Out Of The Comfort Zone: Benny Goodman - Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)

[with special emphasis on the "Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert" version]

[This is the first of the third and last series of occasional write-ups, currently confined to the Substack blog: artists from genres only tangentially related, or even altogether unrelated, to the rock and pop scene I have covered for many years. Treat this as a bunch of amusing dilettantish thoughts, with no pretense of deep understanding or anything - I am only going to cover pieces that genuinely made a profound impression on me one way or another, in the faint hope that they might also serve as bridges to different musical landscapes for somebody else.]

Benny Goodman: Sing Sing Sing (With A Swing)

[with special emphasis on the "Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert" version]

One thing that has occasionally puzzled me about the (vague-but-real) «jazz canon» was what you might call its quite transparent unfriendliness to neophytes. If some pop/rock fans, for instance, wish to expand their horizons to European classical music, chances are that, upon asking for critical advice, they shall be directed first to the likes of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven rather than the complex experimentation of 21st century greats from Stravinsky to Berg to Shostakovich to Ligeti — which is not only the compassionate thing to do, but also the intelligent one, as «understanding» 21st century classical music is essentially futile without first learning some of those basic musical rules that it so desperately tried to break. Or if you take pop / rock music itself — well, you’ll probably want to wait a bit before introducing your zoomer kid to the delights of the Velvet Underground or Frank Zappa, stalling him with some Beatles or some Pink Floyd (Dark Side-era Pink Floyd, of course, not the early Syd Barrett stuff) instead. Naturally, those «accessibility standards» are not universal, and some people are always more adventurous than others from the get-go, but we should not expect people to be adventurous by default. People are weak. Have pity on the people.

Conversely, when it comes to jazz, a question such as "I totally know nothing about jazz but would really like to get into it, where do I start?" is more likely than not to elicit answers where such names would be dropped as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus — maybe going about as far back as Charlie Parker for the birth of the bebop age, but also maybe going as far forward as Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy, which is more or less the equivalent of saying "you want to start off with the very best that rock music has to offer? well, there’s this nice little record I know called Trout Mask Replica, and don’t forget to bring the whole family and the neighbors, too, it’s an unforgettable collective experience".

All right, so maybe this last bit is quite an exaggeration, but the fact remains that if we take the entire time period during which jazz music retained its cultural vitality (which I’d define as spanning a period of approximately six decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, before becoming ensconced in its own «niche» along with classical music), the probability is quite high that most people will be consistently listening to post-1945 rather than pre-1945 jazz music — with Miles and Coltrane and Mingus spending ten times as much time on your playlists than Armstrong or Ellington; and this despite the fact that most of the basic rules and laws of jazz music had been well established, and most of the classic jazz numbers had been properly written, before those guys had a chance to make their own marks. They constituted the «new wave» of jazz music; the «classic rock» stage of it was invented, developed, and perfected by their predecessors.

Three obvious and well-interconnected reasons explain — if not fully justify — this skewed perspective. One, most of the early jazz records can be difficult to listen to in the present day or age, simply due to the inferior sound quality. From this point of view, classical music has a tremendous advantage since nobody is forcing you to listen to pre-war recordings of Mozart or Beethoven — you can always choose such greats as Martha Argerich or Gidon Kremer over Alfred Cortot or Jascha Heifetz without feeling yourself robbed of the essence of the played pieces. But nobody is going to re-record those classic Armstrong or Ellington sides in the exact same spirit as the originals.

Two, all of that music was recorded in the pre-LP era, and while in the modern era of playlists it may seem that we are once again returning to the basic state in which music is judged by individual songs / compositions rather than collections, the «album» still remains the most basic unit of musical production, want it or not. So, nobody asks the question «what is your favorite collection of jazz A-sides?», everybody asks «what is your favorite jazz album», and then what do you answer? Kind Of Blue. A Love Supreme. The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady. Kind of easier to pronounce than The Complete Savoy & Dial Master Takes By Charlie Parker, isn’t it? And from a purely psychological-associative angle, there might be this impression that a real music artist ain’t really a real music artist unless he’s got a strong batch of LPs in his portfolio, preferably with memorable front sleeves and all that.

Finally and most importantly, there is a sense of purpose. Most musical genres, as we know, arose for «pragmatic» rather than «artistic» goals, and jazz was no different — its original function was to entertain, providing energetic fuel for all those Charlestons and Foxtrots in the bowels of Prohibition-era speakeasies, except for an occasional slow interlude or two where it could be used for more romantic aims. It was not really until the arrival of bebop that this conception began to seriously change — and some might, in fact, argue that it was precisely that change which ultimately led to the creative death of jazz, transforming it from proper «music of the masses» to an elitist artistic form that lost its swarming fan base and became impotent due to way too much inbreeding (sorry, modern jazz fans, but that figure of approximately 1% of jazz’s share in the global streaming market is quite telling in itself — Taylor Swift alone is more listened to today than the entire legacy of jazz, as horrendous as that may seem). On the other hand, before killing itself, jazz did produce a large number of artistic masterpieces made for intense listening rather than pure entertainment. Thus, people might be inclined to dismiss early jazz as essentially ballroom fluff, mainly fit for soundtracks to gangster movies on the Roaring Twenties, and believe that «serious» jazz did not even exist until Miles Davis invented it with Kind Of Blue or something like that.

These three reasons, put together, mean that there is absolutely nothing you or I could ever do to change that perspective even if we really wanted to (and I’m not sure any of us would like to devote any significant part of our lives to that endeavor). But what we can do is give the pre-war jazz scene an occasional public pat on the back, even if we are already separated from it for more than a century, making it more and more difficult to recreate anything like the original vibes it sent through radio waves, grammophone needles, underground clubs, and — on occasion — respectable concert halls.

And speaking of concert halls, no better choice could be made for the first «pat» than a selection from Benny Goodman’s January 16, 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, which is sometimes described as "the single most important jazz concert in history" (Bruce Eder); at the very least, it was the first big band jazz concert ever played at Carnegie Hall, and it did wonders for jazz being accepted as a «serious» musical genre after two decades of respectable music critics looking at it as the musical equivalent of comic books (well, more or less). While the recording of the show, somewhat miraculously preserved in the archives and not officially released until 1950, predictably suffers from much worse quality than Goodman’s studio recordings from the same time, it is not unlistenable — and being one of the very, very few actually live big band recordings from the peak era of big bands, it is one of the very, very few historical documents that lets us better understand the sheer unstoppable power of the mighty swing vibe, as compared to the inevitably more restrained impact of the studio sides.

Poor Benny Goodman, too, I might add, tends to get the short side of the stick these days even in the context of occasional glowing perspectives on pre-war jazz — having had the misfortune of being white, Jewish, and Chicago-born rather than black and New Orleanian, he is sometimes unjustly lumped in with the likes of Paul Whiteman and other «light-jazz» white entertainers, when, in fact, at his best he could rival anybody both in terms of innovation and energetic spirit (or is that spiritual energy?), while also towering over most of the competition in terms of sheer musical discipline (though that, come to think of it, is not always necessarily a good thing). We can always pout, of course, about how unjust it was to have Benny Goodman and not Armstrong, Ellington, or even a lesser, but still New Orleanian figure like Henry ‘Red’ Allen, to serve as jazz music’s first honorary ambassador to Carnegie Hall — but this was 1938, for God’s sake, and already the fact that Benny’s big band was quite well-integrated and included such African-American luminaries as Teddy Wilson (piano), Lionel Hampton (vibraphone), and Lester Young (tenor sax), deserves to be celebrated rather than deplored.

The entire performance out there, celebrating the more than 20-year old story of the young and muscular jazz genre, was fabulous, but Benny saved the best for last: a sprawling 12-minute rendition of Louis Prima’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)’, every bit as emblematic of the swing era as Count Basie’s ‘One O’Clock Jump’ (which they used to introduce the show) but also, I believe, much better connected in spirit and structure with the various forms of rock’n’roll music that followed — which is why, presumably, I keep getting drawn back to it, over and over again, more than to any other recording from the same era. For all its coolness and greatness, pre-war entertainment-oriented jazz music can feel monotonous and samey, especially if you ever decide to listen to it in large quantities at once — not so with ‘Sing Sing Sing’, which is an immediate and glaring stand-out if there ever was one.

The original ‘Sing Sing Sing’ was first written and recorded by Louis Prima with his New Orleans Gang, and while few people remember it today, it did plant a certain seed of exceptionality even in its original, relatively humble incarnation. The lyrics were trifling (which is why most everybody just covered it as an instrumental); Prima’s trumpet soloing was part fun, part baffling; but most importantly, it was all about the beat — for the first five seconds, all you hear is that bombastic, «tribal» drum pulse, placing much more emphasis than was common on the bass rather than the snare. Even if drummer Stan King keeps the same pattern tight and minimalistic and repetitive throughout the four minutes of the song, it somehow feels more mystifying and enchanting than everything else that goes on around — in fact, the rather hokey ooh-hoo waa-hoo backing vocals cheesify the atmosphere rather than intensify it, and the best part of the recording starts around 1:58 when everybody shuts up and it turns into a trumpet vs. drum duel. (And even then the drums win because the trumpet improvisation feels weak, as if Prima felt uncertain about which lines would go better with that beat and just tried out every single item on the shelf in the vain hope that sometimes it would click.)

When Goodman’s band went into one of the Hollywood studios to record the song for themselves on July 6, 1937, the only thing that survived more or less intact was the drum beat — Stan King’s jungle sound just so happened to catch the attention of Gene Krupa, the Founding Father of the Drum Ego movement. Legend has it that he became so addicted to the rhythm that he simply wouldn’t stop when the song ended, so Benny had to pick up his clarinet and noodle along, and then they kind of developed the rest of their version as they went along, also incorporating elements from the previously recorded novelty number ‘Christopher Columbus’ (a common standard from 1936, done by Fletcher Henderson and Fats Waller, among other people).

For all the overall excellence of the brass section on the recording — Goodman’s band is the textbook definition of disciplined unity, and the solos are fantastic as well — this is first and foremost a drummer’s paradise. Compare Fletcher Henderson’s version, for instance: short, entertaining, to the point, but losing the jungle beat — this is like somebody covering ‘Satisfaction’ and leaving out the fuzzy guitar riff altogether. (Well, Otis Redding kinda did just that, but he ended up turning the song into something completely different anyway). Krupa sets the tone for the song, then softens the pulse a bit without, however, getting off that bass drum — then acting as unofficial «master of ceremonies» for the entire performance, returning to the thunderous patterns in between each section, each mood change, each solo turn, with the drum breaks steadily growing longer until they turn into a veritable drum solo before the end of Part 1. And then there’s the second part on the second side of the single to look up to.

I’m pretty sure ‘Sing Sing Sing’ was not the very first instance when a long composition was split up in two parts for a single release — there had definitely been precedents with blues numbers, and on the jazz scene Ellington did this with ‘Tiger Rag’ back in 1929, among other examples — but it was a first for Benny in person, and, additionally, it did not sound like «oh, well, the song is over but we love it so much, we’ll just do a few more variations on the melody as an addendum». It’s a wholesome nine-minute piece of music in which the first half is more about group playing and the second half is more about trumpet, sax, and clarinet soloing, giving each side of the single an identity of its own but just as efficiently functioning as a single unit — as usual, it is nice to witness the artistic mind working around the technical limitations of the medium to make them look like they’re actually enhancing the artistry. But it’s even nicer to see the bursting out of something grand and ambitious, smoothly and naturally flowing out of an originally unpretentious form of dance entertainment: Goodman and his orchestra are doing the same kind of thing for jazz here as Bach did for the gavottes and the menuets, or as the art-rockers would be doing for pop music thirty years later.

The definitive available version of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, of course, remains the Carnegie Hall performance from half a year later. Structurally, it remains more or less the same (with one important exception), but everything, as befits a truly inspired live performance, is tightened up a notch: the tempo is slightly faster, the brass melodies are slightly sharper, and, most importantly, Krupa’s jungle beat is taken about as far out as drum work was thought possible in those pre-Keith Moon days. Gene’s tactics are more varied and more wild in the live setting, as he shows himself master of the loud-quiet dynamics and even adapts his patterns to each of the soloists stepping up — more brash bombast for the correspondingly brash trumpet solo, for instance, but steadier and softer for Benny’s own quietly restrained clarinet solo.

Then there’s the famous incident of how, somewhat unexpectedly, Goodman decided to extend the song by signaling pianist Jess Stacy to come in with an improvised solo of his own (this, together with the extended drum solo bits from Krupa, is primarily why the performance is longer than the studio counterpart by about three minutes). That little bit is often considered as Stacy’s crowning moment of piano glory, and it’s easy to see why: you do not really imagine the relative equivalent of a mix of a Chopin ballad and a Debussy impressionist piece as being fit to conclude a sweaty, ass-kicking dance tune set to a jungle beat, but Stacy somehow manages to fit these classical touches into the song’s swing mood, and by doing so, adds a whole new dimension — completing the gradual transformation of the number into a sort of «cosmic epic» anthem for the genre.

And then, of course, there are the final twenty seconds of that performance — possibly the single greatest twenty seconds in big band jazz ever played, a frenetic duel between Krupa, who goes all out on his skins (a lesser man would have dropped dead from those twenty seconds alone) and the entire brass section which decides, for that one short moment, that it is not going to be outdone by one arrogant Polack. That tiny little coda has every bit as much collective energy going on, if not more so, than any such spectacles we are familiar with in the world of classic rock — from Santana’s ‘Soul Sacrifice’ to the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ — and somehow they did it without a single set of Marshall amplifiers, too.

Unfortunately, the Carnegie Hall concert could not be filmed (it’s pretty much a miracle that it could be recorded), but at least we can see an approximation of this from a brief snippet of Goodman’s orchestra as preserved in the film Hollywood Hotel (1937) — there are, of course, later, more comprehensive video performances both from Benny and from Gene Krupa’s own band, but they are predictably less adrenaline-soaked than the way it used to be when those sounds were still fresh and dazzling, and when Krupa was at the very peak of his exuberant wildness, pretty much single-handedly creating the classic trope of «Animal Drummer». (For those who have not yet had the pleasure, be sure to check Howard Hawks’ classic Ball Of Fire from 1941 — the ‘Drum Boogie’ sequence alone is worth its weight in gold, not to mention a whole lot of sharp screwball fun and Barbara Stanwyck at her best as a cinematic bonus).

Benny himself would, of course, be associated with the composition and continue to perform it for most of his life: even such a version as captured on his twilight-year Live In Hamburg album from 1981 still manages to swing reasonably well (with some little-known Danish drummer at the wheel) — but, of course, it is no longer the unstoppable juggernaut that it used to be back in those years where this kind of the music was the real shit. And while I did, just out of sheer curiosity, check several different versions of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ as covered by more modern jazz ensembles, the absolute majority of them screamed «professionalism» and «discipline» and «tribute» at me, rather than the much-desired ideal blend of the Apollonian with the Dionysian that makes those 1930s’ records so blissful. (For a total hoot, check out this predictably technically impeccable, predictably stiff-as-a-board rendition by the Jazz Ambassadors of The United States Army Field Band, not forgetting the astute comments by YouTube viewers — my favorite is: «Drummer: Permission to swing, sir! Leader: Denied. As you were, sergeant».)

I do have to add, from a more general perspective, that Goodman had an extremely prolific recording career even by the average standards of successful jazz musicians — the Chronological Classics series alone, stretching from 1928 to 1952, covers almost 40 hours’ worth of those three-minute sides (and that is not to mention three more decades of his late-period career), and I am meaninglessly proud to say I have listened to every single one of them — and, somewhat passively, enjoyed each and every one through the sheer tightness and classiness of playing. But once you get the vibe, of course, most of the tracks end up becoming more or less interchangeable, especially considering that Benny’s general style (unlike that of, say, Coleman Hawkins) did not change that much through the years. ‘Sing Sing Sing’ is about as far out as he ever got to push the swing formula — but in doing so, he created a masterpiece whose reckless, break-all-boundaries joie de vivre has never really been exactly replicated either by his own contemporaries or whoever came later. Oh yes, and at least (let’s put it this way) for sheer therapeutic purposes I’ll take this Carnegie Hall explosion over any single Miles Davis or John Coltrane track ever recorded. Ever. «Stick this in your fuse box», as the late great Bon Scott would say.