Benny Is Back

In the luxurious rectangular box that is the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room, a wellrounded, balding businessman in spectacles put a clarinet to his lips and once again became a famous living trademark. Behind him 13 instruments exploded in the old Goodman theme song Let's Dance, and the guests at the Empire Room's tables began to feel wonderful. A surprised young waiter nearly dropped the filet mignon Benny he was serving. "For this room--so loud!" he whispered.

By the time Benny Goodman's new band had worked its way through the first set, from Bugle Call Rag through Sing, Sing, Sing, everything in the Empire Room was just as Benny Goodman likes it. People seemed unaware that there was no more space on the dance floor: they just had to dance, and they did.

The King of Swing is playing for dancing once again, and he is bucking a trend he himself started 20 years ago when Benny and his free-swinging sidemen had youngsters clustering around the bandstand to squeal and applaud their riffs and licks. Swing was the thing, and in 1938 Benny Goodman set an altitude record for jazzmen with his concert at Carnegie Hall.

But the end of World War II left Benny--and the other big jazz bands--far behind. The standard unit became the combo (three to eight musicians) and the music they played took off into outer space of cold, interstellar atonalities. Benny Goodman spent more and more time at his place in Connecticut, listening to his classical records.

Last week Benny seemed happier than he had been in a long time. Standout sidemen in Benny's new band: Trombonist Urbie Green and Drummer Mousie Alexander, a graduate, surprisingly, of the contrapuntal Sauter-Finegan band. The arrangements were mostly the old Fletcher Henderson "killer-dillers" that Benny made famous in the '30s, and the swinging improvisations did not seem so improvised any more. But this exhibit from the past--venerable enough to have a movie made about his life--was still able to show a new generation that there is something besides Dixieland, "progressive," and the noise called rock-'n'-roll. "One of the worst things about this stuff they play nowadays," said Benny, "is what it does to the musicians. I had an awful time trying to get some guys together who could really deliver music. A little while ago I went over to Birdland to see what was going on. I was standing there listening in bewilderment when I noticed this kid next to me, concentrating like hell. 'You really get something out of this?' I asked him. 'Well,' he said, 'they're looking for something.' I had to laugh. 'You're right,' I told him. 'They haven't found it yet!":

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