Benny Goodman

Benny Goodman (1909–1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the King of Swing, whose January 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall is often cited as the night jazz arrived as American art music. Born Benjamin David Goodman in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of poor Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, he received a free clarinet at age ten through a synagogue lending program and a scholarship to study with the Chicago Symphony's Franz Schoepp.

By thirteen he was working professionally, by sixteen touring with Ben Pollack's band, and by twenty-five leading his own orchestra. The summer of 1935, when his band electrified a previously indifferent Palomar Ballroom audience in Los Angeles with hot Fletcher Henderson arrangements, is conventionally dated as the beginning of the Swing Era.

Goodman insisted on performing with Black musicians at a moment when the bandstand was a segregated space. The Benny Goodman Trio with Teddy Wilson on piano (1935) and the Quartet with Lionel Hampton added on vibraphone (1936) were among the first racially integrated groups to play before paying white audiences in the United States. The Carnegie Hall concert of January 16, 1938, recorded and later released as a double LP, featured both groups alongside the full orchestra in a program that ran from "Don't Be That Way" to "Sing, Sing, Sing."

He maintained a parallel classical career, commissioning concertos from Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, and Morton Gould. The Benny Goodman Story, with Steve Allen in the title role, appeared in 1955.

The name Benny is a diminutive of Benjamin, Hebrew for "son of the right hand." He was the right hand of the swing orchestra.