When Benny Goodman was Superman

[Ian Thumwood]

On the way back from football the other evening I had a conversation with my Dad about the fact that it seems almost impossible to get hold of CD's dedicated to Benny Goodman's early 1940's band which was arguably the best he ever led. When I was growing up listening to jazz as a teenager, my Dad had a double LP of this band which was absolutely terrific - especially as it was totally instrumental and didn't feature any singers which tends to make alot of the music from the Swing Era cringeworthy.

The 1930's band is always justly celebrated albeit I think alot of the recordings suffer in comparison where the charts were originally played by superior black bands like Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines or ChickWebb. When an edition of "Jazz File" analysed Artie Shaw and Goodman, I got the distinct impression that there was more favouritism towards Shaw even if the commitment to out and out jazz was wighed more heavily with Goodman's bands. I don't think that Goodman's 1940's group is fairly considered and when you appreciate that this orchestra had the likes of Sid Catlett, Charlie Christian, Cootie Williams, the exceptionl Mel Powell (who later swapped jazz for contemporary Classical Music ) etc in it as well as featuring arrangements by Eddie Sauter, this band was probably only second to Woody Herman as being the best assembled by a white band-leader. In one leap, Goodman's approach swapped the Henderson-esque approach which pretty much defined the 1930s for writers such as Sauter who effectively laid alot of the harmonic groundwork for the kind of jazz that emerged in the late 40's. It was a truly ground-breaking band and extremely proficient too, especially in comparison with other white bands like the Dorseys which weren't in the same league. For me, Goodman never really was ahead of the curve as he was in the early 40's. I think there is a tendancy to forget how great this band was:-

This isn't the only great track. Check out arrangements like "Benny Rides Again", "Mission to Moscow", "A string of pearls" (radically different from the rancid Glenn Miller version with some jivey piano from, I think, Mel Powell") Fiesta in Blue", "Moonlight in the Ganges", and the gem-like "Clarinade." However, "Superman " is pretty exceptional by any standards. Shame this band seems so little respected.

[Hornspieler]

I have over 300 tracks of Benny Goodman's band and small groups and probably about a hundred of Artie Shaw's orchestra (he included strings and even a french horn in some of his recordings) and also of his Grammercy Five.**
My interest was generated by my future brother-in-law's attempts to court my elder sister by bringing his vast collection of jazz and swing into our household
I really wanted to learn the clarinet, but there was no instrument available at the time (wartime years) and I was eventually persuaded to learn the french horn which was lying neglected in the school bandroom. Just as well, because I have found that I have absolutely no finger facility and the horn is about the only orchestral instrument where the requirement to use one's fingers is minimal - it's mostly done with the lip.

So it's nice to find a fellow Goodman fan on these boards. Not so popular in fact with his sidemen. The famous "BG ray" was well known to have been too much for some of his players, despite the fame and the money that went with it, for the players.

There's an old joke which circulated among the jazzmen in Chicago:

!st chair trumpet to colleague: "Would you like the good news or the bad news?"

Colleague: "Tell me the good news."

!st chair trumpet "Benny died"

Colleague: "That's great! What's the bad news?"

!st chair trumpet "He didn't suffer!"

Yes, it's a sick joke, but BG was hard on his players and was reputed to require his female vocalists to do more than sing.

HS

** I now have Jack's entire record collection. 78s and LPs covering the entire Goodman span, going right back to Ben Pollack's band.
Also, Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Teddy Wilson, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington etc, etc.

[Ian Thumwood]

Hornspieler

Thanks for your response.

I grew up listening to Benny Goodman because my Dad was a massive fan of his music although these days his tastes have broadened considerably to take in more contemporary big bands like Bobby Sanabria, Hamilton-Clayton and countless lesser known American bands. From many fan's perspective, benny Goodman got there first although it doesn't take long to appreciate just how much he benefited from the likes of the Henderson brothers, Mundy and Sampson who had cut their teeth with jazz writing elsewhere during umuch of the late 20's and tirties. As you state, even Goodman had benefited from playing in a more jazz-orientated group led by Ben Pollack.

It's odd that the band he led in the early forties is so over-looked especially as it was a tighter band than the thirties band which was marred by a poor ryhthm section that often became disengaged with the reeds and horns. The bassist and drummer are usually heavily criticised these days and I don't think that the early work by Gene Krupa merits the adulation it received at the time. (Just listen to the Fletcher Henderson arrangements played by Henderson himself to see how the piano / bass / piano /drums could work together better.) The later band doesn't really suffer like this and I recall reading an account about when he had Catlett and Christian in the band at one time, Goodman was unable to control the rhythm section as it took control of the band. Apparently white audiences were supposed to be aghast at Catlett's drumming ability as it wasn't exactly typcial for white bands to have drummers who were out and out jazz musicians and the fact that th attention was diverted from Goodman's clarient playing ultimately cost him his job.

For me, the early 40's band was Goodman's best. I don't think that Artie Shaw ever got anywhere near this group as a credible jazz organisation even if he later pursued a similar "modernist" course once he had dispensed with the strings. By the advent of Bop, Goodman was still flirting with the current trends within jazz bu his heart wasn't in it. It always seemed strange that Goodman then reverted back to his earlier repertoire for the balance of his career (albeit it was a pretty large repertoire!) and only infrequently employed the more contemporary arrangers like Tadd Dameron and Gil Evans to write charts. In the case of the latter, I don't think the charts ever got performed. I also read somewhere that Goodman also used to edit Sauter's charts where he felt they might have been too challenging or too long. However, what did get recorded for posterity is of excpetional quality and very much a pointer towards the way that jazz writing would develop in to the 1950's.

[Ian Thumwood]

This also seems a pretty impressive chart:-

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

always a fan of both Shaw and Goodman .... these days prefer Shaw and love his BeBop Band just before he gave it all up for good ... and wrote novels farmed and enjoyed life ... a hero

!

[and Helen Forrest was great with both]

[Hornspieler]

always a fan of both Shaw and Goodman .... these days prefer Shaw and love his BeBop Band just before he gave it all up for good ... and wrote novels farmed and enjoyed life ... a hero

!

[and Helen Forrest was great with both]

I have two recordings of Artie's Blues Pts 1 and 2.

The well-known HMV disk featuring Billy Butterfield, Johnny Guarnierie etc and a Parlophone R 2790 featuring Jonny Best, Tom di Carlo (Tpts) Harry Rodgers, George Orus (Trb.), Les Robins, Hank Freeman, Tony Pastor (Sax) Les Burness (Pno) Al Avalon (Gtr) Cuff Leeman (Dms) Ben Ginsberg (Bs) and, of course, Artie Shaw.

Different, but in some ways more interesting. PM me if you are interested.

HS

[Ian Thumwood]

Calum / Hornspieler

I very much like Artie Shaw too and there is a lot to admire about his later output which was distinctly modernist. The was a great clip you posted and not a chart I've hear before. Shaw really managed to make his orchestras play music that went well beyond the call and response riffs so many of the lesser bands. I thought that this track really demonstrated the musicality of that band even if the rhythm section didn't really grasp Latin rhythm - as I've argued before, this itself is a real idiosyncratic genre with it's own League Table of artists. I think a Cuban band would have nailed the Montuno much better than Shaw's group.

I'm familiar with the 2-part version of "The Blues" which was arranged by the Afro-American Classical composer William Grant Still. If anyone used strings to better effect in a jazz / Swing context than Shaw in that era then I haven't heard the record. However, he was equally capable of producing such cheese as the arrangement of "Frenesi" - something Goodman would never have stooped so low to record. This record is a nausiating in my opinion as anything produced by Glenn Miller.

As a huge fan of big bands from this era, I would stand by my assessment of Goodman's band which neatly illustrates just how fast the music was developing at this time and also shows just how much the Eddie Sauter charts set the bedrock for a lot of arranging in the next 10-15 years. He also worked for Shaw of course. I would have to say that I am still more enthusiastic for Goodman and think that it has been fashionable to over compensate in arguing the merits of Shaw's work. Granted that the Grammercy Five were entertaining with Guanieri on harpsichord and the later editions with Hanks Jones and Dodo Marmorosa are hugely satisfying, the corpus of work produced by Goodman's trios , quartets and sextet with Charlie Christian is of such towering brilliance that Shaw's work with smaller ensembles seems inferior in comparison, as goos as the later stuff is. I would argue that there were few musicians as "musical" in the late 30's as Goodman, Wilson, Christian and Hampton and even if you add some of the other main players from this era like Hawkins, Tatum, Eldrigde and Allen who were never employed by Goodman, it is also worth noting that there are some very good rehearsal sides with a Goodman group which include Lester Young as well as Charlie Christian.

The point of my thread was really to argue that the imblance needs to be addressed and credit given to Goodman in fronting a band which was defining a new approach to big bands in the early forties that both Shaw and Woody Herman could built upon. For me, Herman's band was hugely exceptional and nicely fits into the slot between Modernistic Swing and Bebop . Without Goodman, I don't think Herman could have achieved this. equally interesting is to contrast the varying fortunes in the 1940's of those bands upon whom Goodman modelled his 1930's group. As much as I love Fletcher Henderson, by 1940 I think he style of arranging had become out of date and his bands throughout the 40's suffered from a poor reputation amongst fans and especially musicians. ( Henderson had difficulty employing some of the top musicians because of this even though the line up inlcuded future stars like Art Blakey and Sun Ra.) Chick Webb died around 1939 but I feel that as good as his band was, it is difficult to see how it would have embraced the changes of the forties especially as Webb's own drumming style was starting to sound anachronistic in the end despite his amazing talent and ability to drive a band. Conversely, Earl Hines seemed to move with the times , ditching hte Jummy Mundy charts, employing strings for a time and ultlimately employing the likes od Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as well as more forward looking writers like Jerry Valentine.

To my ears, big bands became more advanced in two ways during the forties. The first was by employing more "advanced" writers who were schooled in European classical music or who wanted to broaden the language of the music beyond riffs and pop music. Secondly, the way rhythm sections functioned was revolutionised by Count Basie's band which was as fundemental in changing the way that the groove worked in jazz as Parker later helped change the harmonic language. For me, Goodman embraced both these changes yet little attention is given to his early 40's band as is to Shaw's groups and the music is somewhat forgotten in favour of "Don't be that way", "Stompin' at the savoy" or "Sing, sing , sing."

[Ivor Cockburn]

If your fingers don't work well, there's always trombone,and its cheaper.