Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 22, 1993 | by Leonard Garment

The timing of Ross Firestone's new biography of Benny Goodman is opportune. There's a saxophone-playing president in the White House and a resurgence of interest in swing music. Maybe Firestone's fine, full (if anything, overfull) book, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman (Norton), will give the trend a push. I hope so.

I was obsessed with Benny Goodman 30 years before I met him. In lieu of a bar mitzvah, my mother gave me a clarinet, and from age 13 to 16 (1937 to 1940), I spent countless hours memorizing Goodman's classic solos - hoping some of his magic would rub off. It didn't, so I became a lawyer.

Cut to 1969: Richard Nixon's six years in the White House began with the euphoria of Duke Ellington's 70th birthday party and ended in the dolor of Watergate. At the Ellington party, I got to say a brief first hello to my childhood hero. A jam session closed out the evening and, in an act of colossal clarinet chutzpah, it was I, not Benny, who played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond. (Years later, I learned that Benny was hurt that he had not been invited to bring his clarinet.)

Final cut: It is 1975, post- Watergate, and I am back at my old law firm in New York, adjusting to civilian life after working for the Nixon administration. The intercom buzzes: There's a Benny Goodman calling on line 1. Do you want to take it?" Then the familiar voice - part drawl, part growl, a blend of Chicago, New Canaan and Jimmy Ryan's jazz club: "Hey, Pops," (this was his conventional greeting to everyone), "how about lunch? I've got a legal problem, and I think you're just the one to handle it."

The next day, over lunch at the Century Club, Benny outlined his problem: "Columbia Records has these lousy masters of mine, and I want to make sure they're never released. Now, you're a guy who must realize how dangerous it is to leave a lot of crappy tapes lying around - look at what you did to Nixon - so I want you to arrange to have those masters burned." Columbia, of course, wouldn't permit anyone to touch its Benny Goodman inventory. The company did let me listen to some specimen tapes, which were superb. Goodman grumbled but relented, and a friendship began that lasted until his death in 1986.

He was always generous, gentle, thoughtful. After my first wife died, for example, he had my two kids and me over to his New York apartment for a carefully arranged candlelight dinner, regaling us with wonderful stories about the music business and playing classical duets for a couple of hours with my son, who was then a clarinet student at the Juilliard School. If I were writing about Benny from what I personally knew about him, it would be a numbing exercise in hero worship.

Swing, Swing, Swing describes a vastly more complicated and interesting figure, one worthy of the best of the chess masters of Vienna. The man I knew - charming, funny, articulate - the perfectionist who reveled in the discovery of new talent, the first major bandleader to challenge the color line that barred the "mixing" of black and white musicians by hiring the likes of Teddy Wilson, Charlie Christian, Lionel Hampton and Cootie Williams, not to make a political statement, but because they were the best in the business - is portrayed fairly and fully.

But so is the Benny Goodman who was rude, petty, vain, self-absorbed, miserly, spiteful, condescending, exploitative and at times as mystifyingly cruel to his musicians as a child pulling wings off butterflies. Firestone tells us everything we need to know in order to play "What makes Benny run?" - the favorite game of Benny Goodman sidemen through the years.

The spine of the story is a music business version of rags to riches: Benny's miserable early years in Chicago, where he was the ninth of 12 children in a lower-class Jewish immigrant family (his Orthodox father worked at shoveling hog guts in the stockyards); the moment when Benny, in knee pants, was randomly handed a clarinet in school and turned out to be a prodigy; and the stunning speed of Goodman's progress to the heights of the music business, crowned when he finally enlisted Fletcher Henderson, the incomparable arranger, and organized the crisp, driving "swing" band that caught the late-Depression mood of youngsters who decided it was time to dance.

Benny's climactic triumphs came in quick progression: the unexpected acclaim at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on Aug. 21,1935, after a dreary cross-country tour; the pandemonium at New York's Paramount Theater on March 3, 1937, when all those hysterical kids (myself included) cut school and jammed the aisles; and finally, the historic Carnegie Hall concert on Jan. 16, 1938. (Firestone's one-page description of pianist Jess Stacy's show-stealing solo on "Sing, Sing, Sing" is a gem - as dramatic as radio announcer Russ Hodges's account of Bobby Thompson's 1951 home run and worth the price of admission.)

In April 1939, Benny published his life story, The Kingdom of Swing. He was 29 years old.