At the beginning of my series on Essential Jazz Clarinet recordings, I mentioned the desire to create an introduction to the great Big Band performances by clarinetists as well. Of all eras associated with jazz clarinet, the Swing Era remains the most dominant. The reasons for this are sometimes lost on fans and historians alike. There can be a basic misconception that the clarinet was simply the dominant solo voice of the day, and that band leaders did better if that was the instrument they played. But this is clearly lacking in factual basis, for among the most successful big bands, relatively few were lead by clarinetists.
Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, and Glen Gray (of the Casa Loma Orchestra), for instance, were all trombone players--and each of them lead extremely successful big bands--often more lucrative bands than the great clarinetists'.
Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Claude Thornhill, Stan Kenton, and Fletcher Henderson were pianists who fronted successful bands.
Even among those generally grouped with the clarinetists were more properly termed saxophone soloists who doubled on clarinet; the most prominent being Jimmy Dorsey and Woody Herman.
When the final tally of the top bands is done, it's somewhat surprising only two of them were lead by full time clarinetists: Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Yet when we think of the Swing Era, it is almost always those two players' bands dominating the images and discussion. The reason is simple, if neglected: when the musical facts are examined, Goodman and Shaw were clearly among the greatest jazz musicians in all of history. In an art form often dominated by hyperbole, both Goodman and Shaw were among the rare few worthy of the term virtuosi.
It's not always the case that the greatest technical innovators on an instrument are also the greatest musical innovators. The trumpet, for instance, has had its share of important jazz men. Players like 'Cat' Anderson and Maynard Ferguson are rightly credited with expanding our technical knowledge of the instrument while Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie are understood, primarily, as important musical explorers. This is an oversimplification, of course, but it was rare to find a player who not only expanded but dominated both realms. Louis Armstrong and Harry James come to mind, even they might not have maintained their utter dominance in both fields for as long as Goodman and Shaw.
Benny Goodman was unprecedented in jazz history. There were no clarinetists (or instrumentalists) before him in jazz or popular music who possessed his range of diverse stylistic skill with his instrument; few in the classical world who might approach his technical ablities; and among jazz clarinetists perhaps only Sidney Bechet could lay claim to playing with as much of that elusive qualities of , swing, drive, and soul. While this isn't often mentioned in jazz histories, it was commonly acknowledged by other top players of the day, including Barney Bigard and Jimmy Hamilton of the Ellington band. [ Note: an exception to this rule might be the playing of Jimmie Noone, whose life as cut short by a heart attack when he was in his forties. It would have been very interesting to hear how Noone might have fared in the classical realm, among others].
As a result, Goodman was like a strike of lightening--a player who could not only dominate his field, but command the respect of the non-jazz world. At a time when jazz musicians were widely derided as musically illiterate, rough, and unskilled, his early performances of Mozart and Debussy, when compared to other contemporaries, show a musician at ease in the virtuoso classical clarinet world. It's difficult to imagine any other jazz musician of the era doing the same. Duke Ellington never attempted a Rachmaninoff Concerto; Louis Armstrong playing Hummel is likewise unlikely, and Harry James didn't commission the Tomasi concerto (as Goodman did pieces by Bartok, Copland, and many others). In many ways, this cross over brilliance was unmatched until a young trumpet phenom named Wynton Marsalis burst upon the scene two generations after Goodman had made his mark. [Note: as with every aspect of his multifaceted career, it is intriguing to wonder what Leonard Bernstein might have accomplished, had he decided to focus his career on piano performance. Perhaps he alone might have surpassed Goodman's accomplishments in both fields].
But if Benny was a lightening strike, Artie Shaw was another unlikely blast. The mutually beneficial (though not always perfectly cordial) sibling-like rivalry between Goodman and Shaw is one of the greatest in musical history, and the similarities of the two men are important.
Beyond their virtuoso skills as clarinetists, Goodman and Shaw were arguably the best band directors of the era as well. Their orchestras were rehearsed as thoroughly and brilliantly as any symphony. In fact, if one bothers to check the recordings of orchestras of their day, Goodman and Shaw's outfits were usually better than major symphony orchestras of the era for their precision and execution.
The many live performances available on recording today demonstrate how tightly and emphatically the Goodman and Shaw bands performed on a nightly basis--a record which puts to shame even some of the other legendary Big Bands of the day. Duke Ellington's bands, for instance, were notorious for frequent sloppy performances, and there are plenty of those performances available on recordings--both live and studio sets. Sloppy Goodman or Shaw band recordings are almost non-existent.
These rarely combined talents as soloists, musical revolutionaries, and leaders make a list such as this somewhat daunting, in that it could easily turn into a catalogue of the Goodman/Shaw rivalry: five Goodmans and five Shaws dividing the list. In the interests of exposing folks to a wider variety of material, however, I've decided to broaden the category a bit, including some performances beyond the Swing Era, and beyond the standard understanding of Big Band orchestration. I hope that my deviations from the Swing Era will prove interesting, and that over the next few weeks this top ten list will enrich your understanding (or remind you of what you've loved for so long).
***
Further reading:
Benny Goodman and the Swing Era by James Lincoln Collier
The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity by Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinet by Tom Nolan
The World of Duke Ellington by Stanley Dance
