Benny goodman played which instrument

King Oliver, another important early figure, belonged to a band in that was led by guitarist Louis Keppard, brother of Freddie Keppard. Strat is great for playing Jazz, in fact as great as any traditional jazz guitar. The thing is, if we need to experiment a lot with sounds, tones and musical character, we should not rely on a single instrument.

Jazz guitar and jazz guitar tone is commonly thought of as a rather challenging style of play. Many people ask, is jazz guitar hard to learn or how hard is learning guitar in general? Yes, sure. You just need to remember that jazz theory relies on classical theory first, so know your chord constructions, know your key signatures, know harmony and the function of dominant chords and how cadences work.

From there, basic jazz theory will make a lot more sense. Jazz music has been known to help you concentrate and think better. The lack of words and the rhythm of jazz makes it the perfect music to study to or get work done. Due to these reasons and many others, there are a whole lot of people out there, like yourself, who want to teach themselves to play guitar at their pace.

The good news is, you can absolutely teach yourself guitar! However, learning to really shred a guitar is a process. Two pentatonic scales common to jazz are the major pentatonic scale and the minor pentatonic scale. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis March 21, He performed on the excursion boats that skimmed Lake Michigan, and in was a steady player at a local dance hall called Guyon's Paradise. While he was with them he took part in the band's recording sessions; in addition to clarinet solos that showed the influence of players such as Jimmie Noone and Leo Rappolo, he also dabbled with the saxophone.

After approximately four years, however, Goodman left Pollack and made his living as a freelance side man, working in recording and in radio. Though he was fairly successful, he was affected by the Great Depression, and did not turn down the opportunity to play college dances with bands that he had formed because, by this time, he was supporting his widowed mother.

The young clarinet player's fortune was forever altered in late , when he made the acquaintance of jazz enthusiast John Henry Hammond. Hammond encouraged Goodman to form a jazz group, and though Goodman's intent was to use the band in a recording session for English audiences, the resulting cuts were also released by Columbia in the United States, generating a cult following.

As Barol explained: "The kids went nuts, jitterbugging wildly The swing era was born. From that point on, Goodman was a musical celebrity.

He went on to play successful band concerts at places such as Carnegie Hall and, in one of his most memorable sessions, the Paramount Theatre in The clarinetist and his band also appeared in a few motion pictures.

Along the way, however, Goodman made social history by becoming the first white bandleader to make a black musician part of his group when he hired pianist Teddy Wilson in With Wilson, Goodman's core bandmembers were Gene Krupa on drums and after , Lionel Hampton, another black jazz artist, on the vibraphones.

According to Maclean's magazine, Goodman refused to play concert dates in the southern states, where audiences were segregated by race. After World War II, the combination of a decline in the popularity of the big band sound and Goodman's health concerns prompted the clarinetist to break up his band. But as early as Goodman had begun to pursue his interest in classical clarinet; he performed works such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Concerto in A Major for Clarinet, and asked Bartok to compose an original work for the clarinet for him.

During these early Los Angeles years he became a skilled soloist. He played that thing like it was a yo-yo. The only thing comparable from a technical point of view would be Art Tatum. By , Benny found himself in the recording studio among other jazz icons like his childhood hero Tommy Dorsey , Glenn Miller and Joe Venuti. Hammond whose sister, Alice, married Benny in would be instrumental in launching the careers of Count Basie and Billie Holiday.

His quicksilver tone, his insistent drive to swing the music, his ability to execute cleanly the most dramatic filigrees of passages — all these qualities made him one of the most imitated instrumentalists in the world. Equally important to his legacy is his courage in proclaiming that music is a universal language transcending race and nation.

Both as musical units and as experiments in democracy, his integrated bands comprised magnificent gestures toward perfection in our time. In Benny became the leader of his first band.

They played music that, though its roots were in the improvisational jazz of dixieland and ragtime , was much more structured and predictable and, therefore, appealing to a wider audience in America.

Making Jazz the Music of America. It did not go well. They were not as of yet as popular as they would become, and promoters and show producers were not all that keen on jazz. Benny almost walked away from the tour several times before the night of August 21, , in Los Angeles at the Palomar Ballroom. This event is thought of as the start of the swing era. Overnight Benny became a huge celebrity, and his music of big-band style jazz , at last, had an eager national audience.

This one sensational night was the turning point and beginning of an era where Benny reigned as the King: the Swing Era. College students and High schoolers were inventing new dance steps to pair with this powerful music. On January 16, , Benny and his orchestra introduced jazz and swing to the august members of Carnegie Hall and the world was changed. The Benny Goodman Orchestra performed the same music that was making the kids go wild with guest artists from the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

The event was overwhelming to those in attendance and they walked out of the hall embracing this new form of music. If you have heard swing you recognize it as distinct from other forms of jazz.

In these big bands, traditional jazz instruments, like the banjo and sousaphone, were replaced. This shift in instruments and time signatures created a less choppy feel and a smoother, more melodic flow that is part of the swing style. This big band reality led to the need for a more predictable arrangement of jazz.

The music had to be written down and scored much like classical music, as you would then have the ability to bring new musicians on to replace those who had left or were ill. In swing, the music arrangement was more important than all the individual musicians. This is often one of the most derided elements of swing; the lack in spontaneity and improvisation afforded to the music was to a purist a dilution of jazz.

Despite the ongoing debate of its contribution to jazz, swing was the first commercially successful form of jazz in America. This swing era removed jazz from the perceived confines of prohibition speakeasies and New Orleans brothels and into living rooms and dance halls all over America. Their arrangements were used widely for decades. As the bands became bigger they were organized into groups rhythm, reeds and brass.

These sections groups of instruments were then worked in successions of counterbalancing each other in a dialogue of sorts in a call-response interaction. Oddly enough in Germany, swing was the music of Nazi opposition. There are many contenders to the title. Many could wear the crown and have had the name applied to them at one time or another. Tommy Dorsey , Count Basie , or Duke Ellington all are deserving of the title, King of Swing, if it is simply a matter of skill and innovation.

As unfair as we see it to be from our vantage point in history, the truth is that Benny has the title because he was white. To be successful on a national level meant a band and its leader needed to be white. Commercially it was harder to obtain support for African-American bands.

This is why although there were African-American band leaders big band was dominated by white leaders such as Glenn Miller. So even as much as the title is deserved by Ellington, he was not able to receive a fair shake at it, due to the racism and systemic prejudice of the day. That being said, a case could be made easily that no one deserved it more than Benny Goodman.

Even his critics had to acknowledge that he was possibly the best jazz clarinetist in the world without regard to race. Combine his clarinet skill with his professionalism, popularity, work ethic, consistency, and the outstanding collection of musicians that he gathered around him, and it would be hard to dethrone him as King of Swing.

Because America and the entertainment world were so segregated, it would be easy to be dismissive of the era. However, without the important groundbreaking work that Benny Goodman was doing to shatter the walls of racism, we would not have the better world a lot more work to do!