Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Part 3: Was Benny Goodman the King of Swing?
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| Benny Goodman Quartet: Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Goodman and Gene Krupa |
In addition to Ellison’s remarks on influence in jazz, discussed in Part 2, a key motivator for exploring this topic resulted from my experience listening to the Benny Goodman small group sessions of the 30s over the course of the last several months. I wanted to investigate the music of Charlie Christian, the seminal figure who really established the electric guitar in jazz, and some of his greatest recordings were with the Benny Goodman, so I started there. Wow. What great listening! Assured, melodic, and swinging, with great chops all around. Why had I not listened to more Goodman? Well, that's easy. It's because I myself fell victim to the white-player-as-inferior-usurper fallacy. That is, because America was as racist as it was then, and because so many black musicians have gotten a raw deal, then any famous white player must, by definition, be a fraud.
I have hinted at the flawless-yet-deep nature of Goodman's playing. But let us state for the record that Goodman led the first integrated musical group of the time. In his group were the black musicians Lionel Hampton on vibes and Teddy Wilson on piano. The legendary Gene Krupa played drums. You can overcome the racial prejudices or assumptions of the wider culture when you focus on a common goal -- in this case making tremendous (swinging) music. Or, this is my belief anyway, one not shared today among the intelligentsia. That's why it needs to be said.
Teddy Wilson was also the pianist for Billie Holiday for her greatest works, recorded on Columbia Records during the mid-to-late 30s. Once, when a colleague of mine, a black woman around my age, actually, asked me what she should listen to to understand swing better, I said, without hesitation, Billie Holiday on Columbia in the 30s. I'll make two points here. Teddy Wilson played with the best ever, Lady Day, and he also enjoyed a long association with Goodman, an association that was anything but a sell-out gesture. It actually was an informal jam session with Wilson and Goodman that was witnessed by the legendary producer John Hammond that led to the signing of the Goodman-Wilson small group to Columbia in 1935. So Wilson's relationship predated his public work with Goodman. He wasn't in it for the money, though I'm sure he enjoyed it when it came.
Secondly, it's worth considering that Goodman and Holiday both were on Columbia, a premier label, then as now. It wasn't like the suits wanted to hype Goodman and hide Holiday away. You see, Hammond was a true connoisseur who also worked at the highest levels of the industry. It was he who signed Holiday. Later he would sign both Dylan and Springsteen when they were largely unknown. But if you parse it, Holiday was probably always the hipsters' choice, with her bluesier sound, and Goodman the more mainstream option, not least because of his identity as the leader of an insanely popular big band.
And this is a key point. The word "jazz" then was synonymous with big band music, which was the popular music of the day. It didn't mean anything like we think of it now, defined by seminal "artists" like Miles and Monk and Trane and Mingus, who were not averse to including "difficult" aspects in their work. Jazz just meant anything that loosely derived in varying degrees from the African American tradition, and which in some cases emphasized sounds that appealed to a large, mostly white audience. Big band wasn't a genre that had any purity aspect to it. It's like pop music is now. It just was. And some pop music is harder, some of it is funkier, some of it is stupider, some of it is rootsier, some of it more banal, and some of it is more esoteric, appreciated by the, ahem, more discerning among us.
Also, now as then, none of this means that the popularity of a white musician or group, of necessity, is somehow "watered down." Just look at the Stones at their best, or later on, Eminem. I recently was alerted to how this phenomenon manifested back in the swing era. I was listening to The Complete Savory Collection, which features live radio performances from a who's who of top performers of the swing years, black and white, from Fats Waller and Count Basie to Glenn Miller and Jack Teagarden. Actually, just looking at the playlist now, I see that most of the bands are black. At any rate, I play it on shuffle, so it's interesting to observe when it is that the ears perk up. One such occasion was when Glenn Miller's hit "Tuxedo Junction" came on. Damn, I thought, that track is funky. I could hardly believe it, since my perceptions had been shaped by the unbelievably anodyne Glenn Miller biopic starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson. Thus biased, if I hadn't used the shuffle option, I would never have clicked on any of the Glenn Miller cuts at all.
So: was Benny Goodman the King of Swing? Not to him, I'm sure. Said honorific was actually the invention of a flack at Time Magazine in 1937. Thus, as history has rolled forth into our more enlightened era, people look back and say, Who the hell did he think was? He thought he was better than Count Basie of Duke Ellington? What an arrogant, appropriating asshole! For the record, in an interview from the 1950s, Miles Davis himself, who only ever called 'em like he saw 'em and censored himself for no man, expressed admiration for Goodman. Crucially, when the Goodman band made the first-ever performance of a jazz band at Carnegie Hall, in 1938, they were joined by members of the Ellington and Basie bands. Maybe it always was going to take a white band to crack that barrier. I'm not saying there was no racial bias at the time; of course there was. But Goodman, like any true musician, or true listener even, was motivated by love and respect for the art form itself, and was not interested in taking credit for this great music which would not exist if not for the ever-evolving creative culture of black Americans.
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