The power of the interaction of an artist and an audience can sometimes be one of the most amazing things you can experience. It's just something you feel. You can't explain it, but you know something special is going on and you are at the magical moment that you will never forget!! Sometimes however, for whatever reason, you did not attend, but you have a recording of it. Officially released or not, there are times you just want to re-live that concert or that moment when everything was so special. This recording, while yes, is famous, it also has an interesting history and is a piece of music that just blows me away everytime I hear it.
Benny Goodman was born in Chicago in 1909. During the 1930s and 1940s, he went on to be a household name and have the title the"King Of Swing," where he played clarinet and was his own band leader. One of his most famous recordings of his career is the night he and his band played at Carnegie Hall in 1938. At the time, Jazz music was not thought of as a "serious music" such as Classical and to have that kind of music in this kind of a forum was unheard of.
The event—one of the first public concerts to feature a racially integrated group—helped elevate the status of swing music, and included some of the brightest jazz stars of the day. Count Basie, making his Carnegie Hall debut, appeared as a guest, and members of Duke Ellington’s orchestra also participated. Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa were there, as were Buck Clayton, Johnny Hodges, Walter Page, Lester Young, Harry Carney, and Freddie Green.
Before I knew the tragic history of the recording, I heard this!!
It is one of those great things you just have to hear to really enjoy.
The entire show, well what I had heard at that point, was just amazing for many reasons: the situation, the musicians, the crowd. They just blew the roof off the place, the entire night ending with Sing Sing Sing. This is a song Louis Prima had written and recording a few years earlier, but this was a much different version. There are many other recordings of this song by Benny Goodman, but because of all the many different elements involved in this evening, this version just has the magic that I've only heard on this recording. It's also fun to mention it's just over twelve minutes.
(This version is from my personal collection which I always thought was a better source then others)
Just listen to the band roar!! It's hard not to enjoy Gene Krupa just bangin' the crap out of the drums many years before rock and roll came around. You can just hear the echo in the room from his drums and it's Carnegie Hall in 1938!! The horns...oh the horns...they played their brass off on this night. Man, do I love the way they overlay each other. What a fine piece of music that gives me chills as a listener, a musician and a writer. This version also includes the seldom heard piano solo by Jess Stacy which also give it a different twist.
You can just hear the place going nuts during the epic song performance. Peoples standing and dancing is something you didn't do at Carnegie Hall...well, they did!! To me this is a pre-rock-and-roll moment in time and the place goes crazy over the power of music and it changed music forever.
The history of the recording:
There never would have been a recording of the concert if Albert Marx had not taken the initiative. Marx was married to Helen Ward who was Benny's vocalist from 1934-1937. He decided to record the concert as an anniversary present for Helen. Two copies were ordered, one for Helen and one for Benny.
At the time, recording technology was still in a fairly primitive state. Only three microphones were used, one above the conductor's podium and two others at ends of the band.
The feed went offstage to a mixer and then to a CBS truck in the alley. The engineers on site did not control the mix and thus the settings were the same for each song. There was no attempt to bring out individual soloists or to make adjustments appropriate to the unique nature of each song. From the truck, the feed was then sent by broadcast quaily telephone lines to the CBS master control room downtown who then patched it on to a Recording Studio. There, acetate records were cut but each was limited to 8 minutes 45 seconds. In order to capture the entire live concert, two record cutting turntables had to be used in relays. Smith only had two turntables, so he "subcontracted" the job to Raymond Scott's Universal Recording Studio. Scott received the same feed from CBS master as did Smith. Thus, the concert was recorded on four different cutting machines --- alas, synchronization had not been invented and half the recordings are at a slightly different speed than the others and it was virtually impossible to attain continuity by "splicing" the records together using analogue methods.
Meanwhile, in the CBS studio, a master was cut on aluminum studio transcription disc The discs had much higher quality but were useless for commercial use because:
- Goodman had used a number of people from other bands and it proved almost impossible to resolve the contractual issues
- The American Federation of Musicians (musicians union) demanded prohibitively high royalties for playing transcribed (recorded) music on the radio. The purpose of this was to provide employment for large numbers of musicians since all performances were "live". It was not until 1947 that the Supreme Court invalidated prohibitions on broacasting recorded material.
Since they couldn't be turned into salable records or broadcast over the air, these transcription discs were of academic interest only. Eventually they were filed away and more-or less forgotten. They waited 60 years to be accidentaly found in 1998.
Benny Goodman shelved the idea of issuing a recording from his acetates due to the same contract issues that stymied CBS. Since Benny was busy with lots of other projects, his set of acetates also drifted into obscurity. In 1950, the acetates were discovered by Rachel Speiden (Benny's sister-in-law) when she took over Benny's New York apartment and cleaned out the closets. Needless to say, the quality had degraded even further.
With heroic engineering by Harvard physicist Bill Savory, it was possible to restore about 75% of the concert. Benny was amused when he found out that he had come in sixteen bars late on "Dizzy Spells."
Combining Savory's genius with application of massive legal talent, the re-engineered version was issued in 1950 and became one of the first of the 33-1/3 rpm long play records to sell over a million copies. A 1985 rework of this recording using Helen Ward's additional acetates obtained by producer Phil Schaap is available on CD. In early January of 1998, it was announced that the aluminum studio masters had been rediscovered, allowing the entire concert to be reproduced with much better fidelity.
