THE King of Swing has changed his tune. What Benny Goodman blows nowadays is apt to come out classical and strictly correct. He does his sleeping at night, and every day he practices from three to six hours. "If you get out of practice," Benny explains, mopping his brow, "you lose your lip. It's a physical kind of thing. You gotta be in shape even to just stand there and have this thing hung onto ya." After practice Benny relaxes by the fire in his Connecticut country home, sipping coffee sweetened with saccharin. At 43 he still looks like a handsome and faintly quizzical professor: fit, bespectacled, a bit heavier than in the days of his youth, when he swung a generation.
Benny's clothes are tailor-made; his miniature poodles, Muffin and Petit Pain, are white as suds.
The gold bangles on the wrists of his socialite wife Alice glint rapidly in the fading light as she knits his socks. Their daughters, Rachel, 9, and Benjie, 6, study comics on the sofa.
Benny's own childhood in Chicago was a slum-cramped scrabble; his father had twelve kids to raise on factory wages. But Benny was only ten when he got the break of his life: a chance to play in the boys' band of a neighborhood synagogue (which supplied the instruments). Because he was the smallest, they gave Benny a clarinet.
That was like handing Kit Carson a rifle or Paul Bunyan an ax. Benny mastered the thing—which came down to his knees—and began blowing the stuff of American legend.
At 14, Benny quit school to play jazz professionally, fulltime. He was already well on the road to maturity as a musician, and maturity was to mean a quicksilver brilliance of improvisation backed by more jazz technique than any other clari-BENNY netist can approach: a range of tone from biting cold to haunting hot, and a range of tempo from things so fast they just stand still and tingle to things slow enough to ride while drunk.
YOUNG Benny's inspiration was the true blues that Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and dozens of other greats brought up from the South. His companions were jazz-crazy youths named Davey Tough, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, Bix Beiderbecke. Fame came to all of them; Benny copped the crown.
He got it (and a king's ransom besides) in the null by leading the best swing band in history. Instead of the cream-puff stuff fashionable bands were spooning out, Benny had his men play the jive they lived for. Dragging players came to fear Benny's long, poker-faced squint aimed at them over the tops of his glasses. They called it simply "The Ray." He rehearsed them until they swung as one—a writhing, flashing, soaring serpent of sound. "If you're interested in music," Benny remarks soberly, "you can't slop around. I expected things, and they had to be done. Yeah, they'd grumble, but I think the band really liked it." With the discipline Benny exacted came an abandon greater than that of most barrelhouse bands. The pounding, high-polished drive of the ensemble made an urgent background for the wild flights of star performers, and every solo was free speech in music.