In the U.S. popular music business, five years amounts to a cycle, and this week a cycle was completed: Band Leader Benny Goodman returned to his native Chicago.
It was from Chicago, in 1936, that Benny Goodman turned swing music loose on the U.S., set millions of jitterbugs cutting their first rugs. The swing of which he became "King" was an inevitable commercial outgrowth of an earlier music—jazz, which drifted up the Mississippi from New Orleans in the '20s. By coincidence jazz, too, completed a cycle this week, and in Chicago. Some of the pioneer Chicago jazzmen whom reverent connoisseurs know...