Benny Goodman was the clarinet virtuoso who made swing a national craze. In 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, his band cut loose on the hot arrangements and the crowd of young people went wild – the moment usually marked as the start of the Swing Era. For the next decade he was its biggest star.
He earned the crown with discipline. Goodman was a perfectionist with a famous icy stare for any musician who dropped the ball, and his band was drilled to a fine edge. But he could play with fire too, and his small groups – trios and quartets – made some of the most intimate, brilliant jazz of the era.
Those small groups mattered for another reason. Goodman hired Black musicians – Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, later Charlie Christian – and put them on stage with white players at a time when that simply wasn’t done in public. He insisted on the talent and let the integration follow. It was quietly historic.
In 1938 he brought a jazz band to Carnegie Hall for the first time, a concert that announced the music had arrived as American art. The clarinet led the way, clean and swinging, with the King setting the tempo.
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The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert is the landmark – the night swing went legit, and it cooks.
For the small-group magic, any collection of the Trio and Quartet sides with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa is sublime.
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