George, Benny and Yoda Part 1

There was a time, long ago, in which I never knew Benny Goodman or George Gershwin existed.

It was a sultry summers day in central New Hampshire and I had just finished work. I was fifteen and a caddy at the local country club. I whizzed my 10 year old bike into town the ra-a-a-at-t-t-a-a-t sound of the ace of spades clothes-pinned to the spokes; drowning out the cicada's droning; hidden high above in the elms still not hit by the Dutch blight that would wipe out those giant green shade trees in a few years.

I had a few bucks in my pocket from tips after staggering through 18 holes of golf, carrying fat bags owned by even fatter golfers.

So I stopped in to see Hi.

His real name was Sherman, but everybody called him Hi. He owned the only music store in town and I always found time to drop by and see if a new Kingston Trio album was in. Or, just to touch the guitars hanging from the walls. I couldn't play yet. But I soon would find myself in hock to him when, several years later, and out of the Army, I walked out of his store with a new Gibson safely tucked in a guitar case.

He had something on the store turntable. There was always music humming in the background. The door tinkled behind me.

"Hi, Hi." I always laughed at my clever play on his name and a greeting. He smiled as though it was the first time he had heard those double syllables together. "What's that?" I asked, pointing to the spinning disc. It was an LP.

"Oh, some Benny Goodman.", he handed me the record jacket. "The 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert". It was a re-release of the famous Columbia live recoding first issued in 1950. It captured a moment in musical time that, up until then, I had never been aware of.

The Goodman quartet, with Hamp, Gene Krupa, the impeccable Teddy Wilson and the King of Swing himself grooving to "Avalon", an old Al Jolson standard. It caught my ear.

"This is pretty good.", I said as I scanned the notes on the back. I was tapping my feet and suddenly I began to feel happy. I had never heard this kind of music before. It had always been "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window', or "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane". Then later "Tom Dooley", "Thunder Road", by Robert Mitchum (yeah, he could sing!) or the "Theme From Peter Gunn" by Ray Anthony.

But this. This was something else. My hormones were expanding at a rapid rate and I asked Hi about Benny.

Hi was about to become my "Yoda". My Jedi master who would teach me the ways of "The Force". Music. All kinds of music.

Again, it would be decades before any of us knew who that short green Oz-voiced muppet was.

Hi had been in radio for years, locally. He was first and engineer and later an announcer for the local station which had first went on the air in 1923. I later worked for the same outfit. He knew all there was to know about the business of broadcasting. In fact he was the engineer on duty the day CBS veteran newscaster Lowell Thomas came to town and did a live broadcast.

Hi was my parents age and a link to a time and place before the war I had only read about.

"That's good stuff." He smiled. He always smiled.

And then he said something that stopped me in my tracks.

"You do realize that those musicians are making up all that stuff on the spur of the moment?"

What? I pondered that fact.

"You mean everything they play is off the top of their heads?" Hi nodded.

I ran with that thought for several months. And I mean completely. I thought that those musicians had never played together before and was making stuff up on the spur of the moment. Well, not really. Most of the songs the guys had played over and over again from radio studios to sweaty bandstands and freezing basement clubs for years. And most of them were trained to read and write music.

Everything those guys are playing on that record, except for the melody, was all extemporaneous. That idea blazed in my head and I was hooked on jazz. And especially Benny Goodman.

I bought the album for three dollars and ninety-eight cents. I went home and played it over and over again. But when I got to "Sing, Sing, Sing" my jaw dropped. It hasn't returned to a closed position since.

In the second half of the piece, when Krupa rat-a-tats-BANG and Harry James comes blazing in from the balcony and holding on to dear life as he rides his horn like a mustachioed Valkyrie to the end, when even business men in penguin tuxedos are shagging in the aisles and stomping so loud you can hear it on the record, I was mesmerized. I couldn't believe the intense rhythm I was feeling nor the sense of joy I felt as Jess Stacey played his piano like Bach or when Krupa changed the beat in Benny's solo to a gut wrenching tom-tom stomp.

That one cut from that one album changed my life forever. I never looked at music the same way again.

I began seeking out other big bands, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. I looked into solo recordings from current musicians, like Ruby Braff, Stan Getz and then back to the early days again. Django Rheinhardt, Earl Hines, Louis and the rest.

Good music has always had room for "making it up" as they went along. Even Bach and Beethoven allowed places for musicians to extemporize on the score. And I love the fact that it can never be duplicated. Someone once asked the prototypical jazz-age and doomed trumpeter
Bix Beiderbecke if he could play a particular lick over again from a recently recorded set. He said he couldn't. Not that he wouldn't. He just couldn't.

I have happily been immersed in jazz ever since that summer day so long ago. It would be the first time "Yoda" guided me towards new doors in music appreciation. It wouldn't be the last.

© 2010 George Locke