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The Sound of an Era

© Earl Rickard

On the evening of August 21, 1935, a dilapidated bus carrying the Benny Goodman Band pulled up in front of Los Angeles's Palomar Ballroom. The band had just completed a disastrous cross-country tour and the spirits of the musicians matched the condition of the bus. Even the band's bespectacled leader had doubts about keeping the band together. The 26-year-old Goodman had recruited the best white jazz musicians in New York during the winter of 1934-35 to play what was then called hot music for the National Biscuit Company's Let's Dance radio program. When the show ended in the spring the band embarked on their disastrous tour, playing for audiences that wanted standard band arrangements rather than hot jazz. Yet, on this warm August evening Goodman and his band had arrived at the right place and at the right time to change popular music forever. The Benny Goodman Band's enagement at the Palomar Ballroom provided the overture to the Big Band Era.

In the comparatively unsophisticated music business of the mid-1930s, neither Goodman nor his men knew that their recordings were selling well in California. West coast college students and teenagers bought the band's records after hearing the live radio broadcasts. Unknown to the band, a receptive audience awaited.

Goodman began the evening playing standard dance tunes desired by the Palomar's management. Meanwhile, the young fans who came to hear "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Bugle Call Rag" sat in the fifty-cent cheap seats in the back of the ballroom wondering if this band was the same one they had heard on the radio and records. After a few sets, Goodman, disgusted by the entire tour and resigned to break up the band, said to his men, "The hell with it, if we're going to sink we might as well go down swinging." Goodman called for "King Porter Stomp." Trumpeter Benny Berigan stood up and blew the first notes across the dance floor. Suddenly, a roar of approval came from the opposite end; the music and cheering met in the middle and a generation found its music. Within two years big band swing became the nation's dominant popular music.

The music called jazz evolved from the African-American community. By the 1920s, black band leaders such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were playing jazz the only way they knew how -- unadulterated, like straight whiskey. Most whites never heard black bands, nor were they ready for real jazz. Therefore, Paul Whiteman, who claimed the title "The King of Jazz," and other 1920s "Jazz Age" white bands brought the music to popularity by presenting it like a mixed drink -- plenty of fruit and sugar to cover the straight whiskey of jazz.

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