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.

Benny's profuse strains of unpremeditated art topped all the rest, perhaps because he practiced hardest: "Fifteen times more than the whole band combined," in Trumpeter Harry James's estimation. "I never even saw him take a drink," James adds, bugging out his china-blue eyes. "You don't get very near a guy like that." Pianist Jess Stacy gets a little nearer the essential Benny: "All the time I was with Goodman, he was never satisfied. With him, perfection was just around the corner. He's worked hard enough, but I guess the more you work the more there is to learn. I figure Benny will die in bed with that damn clarinet." Failing perfection, Benny got a popular response that can only be described as weirdly intense. At Manhattan's Paramount Theater, swooning, screaming adolescents danced in the aisles and up on to the stage.

THE generation that adored him is now in its early 305, and somewhat sobered by hot and cold wars, yet it goes on buying Benny's records. His Carnegie Hall concert program has sold more than any jazz album ever, and a recently issued selection of pieces that the band broadcast in 1937-38 is on its way to outselling even that. Altogether, some 23 million disks with Benny's name on them have been sold in the past 15 years.

"Success," Benny comfortably admits, "is the easiest thing in the world to take." Yet success was never enough. "Of course, you wouldn't be human if you didn't like having the crowds, but you hate it just as much, too. The frenzy. You say to yourself, 'Don't take this thing seriously or you'll go out of your mind.' " In 1940 he was operated on for a bad back, and in the hospital quiet he found himself wondering if he would ever "know how to do anything but lead a band." He was married two years later, which made the tours harder to take; in the first four months of their union, the Goodmans slept under 73 different roofs. Half of Benny's star performers had left him to form bands of their own. He decided to quit.

That meant a little more time for his family and for his favorite hobby--fishing. Easygoing family life mellowed him, and slowly the shy, warm, honest man emerged from behind the brilliant, hardshell musician. "Yeah, I'm much more tactful than I used to be," Benny confesses with a laugh. "I don't know if it's done me any good!" A friend recalls that "ten years ago he talked like an aviator--if he couldn't explain with gestures, he couldn't explain. He used to blow everything into that clarinet and not leave anything for communication, but now he expresses himself better . . . He'll bore the hell off you with stories about little Rachel and little Benjie." But Benny never left his clarinet standing voiceless and alone very long. He had begun playing classical music for fun, and found he could do it quite well. Leopold Stokowski praised his work, the Budapest String Quartet was eager to play with him, and so was Violinist Joseph Szigeti. Benny commissioned clarinet concertos from Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, played them with the best symphony orchestras. He gave a course at the Juilliard School of Music, illustrating his lectures with longhair licks and runs.

STILL, Benny was far from satisfied. He had made friends O with one of the world's finest classical clarinet players, Reginald Kell, and in 1949 he began taking lessons from him.

Benny had been taught to hold the mouthpiece between his front teeth and his lower lip, while Kell used only his lips.

Learning to double-lip like Kell meant learning the clarinet all over again from scratch; it brought a different set of facial muscles into play, and required a subtly different fingering technique. Benny had his old finger calluses removed by a doctor, and then buckled down, at 40, to relearning his lifework, acquiring a new set of calluses and an even more controlled technique.

Classical performances keep Benny fairly occupied nowadays; he solos with symphony orchestras around the country about once every two weeks. But at the drop of a downbeat, Benny still swings back to his first love. "After the concert," he grins, "we may have a little jam session." He dreams, sometimes, of getting the stars of his old band together again: "Of course, there might be a little less hair all around, but would we play as well? Could be!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.