The History of Jazz (32 page)

Goodman’s next major discovery, Lionel Hampton, was in the rare position of not replacing anyone. Not only was his principal instrument, the vibraphone, new to the Goodman band, but it was relatively unknown in the jazz world as a whole. Hampton stands out as the innovator who took what was a quasi-novelty sound— essentially a high-tech xylophone with added vibrato effect—and transformed it into a mainstream jazz instrument. Adrian Rollini had performed on the vibraphone in earlier years, and Red Norvo had experimented with it, albeit in private, as early as 1928, but Hampton’s work in the context of the Goodman combo gave the “vibes” (as it eventually came to be known) a new level of legitimacy. Of course, Hampton’s energy, inventiveness, enthusiasm, and sheer sense of swing also had much to do with this. His was a style built on abundance: long loping lines, blistering runs of sixteenth notes, baroque ornamentations, all accompanied by an undercurrent of grunting and humming from above. Few figures of the prebop era, with the obvious exception of Art Tatum (with whom the vibraphonist later jousted in a session of note-filled excesses), could squeeze more into a sixteen-bar solo than Hampton. In the battle of form versus content, the latter always won when this seminal figure was on stage.

During his apprenticeship years in Los Angeles, Hampton adopted various bandstand personas before establishing himself as the vibraphonist par excellence: his first record date, from 1924, finds him on drums, and over the next several years he tried his hand at piano (“Jelly Roll Morton had given me a few lessons and I’d listened to every record Earl Hines ever made”) and singing (“I imitate Louis Armstrong. … I used to go out on a winter night with no coat on, hoping to get laryngitis so I could sound like Louis”). Armstrong himself stepped in to steer Hampton to the instrument that would bring him lasting fame. During a 1930 Armstrong session conducted at the NBC studio in Los Angeles, the trumpeter suggested that Hampton try his hand at an unusual mallet instrument sitting in the corner of the room. Invented only a few years earlier by the Deagan Company, the vibraphone was the result of an inspired decision to attach rotating fans, powered by an electric motor, in the resonator tubes hung below xylophone-like metal bars, thus creating a modernistic (at least in those halcyon days of acoustic sound) vibrato effect. “It hadn’t been used for anything except incidental chime notes—the intermission signals on radio programs,” Hampton later explained.
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This casual encounter led to a new career for the twenty-two-year-old artist, but his big break came when Goodman stopped by, during a visit to Los Angeles in August 1936, to hear Hampton’s band at the Paradise Nightclub. Impressed by the proceedings, Goodman took out his clarinet and jammed with the band all night, finally breaking at dawn. The following evening, Goodman returned, this time bringing Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa. Soon this same foursome would be known as the Benny Goodman Quartet. In November, Hampton joined Goodman full time, initially participating as a member of the clarinetist’s combo, and later breaking the color barrier in the big band in March 1938, when Hampton filled in on drums after Krupa’s departure. The Goodman relationship would last until 1940 when Hampton, like so many other of the clarinetist’s protégés, left to lead his own band.

Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert from 1938 remains the crowning glory of this formative period in the clarinetist’s career. With most of his early “discoveries” on hand—Krupa, Wilson, Hampton, James, Stacy, Elman—Goodman was poised to make the most of this highly publicized performance. If that were not enough, many of the leading players from the Ellington and Basie bands were also featured during the marathon concert. The unlikely hero of the affair proved to be Stacy, who contributed a luminous piano solo at the close of “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Yet the cultural significance of this concert outweighed any purely musical considerations. A watershed event, the Carnegie Hall concert represented a coming of age for jazz: not only accepted, it was all but venerated under the auspices of this symbolic home of American concert music. This was a new experience—for both jazz fans and the players themselves. “How long do you want for intermission?” Goodman was asked before the performance. “I dunno,” he replied. “How much does Toscanini have?”

But just as telling, the concert signaled a newfound fascination with jazz as a historical phenomenon. The program that evening consciously presented a chronology of the music’s evolution, reaching back to the ragtime era and offering tributes to Beiderbecke and Armstrong in addition to featuring a selection of swing favorites. Later that year, Hammond would amplify on this same approach in his first “Spirituals to Swing” concert, also presented at Carnegie Hall. Over the next few years, this emerging sense of historical perspective would transform the jazz world, as witnessed by an outpouring of jazz writing and research, a revival of early New Orleans and Chicago styles, and, above all, a new attitude among fans and musicians, one that focused on discerning progressive and regressive trends—a quasi-Darwinian assessment of improvisational idioms—among the panoply of bands and soloists that made up the jazz world.

Given this fascination with the past, who would have expected the forward-looking moves Goodman would make in the months following the Carnegie Hall concert? Then again perhaps Goodman himself was caught up in the emerging view of jazz as a series of progressively more modern conceptions. In any event, Goodman was now at the start of his experimental phase, marked by a new type of talent drawn into the band—Charlie Christian, Mel Powell, Eddie Sauter—a phase that would culminate some years later in Goodman’s surprising, if short-lived, attempt to transform his group into a bebop ensemble. This same period saw Goodman make important excursions into contemporary classical music, set off by his decision to commission Béla Bartók’s
Contrasts
in 1940. One of the ironies of jazz history is that, for all these efforts to be at the cutting edge, Goodman (like Eldridge) remained stereotyped as a traditionalist, as the leader of the old regime in jazz, the order toppled by the “real” modernists led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Yet the Goodman big band, during the Sauter-Powell years, defies such easy categorization. This was, if anything, a modern jazz ensemble, although brandishing a different type of modern jazz than what the beboppers were creating. Influences from classical music predominate, intermingled with the swing ethos from the Henderson-Mundy-Murphy tradition. In a telling development, Mel Powell, Goodman’s premier pianist from this period, would come to abandon jazz for a career as an academic classical composer, studying under Paul Hindemith, teaching at Yale, and eventually earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for
Duplicates
, a concerto he wrote for two pianos and orchestra—a piece so far afield from Powell’s jazz work as to seem the product of a different person entirely. His charts for Goodman (“The Earl,” “Mission to Moscow”) reflect his sound instincts as a big band arranger, but Powell’s piano playing stands out as even more suggestive. Technically accomplished, harmonically daring, endlessly inventive: Powell could easily have established himself as one of the most influential jazz pianists of his generation. Instead, only a handful of recordings testify to his potential. Sauter, in contrast, never made the plunge into full-fledged classical composition but could well have done so. His ambitious charts for Goodman are packed to the brim with activity—his “concerto” for Cootie Williams, recorded by Goodman as “Superman” in 1940, is a case in point: although less well known than Ellington’s “Concerto for Cootie,” Sauter’s feature piece for the trumpeter is an equally impressive effort with its inspired shifts in key, mood, tempo, and texture. In later years, Sauter pursued a range of commercial projects, including work as an orchestrator for Broadway shows, but his best work (such as his 1961 string writing for Stan Getz’s
Focus
project) confirms that his personal twist on modern jazz could be breathtaking for all its idiosyncracies.

Who can deny that Sauter and Powell, despite their achievements, represented the way modern jazz did
not
go, the path steadfastly not taken? In contrast, guitarist Charlie Christian, the other forward-looking musician sponsored by Goodman during this period, would prove to be a leader and instigator of the defining modern style: namely bebop, as it soon would be called. This was not a modernism resonant of Bartók and Hindemith, but one driven by hard-swinging monophonic lines, drenched in chromaticism and executed with lightning speed. Christian’s credentials in this regard are all the more remarkable when one considers that his major recordings were made in a period of less than two years—and at a point when modern jazz was still in embryo and most listeners had only the sketchiest context within which to grasp the genius of this soft-spoken pioneer of the electric guitar.

To many of his contemporaries, Christian must have seemed more of a novelty act than a harbinger of jazz to come. To this presynthesizer generation, electricity was a practical matter, linked with street lamps and lightning rods, not musical performance. Like Hampton and his vibraphone, Christian may not have actually invented his instrument, but he stood out nonetheless as one of its most visionary pioneers, toying with amplified sound at a time when such ventures had the overtones of a grand experiment. Yet Christian’s advocacy of the electric guitar represents only the smallest part of his contribution to jazz. With his daring sense of intervallic high jinks, his dancing triplets and swinging sixteenth notes, his instinct for pouncing on the altered higher notes of the harmony, extracting the maximum amount of emotion from these flatted and sharpened tones—with these weapons at his command, Christian would have been a master at any instrument. His influence on later guitarists can hardly be overestimated. Listen to the small body of performances he left behind—such as “Seven Come Eleven,” “Flying Home,” “Breakfast Feud,” and the amateur recordings of his sessions with the first generation of beboppers—and hear the melodic material that countless later guitarists would imitate, often borrowing whole phrases note for note as though these scattered 78s were a textbook on six-string soloing. The first great electric guitarist in jazz, Christian also demands respect as the most influential.

Born in Dallas and raised in the most impoverished section of Oklahoma City, Christian presented a striking contrast to the other modernists (Powell and Sauter, Bartók and Copland) linked with Goodman. Reserved, laconic, largely self-taught— novelist Ralph Ellison, who grew up with the guitarist, recalled him constructing primitive stringed instruments out of cigar boxes—the willowy Christian would have been easy to ignore if it were not for his stellar musicianship. “An impossible rube” was reportedly Goodman’s first reaction to the guitarist. John Hammond, hearing of Christian through pianist Mary Lou Williams, had flown to Oklahoma City, where he found him playing for $7.50 per week at the Ritz Cafe. Ever the matchmaker, Hammond arranged for Christian to come to California in August 1939 to meet Goodman. The clarinetist’s reluctance gave way to rapt admiration after an impromptu jam, lasting almost an hour, on “Rose Room.” “He wasn’t the most imposing figure in the world,” Goodman recalled some forty years later. “But, by gosh, when he sat down to play the guitar he was something. … He was way ahead of his time, and a joy to listen to.”
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Goodman immediately enlisted Christian into his small combo, now enlarged to a sextet. Within weeks, Christian had recorded a number of solos that would be widely emulated by other guitarists, and had performed with Goodman at Carnegie Hall. Jazz fans were quick to take notice, naming Christian as
Downbeat
poll winner on guitar for 1939, an honor that would be repeated in 1940 and 1941. But by then his career, though barely begun, was all but over.

In the spring of 1940, Christian was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Although advised to cut back on his activities, Christian found it difficult to turn down the growing number of performance opportunities now available to him. In addition to his small-combo work with Goodman, he also began playing with the big band, while after hours he frequently joined the jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse, a Harlem nightclub where the bebop style was being refined by a group of forward-looking modernists. But the long hours (the sessions would often last until 4
A.M
.), combined with the excesses of Christian’s lifestyle, served to undermine his already precarious state of health. In July 1941, he was admitted to Seaview Sanitarium on Staten Island, but even there Christian’s situation remained precarious. On March 2, 1942, he died from pneumonia.

In the Goodman band, Christian formed part of a powerhouse rhythm section. With pianist Mel Powell, bassist John Simmons, and either Dave Tough or Sid Catlett on drums, Goodman’s 1941 band was the most rhythmically exciting unit the clarinetist ever fronted. “There has never been a rhythm section like it in a white band,” John Hammond has asserted. “Without question, it was the best Benny ever had.”
³
Catlett’s tenure with the band lasted only a few months, but a handful of studio sessions and recorded live dates testify to the impact he had. “Big Sid,” as he was affectionately known, represented a striking contrast with the Krupa style that had defined the Goodman sound. Supportive, hard swinging without being overbearing, rock solid in keeping a tempo, rarely taking a feature solo but showing remarkable melodicism when he did—Catlett was a musician’s musician, avoiding the limelight and working in the trenches to kick the band into action. And with what versatility—his two-decade career included gigs with Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, a whole history of rhythm encompassed in those seven names.

These were late vintages of the Swing Era. On August 1, 1942, recording of jazz music came to a grinding halt as the result of a standoff between James Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, and the music industry. Petrillo insisted that the union be reimbursed for the increasing substitution of recorded music—in the form of radios, jukeboxes, and phonographs—for live performances. It wasn’t until September 1943 that Decca came to terms with Petrillo, with the Columbia and Victor labels waiting for over another year before capitulating. But even earlier the U.S. government, in an effort to conserve raw materials for the war effort, had instituted a 30 percent reduction in the production of phonograph records. The war impacted the big bands in many other ways: musicians were conscripted; new woodwind, brass, or percussion instruments became almost impossible to find; and the rationing of gasoline made band tours difficult, if not impossible. In their aggregate effects, these causes did more to put an end to the Swing Era than the often-cited onslaught of bebop music.