Joint Rocked

Fourteen years ago, about the time Benny Goodman was doing imitations of Ted Lewis in a Chicago vaudeville house, Paul Whiteman & band gave a jazz concert in Manhattan's Aeolian Hall. What it lacked in sincerity as a strictly jazz presentation, it made up in salesmanship, for swing music was launched on a profitable era. Last week, swing having been to the dog house and back as far as national appreciation is concerned, Benny Goodman, a far more serious artist than Mr. Whiteman and one of the principal reasons that swing came back, gave a concert in Carnegie Hall.* Whiteman had played there, too, but this was different.

When fans hear Benny Goodman's disciplined but unfettered band play on a phonograph or the radio, they tap their feet. When they listen to him from a dance floor, they shake all over. When they listen to him while sitting in large numbers in an auditorium, they are likely to cut up rough. Last spring when Goodman played Manhattan's Paramount movie theatre, the folks got to running up and down in the aisles and extra police were called out. Something like this took place in the late Mr. Andrew Carnegie's polite plaster shrine last Sunday night.

What the Goodman concert amounted to was 14 foxtrots, some new, some classics like Sensation Rag and I'm Comin' Virginia, most of which the Goodman band had recorded. Also played was the celebrated set piece Sing, Sing, Sing, notable for demoniac Gfene Krupa's imperious drum beat and Teddy Wilson's rippling piano. But the event of the evening was the "jam session," effacingly noted as "no doubt the greatest contradiction a swing program could offer," but in effect a blaring success. Amiable Mr. Goodman seated himself in his reed section, his professional spectacles gleaming, and Count Basic began thumping a blues on the piano. For two or three choruses it looked as though the boys were not going to get off. Then the afflatus descended, Goodman took a chorus, Trumpeter Harry James cut one and the whole group swung out. The audience of 3,000, infected, pounded its feet in unison. In the best and truest sense, the joint actually was rocking.

Those who could still take it made an historic evening of it by following part of the Goodman band up to Harlem to hear Count Basie's boys battle hunchbacked Chick Webb's men at the Savoy Ballroom.

*Presented by Sol Hurok, sometime entrepreneur of Monte Carlo Ballet Russe, Shan-Kar, Schumann-Heink, Chaliapin, Pavlova, Isadora Duncan.

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