Benny Goodman

The clarinet went to Benny because he was the smallest. In 1919 a Chicago tailor named David Goodman enrolled three of his sons in free music classes at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue, hoping music would get them out of the Maxwell Street slum. The older boys got the tuba and the trumpet. Benny, the ninth of twelve children of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw and Kaunas, was 10. From the synagogue he went to the boys' band at Hull House, then to two years with a Chicago Symphony clarinetist. He turned professional in 1921 and had a union card at 14. When he was 17, his father stepped off a streetcar and was killed by a passing car — the saddest thing, Goodman said, that ever happened in the family.

NBC put his band on the radio show Let's Dance in 1934, in a slot too late to reach the East Coast. When the show collapsed the following spring, the band went west on a cross-country tour that flopped nearly everywhere. On August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, Goodman abandoned the safe stock arrangements and opened the second set with Fletcher Henderson's charts. The room erupted. Historians date the Swing Era from that night. On January 16, 1938, he took a jazz band into Carnegie Hall, a room built for classical music, and sold it out.

Teddy Wilson joined Goodman's trio in 1936 and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton the quartet that same year, after John Hammond — Goodman's talent scout, sparring partner and, from 1942, his brother-in-law — pushed him toward both. They became one of the first integrated groups in American popular music to work in public — on stage and on the road, at a time when most clubs would not book mixed bands and Southern law forbade them. Goodman's stated reason was simply that they were the best players available. He was also a hard man to work for. Musicians called it the Ray: the stare he turned on anyone who played badly. Helen Forrest said her months in the band felt like a life sentence. He was careless about credit and money, and paid for other people's college educations in secret.

He kept commissioning music from composers who were not supposed to write for him. Béla Bartók produced Contrasts in 1938 for clarinet, violin and piano, and recorded it with Goodman and Joseph Szigeti two years later. Aaron Copland wrote him a clarinet concerto. Goodman also recorded Mozart and Weber and, at 40, rebuilt his embouchure under a classical teacher. In 1962 the State Department sent his orchestra to the Soviet Union, where he quarreled with his own sidemen the whole way — his bassist, Bill Crow, later published an account of the trip called To Russia Without Love. He gave his last concert six days before he died of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment on June 13, 1986.

Benny Goodman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Moonglow song
  His first number one record, cut by the orchestra built for the Billy Rose Music Hall 1934
• King Porter Stomp song
  Fletcher Henderson's arrangement, released July 31, 1935 — the record that broke the band open on tour 1935
• Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing) song
  The band's signature number and Gene Krupa's showcase 1938
• Contrasts other
  Commissioned from Béla Bartók and first recorded in 1940 with Bartók and Joseph Szigeti 1938
• The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert album
  Issued from acetates Goodman recovered from a closet more than a decade after the concert 1950
• Benny Goodman in Moscow album
  Recorded on the State Department tour of the Soviet Union 1962

• 1919 aged ~10 Starts free music lessons at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue in Chicago His father enrolled three sons. The older two got a tuba and a trumpet, and Benny got the clarinet.
• 1921 aged ~12 Makes his professional debut at the Central Park Theater on Chicago's West Side He joined the musicians' union at 14.
• December 9, 1926 aged 17 Cuts his first commercial record in Chicago with the Ben Pollack Orchestra The session produced When I First Met Mary, with Glenn Miller in the band.
• August 21, 1935 aged 26 The Palomar Ballroom crowd erupts in Los Angeles After an indifferent first set he switched to Fletcher Henderson's arrangements. The night is usually treated as the start of the Swing Era.
• 1936 aged ~27 Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton join the trio and the quartet One of the first integrated groups in American popular music to play for paying audiences.
• January 16, 1938 aged 28 Plays a sold-out Carnegie Hall Critic Bruce Eder later called it the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history.
• August 16, 1939 aged 30 Charlie Christian is smuggled onto the bandstand in Beverly Hills John Hammond put him there without telling Goodman. Rose Room ran for more than three quarters of an hour.
• March 20, 1942 aged 32 Marries Alice Hammond Duckworth, John Hammond's sister
• June 13, 1986 aged 77 Dies of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment He had played his last concert six days earlier.

• John Hammond 1910–1987
  Record man who signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. brother-in-law
• Aaron Copland 1900–1990
  Composer whose accessible modernist works created an enduring musical language associated with American landscapes and identity. commissioned