Jazzmen off Beat

Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington and Benjamin David ("Benny"') Goodman are the ablest U. S. jazz band leaders now shaking a stick. Both are hard-working and musicianly; both are money-making veterans. Last week the Duke and Benny both made off-beat appearances.

>Duke Ellington, with his 15-piece orchestra and two singers (Ivie Anderson and Herbie Jeffrey), played for two and a half hours in Colgate University's Memorial Chapel at Hamilton. N. Y. It was the first time that a major U. S. college had ever put a jazz band on its official concert course. Colgate made some pretence that the Duke's performance was--ah--cultural. But to 1,450 students, faculty members and townspeople who crowded the chapel, no such excuse was necessary. The audience would have rocked the joint, had not the Colgate Maroon warned beforehand that stamping might jar loose the three-and-a-half-ton ceiling of the chapel.

>Benny Goodman made a long-heralded appearance in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall as clarinet soloist with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in Mozart's rippling Concerto in A Major, Debussy's First Rhapsody. No one should have been surprised. Trained in his youth by a Chicago Symphony clarinetist, Franz Schoepp, Benny Goodman can tootle with the two or three best in the world. Critics could find little fault with his playing of Mozart and Debussy--unless it was a slight excess of refinement and dignity.

Benny Goodman wants to commission clarinet works by such contemporaries as Prokofieff, William Walton, Aaron Copland. But last week he was busy with his new orchestra. When he was ill last summer with sciatica, for which he underwent an operation at the Mayo Clinic, Goodman disbanded his men, starting rumors that he was through. The new 15-man band, now to be heard on Columbia records, has a new, richer style, which Benny Goodman says is not swing. But it is still Goodman.

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