70 years is a lonnnnngggg time ago.
I have no observations. Does anyone?
If you see anything good(man) on line, please let us know!
Thanks!
70th anniversary Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert - today
Moderators: Mr Awesomer, JesseMiner, CafeSavoy
70th anniversary Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert - today
Will big bands ever come back?
I've just written various things over the years. I don't have anything fresh to add w/o prodding.
And to be slightly controversial - I must say that I have never been convinced of the 'importance' of that concert back in 1938 for it provoked little in the way of things to come...unless one feels it was the forefather of 'jazz concerts'.
Waller and Ellington both had CH gigs. Waller blew his by getting drunk; Ellington did his with little historical comment outside of Jazz circles.
But the Goodman got the 'thumbs up' from history. He gave them a fine show, but without the release on LP in the 50s, very few would remember it as more than a legendary, great concert by The King of Swing.
And I like the Victor recording of "Sing Sing Sing" more than the CH concert rendition, in toto.
And to be slightly controversial - I must say that I have never been convinced of the 'importance' of that concert back in 1938 for it provoked little in the way of things to come...unless one feels it was the forefather of 'jazz concerts'.
Waller and Ellington both had CH gigs. Waller blew his by getting drunk; Ellington did his with little historical comment outside of Jazz circles.
But the Goodman got the 'thumbs up' from history. He gave them a fine show, but without the release on LP in the 50s, very few would remember it as more than a legendary, great concert by The King of Swing.
And I like the Victor recording of "Sing Sing Sing" more than the CH concert rendition, in toto.
Will big bands ever come back?
Very interesting comments. Was it the first concert of its kind there? Did it come before Waller and Ellington? Maybe that is a reason it is so lauded?
If it wasn't the first, then I can only guess that what you say about the release of the LP preserving its memory for future generations is near the mark.
If it wasn't the first, then I can only guess that what you say about the release of the LP preserving its memory for future generations is near the mark.
It don't matter if your clock is broke - it's the right time somewhere : Slim Gaillard
It was the first of its kind there, although Paul Whiteman had played a classical venue (I believe) in the 1920s.
There was an ASCAP show there in 1939 with quite a few Swing bands.
Waller was there in 1942, IIRC.
Ellington in 1943.
But still - unless one feels that the BG 38 open up the concert halls of the world to Jazz, I can't see too much at the show to make it so memorable for 70 years.
There may be a bigger picture!
There was an ASCAP show there in 1939 with quite a few Swing bands.
Waller was there in 1942, IIRC.
Ellington in 1943.
But still - unless one feels that the BG 38 open up the concert halls of the world to Jazz, I can't see too much at the show to make it so memorable for 70 years.
There may be a bigger picture!
Will big bands ever come back?
That is exactly why it was so lauded. It was the "coming out" of Swing into the mainstream. Carengie Hall was the "it" venue back then. Most historians use that concert as the effective start date of the "Swing Era." Of course, Swing music existed before then, but as an "Era" in popular music, Swing music did not fully arrive until that concert.CountBasi wrote:Very interesting comments. Was it the first concert of its kind there? Did it come before Waller and Ellington? Maybe that is a reason it is so lauded?
The concert WAS a huge deal back then. According to what I have read, thousands of fans were in the street trying to get in but never got it. It was to Swing what Elvis on Ed Sullivan was to Rock and Roll.
The other notable aspect of the concert was that it was one of the first times (if not the first time) that black and white musicians performed together in a major, mainstream venue. Count Basie was right there onstage with Krupa, Goodman, and Lionel Hampton.
I thought most historians used the 1935 Palomar Ballroom concert as the start of the Swing Era?Lawrence wrote:Most historians use that concert as the effective start date of the "Swing Era." Of course, Swing music existed before then, but as an "Era" in popular music, Swing music did not fully arrive until that concert.
Yes - you're right.Travis wrote:
I thought most historians used the 1935 Palomar Ballroom concert as the start of the Swing Era?
The CH Concert in 1938 seems such an 'oasis' event of the moment. Jazz came to the concert hall - that might have been big news at the time. Now, it just seemed like a grounded fact and nothing more with not much influence on the events to come....unless you feel it was the 'door-opener' for Jazz concerts.
Otherwise, I just don't see it as a watershed event. Just a great concert once upon a time.
Will big bands ever come back?
When Carnegie Hall Swung
When Carnegie Hall Swung
Benny Goodman headlined and Jess Stacy stole the show
By TOM NOLAN
January 12, 2008; Page W14
"Sunday evening, January 16, 1938: Benny Goodman and his Swing Orchestra" read the placard 70 years ago in front of New York City's most prestigious classical-music venue. "The First Swing Concert in the History of Carnegie Hall."
Headlining this sanctum sanctorum must have seemed the only thing that Goodman, the 28-year-old, Chicago-born clarinet player, big-band leader and "king of swing," might then do to top a phenomenal 2½-year ride to the peak of the popular-music world. New York seemed to agree. Carnegie Hall sold out at once: all 3,900 seats.
[Benny Goodman illustration]
At 8:45 p.m. that Sunday night, a nervous Goodman, in white tie and black tailcoat, launched the band into the evening's first number: "Don't Be That Way." The tempo was restrained, the orchestra tentative, the soloists polite. But 2½ minutes into the tune, drummer Gene Krupa jolted the ensemble to life with an explosive two-bar break. The event would need more such jolts. This "definitive program of swing music" came saddled with program elements that kept the concert out of step for its first half-hour.
A "20 years of jazz" segment and a quarter-hour "jam session" with guest players from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras proved wearying. Not until Goodman's trio and quartet -- specialty combos featuring first the impeccably brilliant pianist Teddy Wilson and then the rhythmically enthusiastic vibraphonist Lionel Hampton -- took the stage did the concert gain traction.
Goodman was at his best in small-group settings, where his melodic ease, great technique and strong sense of swing were on full display. The trio's "Body and Soul" and the quartet's "The Man I Love" and "Avalon" charmed the audience -- and the quartet's five-minute upper-tempo "I Got Rhythm" positively sizzled.
After intermission, the orchestra too was in fine form, demonstrating, for the Carnegie Hall crowd, just what this swing-era fuss was all about.
"Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" had the concert audience clapping in time (if unhiply on the wrong beat); and at the close of the band's euphoric performance of "Swingtime in the Rockies," the Carnegie crowd let out a roar worthy of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Then Goodman called again on his trio and quartet, for three more numbers.
It was good pacing to go from combo to big-band and back, but it also seemed emblematic of a schism that ran through the jazz world of the late 1930s: the split between young swing-music idolizers, hooked on the big bands' riffs, and an earlier generation of traditionalists who felt "true jazz" was played only by small groups of collectively improvising players.
This concert's earlier "history of jazz" segment paid homage to the "classic" jazz of the '20s; its most effective moment, for many, was when Bobby Hackett, a 22-year-old cornet player from Rhode Island, re-created the late Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke's melancholy 1927 version of "I'm Comin' Virginia."
Beiderbecke had died an alcoholic's death in New York in 1931. A generation of jazzmen were haunted by his lyrical sound. Several of the men on stage, including Goodman, had played with Bix back in the day. Jess Stacy, the Goodman orchestra's outstanding pianist, had his style shaped through crucial exposure to Beiderbecke in 1923, in Davenport, Iowa, when Bix came aboard the riverboat an 18-year-old Stacy worked on.
"He played the pian-a," Stacy told pianist Marian McPartland decades later on her NPR program "Piano Jazz," "and he played [the type of] harmony like [he had], you know, [in his own] 'In a Mist'?" Stacy was referring to Beiderbecke's Debussy-like composition for keyboard. Beiderbecke had steeped himself in the sounds of such modern-classicists as Ravel, Elgar and MacDowell. "He played 'Clarinet Marmalade,' with that type harmony. Back in my head, I'd known that that was possible. But I didn't know how to do it, you know? But when I heard him do it -- it just bowled me over."
Bix, with his relaxed manner and modernist harmonies, seemed, for some, the ghost at the banquet of this swing-music concert, with his implied reproach: Mine was the path you might have taken. But toward the end of this longish evening, Benny Goodman found a way to merge these opposing visions of jazz via "Sing Sing Sing" -- the most raucous and elaborate of his big band's signature items, a "killer-diller" that had evolved into an epic.
The number began with a vengeance, as Krupa beat a tattoo beneath the snarling brass and strutting reeds. Riff patterns unfolded smoothly, and then Goodman's clarinet emerged, full of subtle spirit and insinuation. "Sing Sing Sing" rolled on and on -- through a false ending and a surprise return, a raucous Harry James trumpet solo, and three rhythmic ad-lib choruses by Benny that conjured the intimacy of an after-hours session even as they worked their way up to a tentative high C.
And then, after 9½ minutes, Goodman, in true jam-session fashion, turned "Sing Sing Sing" over to Stacy, who'd never before been featured on this number: "Take it, Jess."
The pianist began to unfurl a long, driving, ruminative meditation on "an old A-minor chord" -- a thoughtful exploration that would still sound fresh 70 years later. "I used to listen to records every night," Stacy told McPartland. "I listened to a lot of Ravel; I listened to Debussy and MacDowell. If you'll notice, in that chorus a little MacDowell crept in there." His extraordinary three-chorus, two-minute solo, which stretched from steamboat-stride to barely audible Impressionist ripples, induced what one witness called "a magical stillness." At last the band, booted by Krupa, returned for a thrilling half-chorus finale.
Benny Goodman's one-night stand at Carnegie Hall faded into the mists of memory -- until 1950, when acetate recordings of the event were issued on an LP that became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. An eventual CD version, "Benny Goodman: Live at Carnegie Hall" (Columbia), introduced still younger listeners to the concert that began as a press agent's brainstorm and turned into legend. Most all who heard the recording (including Goodman) thought Stacy stole the show with his two-minute soliloquy -- a solo seeded with the subtle phrasings and harmonic shadings that the pianist first encountered so long before, when a 20-year-old cornet player in Davenport came aboard the riverboat to play the piano.
Mr. Nolan is editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Detective," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen &Landru).
Benny Goodman headlined and Jess Stacy stole the show
By TOM NOLAN
January 12, 2008; Page W14
"Sunday evening, January 16, 1938: Benny Goodman and his Swing Orchestra" read the placard 70 years ago in front of New York City's most prestigious classical-music venue. "The First Swing Concert in the History of Carnegie Hall."
Headlining this sanctum sanctorum must have seemed the only thing that Goodman, the 28-year-old, Chicago-born clarinet player, big-band leader and "king of swing," might then do to top a phenomenal 2½-year ride to the peak of the popular-music world. New York seemed to agree. Carnegie Hall sold out at once: all 3,900 seats.
[Benny Goodman illustration]
At 8:45 p.m. that Sunday night, a nervous Goodman, in white tie and black tailcoat, launched the band into the evening's first number: "Don't Be That Way." The tempo was restrained, the orchestra tentative, the soloists polite. But 2½ minutes into the tune, drummer Gene Krupa jolted the ensemble to life with an explosive two-bar break. The event would need more such jolts. This "definitive program of swing music" came saddled with program elements that kept the concert out of step for its first half-hour.
A "20 years of jazz" segment and a quarter-hour "jam session" with guest players from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras proved wearying. Not until Goodman's trio and quartet -- specialty combos featuring first the impeccably brilliant pianist Teddy Wilson and then the rhythmically enthusiastic vibraphonist Lionel Hampton -- took the stage did the concert gain traction.
Goodman was at his best in small-group settings, where his melodic ease, great technique and strong sense of swing were on full display. The trio's "Body and Soul" and the quartet's "The Man I Love" and "Avalon" charmed the audience -- and the quartet's five-minute upper-tempo "I Got Rhythm" positively sizzled.
After intermission, the orchestra too was in fine form, demonstrating, for the Carnegie Hall crowd, just what this swing-era fuss was all about.
"Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" had the concert audience clapping in time (if unhiply on the wrong beat); and at the close of the band's euphoric performance of "Swingtime in the Rockies," the Carnegie crowd let out a roar worthy of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Then Goodman called again on his trio and quartet, for three more numbers.
It was good pacing to go from combo to big-band and back, but it also seemed emblematic of a schism that ran through the jazz world of the late 1930s: the split between young swing-music idolizers, hooked on the big bands' riffs, and an earlier generation of traditionalists who felt "true jazz" was played only by small groups of collectively improvising players.
This concert's earlier "history of jazz" segment paid homage to the "classic" jazz of the '20s; its most effective moment, for many, was when Bobby Hackett, a 22-year-old cornet player from Rhode Island, re-created the late Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke's melancholy 1927 version of "I'm Comin' Virginia."
Beiderbecke had died an alcoholic's death in New York in 1931. A generation of jazzmen were haunted by his lyrical sound. Several of the men on stage, including Goodman, had played with Bix back in the day. Jess Stacy, the Goodman orchestra's outstanding pianist, had his style shaped through crucial exposure to Beiderbecke in 1923, in Davenport, Iowa, when Bix came aboard the riverboat an 18-year-old Stacy worked on.
"He played the pian-a," Stacy told pianist Marian McPartland decades later on her NPR program "Piano Jazz," "and he played [the type of] harmony like [he had], you know, [in his own] 'In a Mist'?" Stacy was referring to Beiderbecke's Debussy-like composition for keyboard. Beiderbecke had steeped himself in the sounds of such modern-classicists as Ravel, Elgar and MacDowell. "He played 'Clarinet Marmalade,' with that type harmony. Back in my head, I'd known that that was possible. But I didn't know how to do it, you know? But when I heard him do it -- it just bowled me over."
Bix, with his relaxed manner and modernist harmonies, seemed, for some, the ghost at the banquet of this swing-music concert, with his implied reproach: Mine was the path you might have taken. But toward the end of this longish evening, Benny Goodman found a way to merge these opposing visions of jazz via "Sing Sing Sing" -- the most raucous and elaborate of his big band's signature items, a "killer-diller" that had evolved into an epic.
The number began with a vengeance, as Krupa beat a tattoo beneath the snarling brass and strutting reeds. Riff patterns unfolded smoothly, and then Goodman's clarinet emerged, full of subtle spirit and insinuation. "Sing Sing Sing" rolled on and on -- through a false ending and a surprise return, a raucous Harry James trumpet solo, and three rhythmic ad-lib choruses by Benny that conjured the intimacy of an after-hours session even as they worked their way up to a tentative high C.
And then, after 9½ minutes, Goodman, in true jam-session fashion, turned "Sing Sing Sing" over to Stacy, who'd never before been featured on this number: "Take it, Jess."
The pianist began to unfurl a long, driving, ruminative meditation on "an old A-minor chord" -- a thoughtful exploration that would still sound fresh 70 years later. "I used to listen to records every night," Stacy told McPartland. "I listened to a lot of Ravel; I listened to Debussy and MacDowell. If you'll notice, in that chorus a little MacDowell crept in there." His extraordinary three-chorus, two-minute solo, which stretched from steamboat-stride to barely audible Impressionist ripples, induced what one witness called "a magical stillness." At last the band, booted by Krupa, returned for a thrilling half-chorus finale.
Benny Goodman's one-night stand at Carnegie Hall faded into the mists of memory -- until 1950, when acetate recordings of the event were issued on an LP that became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. An eventual CD version, "Benny Goodman: Live at Carnegie Hall" (Columbia), introduced still younger listeners to the concert that began as a press agent's brainstorm and turned into legend. Most all who heard the recording (including Goodman) thought Stacy stole the show with his two-minute soliloquy -- a solo seeded with the subtle phrasings and harmonic shadings that the pianist first encountered so long before, when a 20-year-old cornet player in Davenport came aboard the riverboat to play the piano.
Mr. Nolan is editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Detective," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen &Landru).