Benny Goodman 1936

Benny Goodman and his orchestra recorded four numbers - including "Stompin' at the Savoy" in an arrangement by Edgar Sampson (who had gotten his start in the Chick Webb band and was best known for writing "Savoy" and "Don't Be That Way")- on January 24, 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. This was a breakout period for Goodman. He had arrived in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935 to perform at the Palomar Ballroom after a long and disappointing national tour. When the band ditched its "sweet" numbers to play some hot arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, the reaction was electric.

As Goodman later recalled: "that was the moment that decided things for me. After travelling three thousand miles, we finally found people who were up on what we were trying to do, prepared to take our music the way we wanted to play it."

Stompin' at the Savoy, of course, memorialized the famous Savoy ballroom where Chick Webb's band frequently performed and the lindy hop was born.

In addition to his success at the Palomar, Goodman recorded his first trio sessions in July 1935 with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa. The numbers included "After You've Gone" and "Body and Soul".

Goodman's success brought him to the attention of Time. The magazine reported on what it characterized as a revival of jazz after its first heyday in the 1920s. This revival, Time noted, was centered on Goodman.

About two years ago, jazz suddenly became salable again in the U. S. The Jazz Revival occurred almost simultaneously with a series of Columbia records which spectacled Clarinetist Benny Goodman & band made in the winter of 1933, including such latterday masterpieces as Ain't Cha' Glad?, Riffin' the Scotch, Georgia Jubilee. While the big hotel and ballroom jobs still go to the big conventional organizations, small "hot" bands have lately been springing up in saloons all over Manhattan and Chicago.

In addition, the magazine noted that Goodman's appeal extended beyond the young lindy-hoppers who thronged the Palomar and other dance halls.

In Chicago, his home town, Benny Goodman was making a sensational stay at the Congress Hotel, was somewhat ambiguously lauded in a full-page advertisement on the back page of Variety as the possessor of an "individual hot-sweet 'swing' style, " had just played a Sunday afternoon recital to 800 Chicago jazz academicians who would no more have thought of dancing than they would of gavotting at a symphony concert. Clearly, Goodman, who played his first professional date in short pants on an excursion boat, was the Man Of The Hour to thousands of jazz fans.

Of course, as Goodman was in Chicago, New Yorkers had to look to other bands to fill their nights. In February 1936, Hal Kemp was at the Madhattan Room in the Pennsylvania hotel. His was a "sweet" band. Goodman had this to say to American Heritage magazine in later years about playing the Madhattan Room:

Playing a job at a place like the Madhattan Room of the Pennsylvania Hotel, where we were then, or most anyplace, we’d usually start kind of quietly. Play dinner music, so to speak. Warm up a little bit. It wouldn’t be until later that the band really got rocking. But in a concert you had to hit right from the top, bang! Then, too, in Carnegie Hall the acoustics are special. The Madhattan Room, for instance, was very dead. You’d just blow like hell in there all the time. Carnegie, as you know, is very live, so I insisted we go in about two or three days in advance to rehearse there, just to get used to it. By the time I gave the downbeat on “Don’t Be That Way,” we were pretty confident.

Ozzie Nelson was at the Lexington. Nelson, who went on to great TV fame in the "Ozzie and Harriet Show", had married Harriet Hilliard in October 1935. She starred later in 1936 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet.

For those with more adventurous tastes, Connie's Inn was hosting Louis Armstrong and his band in what The New Yorker called an "elaborate black and tan show." Armstrong, of course, was one of the creators of jazz music - the genre that Time believed Goodman was reviving.

Blackbirds

More on the Nicholas Brothers. The recently released DVD of Hallelujah contains the short "Pie, Pie Blackbird" featuring the Nicholas Brothers and Nina Mae McKinney. McKinney was the Halle Berry of her day. According to the linked website (which is wonderful and well worth exploring) she was known as the Black Garbo. Donald Bogle in Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams notes she was also referred to as a "dusky Clara Bow."

Both McKinney and Eubie Blake, whose band appears in the short, have "Blackbird" antecedents. Blake, together with Noble Sissle, created the show "Shuffle Along" which opened on Broadway in 1921. This was a pioneering all-black Broadway show. According to the linked website:

Shuffle Along was so original and successful that it inspired the creation of countless other African-American musicals to showcase African-American dancing. In 1923, Miller and Lyle starred in Runnin' Wild, which introduced the Charleston to the stage and turned it into a national and international fad. In Sissle and Blake's 1924 production of The Chocolate Dandies, which made a star of Josephine Baker, the chorus line performed tap and danced closely together with a swinging rhythm.

Gerald Bordman praises Blake's "foot-stomping score" and says the show's "rhythms provoked an orgy of giddy dancing that had audiences shouting for more tap routines, soft shoes, buck and wing, and precision numbers."

The score included such hits as "I'm Just Wild About Harry", "Love Will Find a Way" and "Bandana Days". It also launched several great black performers on their stage careers - including Josephine Baker and Florence Mills. Nonetheless as this site notes, the show had its limitations:

Judged by contemporary standards, much of Shuffle Along would seem offensive. The African American actors darkened their skin with blackface make-up, and most of the comedy relied on old minstrel show stereotypes. Each of the leading male characters was out to swindle the other, and the show closed with one character explaining that the lighter the skin, the more desirable a Negro woman was.

The show also inspired the promoter Lew Leslie to launch a series of revues at the Plantation Club which featured performers including Mills, Baker and Paul Robeson. Eventually Leslie launched a series of "Blackbird" revues on Broadway which reached their pinnacle in "Blackbirds of 1928" which opened on May 9, 1928.

"Blackbirds" followed another black show onto the 1928 Broadway stage - "Keep Shufflin'". Time's review of Keep Shufflin is redolent of the pervasive racism of the age:

Keep Shufflin' is for those who like capering, singing, cuckoo coons.

There are also more strenuous Bedlamites from Harlem who break into loud melodious ululations; there is a skilful and frantically energetic black and blues orchestra and marty lively tappers and prancers of whom one, name unspecified, brandishes her mahogany limbs with incredibly vicious abandon.

By the way, Eubie Blake was no longer with the franchise. He had been replaced by Fats Waller. I'll just note that Blake and Waller are now lionized as among our greatest composers and musicians. The guy who wrote that Time review has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Blackbirds was, unlike "Keep Shufflin'", an "all-white creation for an all-black cast" as Gerald Bordman put it. The music and lyrics were by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (who did the lyrics for several numbers in Roberta and other Astaire films). The show's numbers included "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "Diga, Diga Do" and the crowd favorite - "Doin' the New Low Down". This last was performed by Bill Robinson in his Broadway debut.

According to Jim Haskins in his book Mr. Bojangles

the first-act finale [of Blackbirds], a tribute to the DuBose Heyward novel Porgy, featured a huge black screen on which were reflected the magnified shadows of the performers. The first production of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess several years later featured a similar stage effect, though it is not known whether director Rouben Mamoulian consciously copied the Blackbirds segment.

But the best was yet to come, as the second act featured Bill Robinson who, according to Haskins, "from the moment he came on the stage seemed to electrify it." That was certainly the view of Time which rhapsodized:

the finest tap dancer in the world is Bill Robinson, long a spot of interest on Keith's tours. His feet are as quick as a snare drummer's hands; in Blackbirds he has a double flight of five stairs which, when he trots up and down it, produces a rapid tuneless and delicious music. Bill Robinson makes the show; if he were on the stage more of the time he would make the show a lot better.

Keith, by the way, was a vaudeville touring circuit founded by Benjamin Franklin Keith. It later became the "K" in RKO.

The New Yorker appeared to agree with Time that Robinson's dancing was the best thing in the show - albeit in a less enthusiastic way. Of "Blackbirds", they said: "Darky revue. For tap-dancing fans only."

Well, in fairness, Blackbirds did have solid competition in the 1928 theater season. Also showing was "Funny Face" with Fred and Adele Astaire, "Showboat" with Paul Robeson and others, "A Connecticut Yankee" with words and music by Rodgers and Hart, "Rosalie" - a Ziegfeld production - and the aforementioned "Keep Shufflin'".

Apparently King Vidor attended "Blackbirds" and spotted Nina Mae McKinney in the chorus line. That led to her casting in Hallelujah. And eight years after "Blackbirds of 1928", the Nicholas Brothers would star with Bill Robinson in "Big Broadcast of 1936" and then travel to London to star in a Lew Leslie production entitled "Blackbirds of 1936." And so, we're back to "Pie, Pie Blackbird".