A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 1: “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet

Episode Date: October 7, 2018

Welcome to the first episode proper of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs! As this is the first real episode, you may notice a couple of flaws in the production — those will hopefully get ironed out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sit back and listen to the story of “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet! (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hake Episode 1 Flying Home We have to start somewhere, of course, and there's no demarcation line for what is and isn't rock and roll. So we're starting well before rock and roll itself in 1939.

We're starting, in fact, with Swing. Swing was a form of. music that had its roots in 1920s jazz. It's hard to remember now, but when Dixieland jazz was first popularized in the early 1920s, the reaction to it from polite society was essentially the same as to every other black musical form. It was going to be the end of the world. It was evil jungle music. It was causing our children to engage in acts of lewdness and intoxication. It was inciting violence. it was, in short, everything that was later said about rock and roll, about hip-hop, and you get the idea.

This might sound ridiculous to modern ears, as we don't normally think of the cornet, the trombone, and the banjo as the most lascivious of instruments. But back in the 1920s, this kind of music was considered seriously our housing. And so, as with all of the moral panics around black music, Some white people made the music more appetising for other white people by taking the rough edges off, cleaning it up and putting it into a suit. In this case, this was done by the aptly named Paul Whiteman. Whiteman was a violin player and conductor,

and he became known as the King of Jazz for being the band leader of an all-white band of musicians, where most jazz bands consisted of eight to ten musicians, all improvising based on head arrangements and interacting with each other. Whiteman's band was 35 musicians playing from free-written charts. It was polite, clean and massively popular. Whiteman's band wasn't bad by any means. At various times, he had musicians like Bix Bidebeck and Joe Vanuti playing for him.

And as you can hear, in this performance of Rhapsody in Blue, they could play some quite exciting jazz. But they were playing something fundamentally different, something tamer, more arranged, and with the individual players subsumed into the unit. Whiteman still called the music he made jazz, but when other people started playing with similarly big bands, the music became known as Swing, and so from Whiteman, we moved to Goodman. Benny Goodman, the King of Swing,

was the leader of the most popular of the pre-war swing bands, as well as being an excellent clarinet player. His band hired a ranger Fletcher Henderson, a black musician who led his own excellent band, and who had provided arrangements for Whiteman to provide their arrangements and managed to create music that had a lot of the excitement of less formalised jazz.

It was still highly arranged, but it allowed for soloists to show off slightly more than many of the other bands of the time. This is partly because Goodman himself was a soloist, while Whiteman was a band leader, first and foremost, someone whose talent was in organising a group of other people, a manager rather than a musician.

though he was a perfectly serviceable player. Goodman was a serious player, someone who had later premier pieces by Bartok, Poulonk, Aaron Copland and others, and who had, before becoming a bandleader, been one of the most in-demand players on small group jazz sessions. Goodman's band was still a big band, but it allowed the soloists far more freedom than many of his competitors did, and many of Goodman's band members became well enough known individually

to go off and form their own big bands, and because Goodman's band had a lot of great soloists in, as well as the 30-plus person big band he ran, he also had a number of smaller groups, which were made up of musicians from the big band. These would play sets during the same shows as the big band, allowing the best soloists to show off while also giving most of the band a rest. Their performances would be proper jazz rather than swing. They would be three, or four, or six musicians, improvising together the way the old Dixieland players had.

And importantly, Goodman was one of the first band leaders to lead an integrated band during the segregation era. His small groups started with the trio of Goodman himself, white and Jewish on clarinet, white drummer Jean Kruper, and black pianist Teddy Wilson. This integration, like the recruitment of Fletcher Henderson for the arrangement, was the idea of John Hammond, Goodman's brother-in-law.

Hammond was an immensely privileged and wealthy man, His mother was a Vanderbilt, who had decided to use his immense wealth in the service of two goals. The first of those was racial integration, and the second of them was to promote what would now be called Roots of Americana music, pre-bop jazz, folk, blues, and gospel. Hammond is someone we'll be hearing a lot more of as this story continues, but at this point he was a DJ, music journalist, and record producer, who used his wealth to get records made and aired that otherwise wouldn't have been made. Goodman certainly believed in racial equality, by all accounts,

but it was Hammond who introduced him to Fletcher Henderson, and Hammond who persuaded him to include black musicians in his band. Goodman wasn't the first white band leader in America to hire black musicians. There had been three in the 1920s, but when he hired Teddy Wilson, no one had led an integrated group for seven years, and Goodman was hiring him at a time when Goodman was arguably the most popular musician in the USA. And this was a far more radical thing than it seems,

in retrospect, because Goodman was pushing into radically different directions. On the one hand, he was one of the first people to push for mainstream acceptance of jazz music in the classical music world, which would suggest trying to be as conservative as possible. But on the other, he was pushing for integration of musicians. Lionel Hampton later quoted him as saying, we need both the black keys and the white keys to play music, which is the sort of facile comparison well-meaning white liberals make now in 2018. So Goodman saying, 80 years ago is a genuinely progressive statement for the time. Lionel Hampton was another black musician who joined the trio and turned it into a quartet.

He was a virtuoso vibraphonist who more or less defined how that instrument was incorporated into jazz. He appears to have been the first person to use the vibraphone on a jazz record on a recording by Louis Armstrong of the song Memories of You from 1930. Before that, the vibraphone had only ever been used as a novelty instrument. It was mostly used for radio intermission signals, playing a couple of chimes. In fact, the vibraphone was so new as an instrument that its name had never been settled. Vibrophone was just at one of a number of trademarks used by different companies making the instrument. The instrument Hampton played was put out under another brand name, Vibra harp,

and that was what he called it for the rest of his life. Hampton had trained as a drummer before becoming a vibraphone player, and was often billed as the fastest drummer in the world. but he had a unique melodic sensibility, which allowed him to become the premier soloist on this new instrument. Indeed, to this day, Hampton is probably the most respected musician ever to play the vibes. By 1938, Goodman actually reached the point where he was able to bring an integrated band, featuring Count Basie, Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton,

plus other black musicians, along with white musicians such as Goodman and Gruper. On to the stage of Carnegie Hall. at the time the US's most prestigious music venue. Like many of Goodman's biggest moments, this was the work of Hammond, who, after the success of Goodman's show, put together a series of other concerts at Carnegie, the Spirituals to Swing concerts,

which are some of the most important concerts ever in bringing black American music to a white audience. We'll almost certainly talk about those in the future. But getting back to the Goodman Show, that Carnegie Hall concert is still one of the greatest live jazz albums ever recorded and shows that it was entirely possible to create truly exciting music using the swing band template. One particularly impressive performance was the 12-minute long version of

Sing Sing Sing. Obviously, we won't hear that in full here, but here's a brief excerpt of that staggering performance. Along with all the other songs excerpted in this podcast, at the Mix Cloud page linked in the blog post associated with this podcast. For US cultural context, it would be another nine years before Jackie Robinson was able to break the colour bar in baseball to give some idea of how extraordinary this actually was. In fact, Lionel Hampton would often later claim that it was Goodman hiring him and Wilson and later other black musicians that paved away for Robinson's more well-known achievement. The original Benny Goodman Quartet were an extraordinary set of musicians, but by 1939 both Wilson and Crooper had departed for other bands. There would be reunions over the years,

but the classic line-up of the quartet had stopped performing together. Various other pianists, notably Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson, sat in with the Goodman's small groups. But he also realized the need to make up for the loss of two such exceptional musicians by incorporating more, and so the Benny Goodman sex texts performed. Those sextets featured a rotating lineup of musicians, sometimes including the great jazz trumpeter Couty Williams, but revolved around three soloists.

Goodman himself on clarinet, Hampton on vibraphone, and a new musician, the guitarist Charlie Christian, a musician who would only have a very short career, but who would come to be better known than any of them. Christian is sometimes erroneously called the first electric guitarist, or the first person to play electric guitar on record, or even the inventor of the electric guitar. He was none of those things, but he was a pioneer in the instrument, and the first person to really bring to prominence as a solo instrument. The electric guitar allowed a fundamentally different style of guitar playing. Before, the guitar had only really worked either as accompaniment for a single vocalist, or act best as a barely audible rhythm instrument drowned out by the louder pianos and horns of jazz bands. Now the guitar could play single melody lines as loudly as any trumpet or saxophone,

and could be used as a solo instrument in an ensemble in the same way as those instruments. This changed the whole approach to the guitar in popular music. While Goodman claimed responsibility for the head arrangements the small groups used, a lot of people think that Christian was responsible for these too, and certainly the sextat's music has a much more exhilarating field than the early quartet or trio work. The first song with the new Goodman sextet recorded, on October 2nd, 1939, 79 years ago this week, was a piece called Flying Home. Flying Home is a great example of the early work of the sextet, and quickly became in many ways

their signature song. The story of its writing is that the band were on a plane from L.A. to Atlantic City, the first time many of the band members had flown at all, and Hampton started humming the riff to himself. Goodman asked, What's that you're singing? And Hampton said, I don't know. We can call it flying home, I guess. Goodman and Hampton were credited as the writers, although John Hammond later claimed that he'd heard Christian improvising the riff before it was picked up by the other two men. Before we start looking at the record, I want to address one problem you find without of copyright jazz recordings, and that is that if you're trying to get hold of or talk about the right version of a track. Many of the musicians involved recorded multiple versions of songs.

Those tracks get released on multiple compilations, and tracks get released under different names. For example, I have one compilation album, one which says it's just 16 different versions of Flying Home, which has the Benny Goodman's sextet recording of the track. and a Charlie Christian recording. Except, of course, the Charlie Christian recording is exactly the same one as the Benny Goodman one, although on that compilation it's taken from a different source as there are different amounts of tape hiss. So it may be that at some point here I identify a recording wrongly, particularly one of the many, many Lionel Hampton recordings of the song.

I am not pretending to be authoritative here, and I may get things wrong, though I'm trying as best I can to get them right. But what I do know is what the Benny Goodman's sextat version of this song sounded like, and we can hear that now. It's hard to emphasise just how strange this record must have sounded then, nearly 80 years ago, when you consider that electronic amplification was a new thing, that only one electric guitar had ever been recorded before the sextat sessions, and that the record contained two separate electronic sound.

amplified instruments, Christian's guitar and Hampton's vibraphone. Other than the vibraphone and clarinet, though, this small group was almost a prototypical rock band. Piano, electric guitar, double bass, and drums would be the hallmark instruments of the genre a full 20 years after this record. And the record seems to anticipate many aspects of the rock genre in many details, especially when Charlie Christian starts his soloing. His playing now sounds fairly tame, but at the time, it was astonishingly advanced, both in technique. He was a huge influence on BOP,

which wouldn't come along for many more years, and in just the sound of it. No one else was making music that was amplified in that way, with that timbre. The song, in this version, starts with a simple stride piano intro, played by Fletcher Henderson, with Artie Bernstein on the bass

and Nick Fetool on the drums. This intro is basically just setting out the harmonic structure of the verses before the introduction of the main riff. It does a common thing where you have the chords at the top end stay as close to being the same as they can while you have a descending bass. And the bass includes a few notes

that aren't in the same key that the melody is in when it comes in, setting up a little bit of harmonic tension. Once it does come in, the riff sounds really odd. This is a vibraphone, a clarinet, and an electric guitar all playing the same riff in unison. That's a sound that had not. never been recorded before. We then have a very straightforward swing-style clarinet solo by Goodman.

Goodman's clarinet style a great deal. He is, in fact, one of the musicians who shaped my sense of melodic structure. But there's nothing particularly notable about this solo, which could be on any record from about 1925 through about 1945. After another run-through of the riff, we get Charlie Christian's solo, which is where things get interesting. The clarinet and vibraphone, this longer solo, which includes a whole section that effectively acts as a middle eight for the song, is unlike pretty much anything ever played on guitar in the

studio before. Christian's short bursts of single-note guitar line are, to all intents and purposes, rockabilly. It's the same kind of guitar playing we'll hear from Scotty Moore 16 years later. It doesn't sound like anything revolutionary now, but remember, up to this point, the guitar had essentially only been a rhythm instrument in jazz, with a very small handful of exceptions like Django Rinehart. You simply couldn't play single-note lead lines on the guitar and have it heard over saxes or trumpets until the advent of electrification. After Christian's solo, we have one from Lionel Hampton. This solo is just a typical example of Hampton's playing. He was a stunning jazz

vibraphone player and at the time was on the top of his game, but it's not as astonishing as the one from Christian. And then at the end, we get a whole new riff coming in. This kind of riff had been common in Goodman's work before. You can hear something similar in his hit version of King Porter Stomp, for example. But it would become the hallmark of the jump band style a few years later. This call and response, repetitive riffing, would be the sound that would dominate dance music in the next decades.

The song would go on to have a long life after this recording. A couple of years later, Lionel Hampton left Goodman's band to form his own big band, and Flying Home became their signature song. That band would be one of the first bands to perform a new type of music, jump band music, which was rooted in swing, but had more emphasis on riffs and amplified instruments. That jump band music is the same music that later became known as rhythm and blues, and musicians such as Louis Jordan were clearly inspired by Hampton's band. We'll be looking in future episodes of this podcast at The Way and

which jump bands became one of the biggest influences on rock and roll. Hampton recorded the song multiple times, starting in 1940, but the most famous example is the version he recorded in 1942 for Decker, with instrumental foxtrot on the label. That version features Illinois Jaquette on saxophone, and, like the Benny Goodman version, it would introduce a whole new sound to people. This time, it's Jacquesette's tenor sax playing, which has a honk and scrunk to it, that was unlike anything people had heard before. There were predecessors to it, of course. As they said earlier, there's no earliest example of anything in music,

but this saxophone solo became the one that defined a whole new genre, a genre called rhythm and blues. Jaquette's solo was so exceptional that when he left the band, every tenor sax player who replaced him would copy his solo note for note, rather than improvising their own versions, as would usually be the case. There's another person involved in that recording of Flying Home, who probably needs mentioning here. Milt Gabler, the producer, like John Hammond, he's someone we'll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. Hampton himself remained a respected and popular musician for many more decades.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the big bands lost a lot of their popularity, and Hampton started playing yet another style of music. He became one of the greats of bebop music. and played in small groups, much like the Goodman ones, just playing more harmonically and melodically complex variations of what he had played earlier. But he was also recognised by the rock musicians as a pioneer. You can see him in the 1957 Alan Freed film, Mr. Rock and Roll,

playing his vibraphone as the only jazz musician in a film which otherwise features Little Richard, Clyde McFatter, and other Rock and R&B stars at the time. Charlie Christian, on the other hand, never even lived to see the influence he had. Even though he was one of the most influential musicians on both jazz and rock music, Chuck Berry later said that Christian was one of the biggest influences on his guitar playing, though he wrongly said that Christian played with Tommy Dorsey's band,

a rival to Goodman's. While Christian was responsible for the name Bebop, being given to the form of music, he helped creating jam sessions after his regular work. He was already suffering from tuberculosis in 1939, when Flying Home was recorded. and on March the 2nd, 1941, aged only 25, Charlie Christian died. He was buried in an unmarked grave, which was later concreted over. A memorial was placed for him 53 years later, but it was later discovered to be in the wrong place. A history of rock music and 500 songs is written produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-0.com.000. songs.com to see transcriptions, liner notes and links to other materials, including a mixed cloud stream of all songs excerpted in this episode. A history of rock music and 500 songs is supported by the backers on my Patreon. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickeg to support it. Patreon backers also get early access to my books and also support my blog and my other podcasts. If you've enjoyed this episode, please by all means subscribe in iTunes or your favourite podcast app and rate it, but more importantly, please tell just one other person about this podcast.

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