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Benny Goodman
For a kid who liked jazz, Chicago was a great town to grow up in. Musicians had begun working their way north from New Orleans about the turn of the century, and by the early 1920s giants like "Jellyroll" Morton, Sidney Bechet, "King" Oliver and Louis Armstrong were playing in Chicago and making history.
Kids who paid attention to this development were going to make history themselves in a few more years - Bud Freeman, Davie Tough, Eddie Condon, Milt Mesirow (Mezz Mezzrow), Gene Krupa, "Muggsy" Spanier, Jimmy McPartland, Jess Stacy - and a kid in short pants who played the clarinet.
Benny Goodman was only 10 when he first picked up a clarinet. Only a year or so later he was doing Ted Lewis imitations for pocket money. At 14 he was in a band that featured the legendary Bix Beiderbecke. By the time he was 16 he was recognized as a "comer" as far away as the west coast and was asked to join a California-based band led by another Chicago boy, Ben Pollack.
Goodman played with Pollack's band for the next four years. His earliest recording was made with Pollack, but he was also recording under his own name in Chicago and New York, where the band had migrated from the west coast. In 1929, when he was just 20, Benny struck out on his own to become a typical New York freelance musician, playing studio dates, leading a pit orchestra, making himself a seasoned professional. Continue reading...
"MOONGLOW" Benny Goodman, clarinet; Lionel Hampton, vibes; Teddy Wilson, piano; Gene Krupa, drums. With George Duvivier on bass.
Reginald Kell delivered a lecture on the principles of clarinet playing recently under the auspices of Boosey & Hawkes which, apart from its intrinsic interest, threw some light on to Benny Goodman, the man behind the public mask. Leslie Evans was there to report.
Kell, Principal Clarinet with the Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic and Philharmonia orchestras and the only British musician chosen by Toscanini to play with the Lucerne Festival orchestra has numbered among his pupils Benny Goodman, Peanuts Hucko and Jose Ferrer.
Benny Goodman changed his complete clarinet embouchure, and altered his fingering and tonguing methods after he had already been acclaimed all over the world as the finest jazz player on clarinet of the Swing era.
This astonishing information was disclosed by Reginald Kell, the brilliant international principal clarinettist and concert soloist, during his recent lecture at the Russell Hotel, London, organised by Messrs. Boosey and Hawkes. Continue reading...
Benny Goodman
