the cellar joints where the rich voice of an alto sax or a horn cut through the smoke. In the Village, Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman, Peewee Russell and the Chicago gang of white boys blasted out their tighter Chicago-style version of the New Orleans product. And at the Apollo in Harlem, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford blew the curtains off the proscenium. This was jazz in the thirties, before Wynton Marsalis and the reverse racists at the Lincoln Center in New York decreed that jazz was black and you ofays better get out!

But the Carnegie Hall concert gave us a new dimension. Goodman brought discipline to big-band jazz and some of the finest sidemen of the time. He had broken the color barrier, and his trio and quartet included Teddy Wilson, with his sensitive touch and his sprung rhythms, and Lionel Hampton, who brought more music out of his vibraphone than we thought was in it. Goodman had come out of the Chicago dives, the nightclub gigs and the New York pit bands to organize a jazz orchestra that launched the swing era and had the country dancing to a four/four beat and made the welkin ring. When he hit New York, every jazzman, black or white, dusted off his horn and went to work.

Goodman was much of the evening, but there was a good deal more. The Duke and some of his finest sidemen -- Johnny Hodges on alto and Cootie Williams on trumpet -- played his lovely Blue Reverie. Count Basie's Kansas City team, with Buck Clayton and Lester Young doing the honors, were most solidly there. It was a big night for Bobby Hackett, an unknown until then, who put cornet to lip and brought back the beautiful and plangent improvisations of the late, great Bix Beiderbecke's I'm Coming Virginia.

And there were others from jazz's many voices. But the evening's stomping conclusion was Benny Goodman's as he rolled into one of his standards, Sing, Sing, Sing. The kids poured out, rug-cutting in the aisles, and they couldn't be stopped. Goodman's finger kept going up for one more chorus, demanded by the audience, each one featuring one of his sidemen, and the crowd kept clapping for more. There was a crescendo of drums -- a powerhouse Gene Krupa solo -- and then almost quiet as Jess Stacy's piano took over, quietly telling the jazz story like Chopin playing barrelhouse, I would later write. His hair plastered down and dignified as an Irish bartender, Stacy put together those tight choruses, that solid left hand and that ranging right hand while the audience listed raptly, then burst into tremendous applause.

There had been other jazz concerts in the past. In 1924, Paul Whiteman, the "King of Jazz," had brought his half-acre of violins and a "hot" section which later become famous because of some of its members-- Bix, C-melody sax Frankie Trumbauer, the Dorsey brothers, the guitar virtuoso Eddie Lang and Bing Crosby -- into Aeolian Hall, introducing George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It had led some of the longhairs to tie on to that oxymoron, "symphonic jazz." But the Benny Goodman jazz concert, en plein Carnegie Hall, had made the world of "serious" music take notice of what Europe's public and musicians knew when they cheered Louis Armstrong at Paris' Salle Pleyel in 1932 and wondered at the ease with which he could hit C above high C on his horn. Or how Ernst Ansermet, who pioneered conducting Stravinsky, had listened in 1919 to Sidney Bechet's New Orleans soprano sax cadenzas and predicted that this was the way the music of the future would go.