Flashback, January 1943: Ellington Debuts ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ at Carnegie Hall

Duke Ellington achieved a new level of prominence in January 1943—a month when his new management began marketing him as a multidimensional musical force—by debuting, with his big-band jazz orchestra, at Carnegie Hall. 

The concert, also marking the premiere of his 45-minute Black, Brown and Beige, was commercially successful, but also inaugurated a strain of commentary on the bandleader-composer-pianist that has endured to this day: the question of whether his genius was better suited to short or extended musical works.

The black-tie affair was marketed both as a charity ($5,000 raised for relief of Russia, America’s ally at the time in WWII) and as a celebration of Ellington’s 20 years as a bandleader. In the seven days before the big event, a barrage of ads, articles and radio spots orchestrated by his management, the William Morris Agency, promoted “National Duke Ellington Week.” To accommodate the overflow of such illustrious attendees as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, and Leopold Stokowski, roughly 200 people had to be seated onstage.

The attention brought by the concert was much wanted and much needed. Ellington had been privately peeved when Benny Goodman became the first jazz big-band leader to appear at Carnegie in 1938, and even more so when he believed his manager at the time, Irving Mills, had turned down a chance to book the band a year before Goodman’s landmark concert.

But Ellington was not primarily motivated by ego in wanting the appearance at one of New York’s principal cultural institutions: he felt that it would maintain the band’s public profile at a time when it desperately needed it.

A traditional vehicle for doing so—the release of an LP—had been foreclosed since August 1942, when the American Federation of Musicians, in a royalty-payment dispute with radio stations, forbade its members from making commercial recordings. 

There was little problem provoking interest on the West Coast, where the band had been particularly active for the past two years (mostly involved in making music for movies), but it was another matter on the Eastern Seaboard. A suggestion by his agent at William Morris that he go to Carnegie was the spark Ellington needed—and the bandleader thought he had the requisite material, a project he had spoken of as far back as 1930: “My African Suite. It will be in five parts, starting in Africa and ending with the history of the American Negro.”

The next six weeks became a struggle, at times frantic, to shape the material into a coherent whole. How much he cobbled together from a previously announced opera, Boola—which, in its subject matter, sounds like an altered form of African Suite—is difficult to say, as no performance, recording, or physical artifact remains of that aside from an unfinished scenario.

But the subject of that long-aborning project now formed an inextricable part of what he eventually subtitled "A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in. America."

In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington noted that the Carnegie concert was the only time he never experienced stage fright: “I just didn’t have time. I couldn’t afford the luxury of being scared.” Even up to the day of performance, he was making changes in the program.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Ellington and his band had reached a creative and commercial zenith. But from this point on to the end of his life, he devoted considerably more energy to extended forms: thirty-odd concert suites and three “Sacred Concerts.”

Most Ellington observers have been kinder than biographer James Lincoln Collier, who thought these longer compositions represented “one of the great artistic errors in jazz history.” But the majority have been critical, and certainly so in the immediate aftermath of the 1943 concert, when Ellington’s attempt to add new orchestral colors failed to satisfy neither jazz nor classical purists.

Even the admiring cultural critic Terry Teachout, in his 2013 biography Duke, felt compelled to write that Ellington might have “fumbled the ball just short of the goal line.” But if the organic unity prized by critics proved elusive, the vivacity and power of the music endure.

Take, for instance, “Come Sunday,” one of the most forceful expressions of the composer’s spirituality. In its original instrumental version, it spotlighted alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. But I came to know it, three decades ago, through a transcendent 1958 recording featuring soul-piercing vocals by Mahalia Jackson, with Ellington himself gently accompanying her on piano.

I’m not so sure, in any case, about the overall validity of critical pronouncements on artists attempting a larger canvass. Critics may prefer the small scale because artists can concentrate their efforts there more easily to achieve perfection. But would critics really want to trade a perfect Mark Twain short story for an admittedly imperfect but still magnificent Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

This Day in Classical Music History (Goodman, Bernstein Debut Poulenc’s Posthumous ‘Clarinet Sonata’)

April 10, 1963—The debut of Francis Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata turned into an unanticipated memorial at Carnegie Hall. With the 63-year-old French composer dying of a massive heart attack only four months before, Leonard Bernstein replaced him at the piano, accompanying featured soloist Benny Goodman.

Twenty-five years before, Goodman’s performance at Carnegie had been a brassy, joyous affair that gave the imprimatur of New York’s most serious musical venue to big-band jazz. In contrast, his appearance in the Poulenc piece took on a somber tone.

In terms of personality, Poulenc and the "King of Swing" could not have differed more. The American, for all the joy his music gave the Greatest Generation, was such a taskmaster that years later, musicians who once played for him spoke of what a martinet he could be. Poulenc, far more of an easygoing eccentric, also displayed far more duality: "something of the monk and something of the rascal," according to music critic Claude Rostand. Never entirely able to sublimate his homosexual orientation, he also was a devout Roman Catholic who wrote an opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), that stands a fair chance of becoming a staple of modern musical theater—even though it features no romance or melodrama, only an order of nuns martyred during the French Revolution.

In terms of music, however, Poulenc and Goodman evinced a similar crossover sensibility. From early in his career, Poulenc composed witty, jazz-inflected pieces as well as the melodic, Romantic-influenced works for which he was better known. By the 1960s, with bebop pushing to the side his own big-band sound, Goodman increasingly widened his musical perspective to take in classical works. In the next two decades, he would perform classical works with his daughters acccompanying him on the piano and cello, and he died in 1986 while playing a Brahms sonata on his clarinet in his New York home.

Goodman had commissioned this piece from Poulenc, and it turned out to be one of the last (if not the last) works the Frenchman wrote before his untimely death. Bernstein, another musician with crossover tendencies (Poulenc deeply admired his West Side Story), was honored to step in for his friend.

For a fine assessment of Poulenc’s career (the piece that got me interested in him in the first place), this one by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal is the place to start. This YouTube clip, a performance by Anton Dressler on the clarinet and John Novacek at the piano, also gives a fine sense of Goodman’s fortune in commissioning this sterling late-career work.

This Day in Pop Music History (Judy Garland, in a Conquering Carnegie Comeback)

April 23, 1961—In its long, legendary history, Carnegie Hall has served as a platform for countless musicians who left their mark on the New York venue. 

But it’s almost impossible to think of one who had fallen so low before an appearance as Judy Garland, nor one who rose again so high on the strength of a single exultant performance as the former Wizard of Oz star.

Offstage, Garland was such a mess that if she came to visit, you’d better say goodbye to the contents of your medicine cabinet. But put her in front of thousands of cheering fans with a microphone in hand, and she ruled.

It was practically a physical change that those closest to her witnessed. 

That night at Carnegie, for instance, journalist Shana Alexander, who had been holding the star’s lit cigarette backstage as the audience excitement built before the 8:30 pm scheduled start time, was astonished to see that as Garland let go of the curtain and headed onstage, she “actually got bigger.”

Hype, you say. But Garland was so over the top herself that even when you describe exactly the way she was, in what you view as realistic terms, it comes out as hype anyway.

Sports bring comeback stories aplenty—in fact, baseball even has a “Comeback Player of the Year.” But in the entertainment industry, with only one notable exception that I can think of—John Travolta, who has noted wryly that he’s had four or five so far in his career—they’re harder to mount. 

Though sports had its share of triumph over physical adversity (Ben Hogan’s car crash, Tony Conigliaro’s beaning in the head), most “comebacks” happen after a subpar, injury-plagued season. Heal a bone and the body does wonders again.

Entertainment comebacks are different. Entertainers might not be overcoming simply a medical condition, or even the inevitable self-doubt in the wake of this kind of setback, but also the attitudes of those who make the deals in Hollywood. 

Make no mistake: For all their professed progressivism, when it comes to a performer who can interfere with a payday, Hollywood moguls can be as intolerant as the worst bigot.

The only entertainment comeback I can think of comparable to Garland’s was the one staged by her good friend and old MGM colleague, Frank Sinatra, with From Here to Eternity (recounted in this prior post of mine). But Sinatra only had to do it once, and by 1961 he was bigger than ever.

Not so with Garland. Oh, nobody doubted her ability to invest the Great American Songbook with the same drama that Ol’ Blue Eyes did. 

But the lift provided by her comeback vehicle after her suicide attempt and public firing by MGM, A Star Is Born (1954), proved ephemeral.

Five years later, after looking at her 4-ft.-11-in., 180-lb. frame in a hospital bed, drained of fluids, with a liver compromised by years of alcohol and pills, a doctor not only bluntly warned Garland she would be a semi-invalid for the rest of her life, but that under no circumstances could she even walk again.

Maybe Garland misheard him—maybe she thought he said she could never work again. Whatever. She was going to prove him wrong.

More than a few people thought she couldn’t do it. And more than a few people, tired of her chronic tardiness and unreliability, thought her such a high-maintenance pain in the neck that they weren’t even inclined to wish her well.

You get a very pungent sense of this in James Kaplan’s terrific 50th-anniversary retrospective of the Carnegie Hall concert in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair. Among the friends and fans who function as a kind of Greek chorus in this tragedy that was magically delayed, one quote especially stands out, by actress-singer Polly Bergen:

“She’d been gone, and her career was over. Nobody really understands. Her career was over. Nobody wanted to see her. Nobody wanted to put up with her. Nobody cared. I’m talking about nobody in the Business. And let’s face it, the Business is what creates the business. So if people in the Business didn’t care, nothing was going to happen.”

But two thought they could reverse that impression: Bergen’s husband of the time, aspiring agent Freddie Fields, and his partner, David Begelman (yes, the future head thief of Columbia Pictures). 

In January 1961, they outlined their plan to revive her career. One element of this was re-establishing her as a marquee live performer—and a key component of this was her date at Carnegie Hall.

That sold out within hours after a small ad was placed in The New York Times. 

Yes, there was an element—similar to those watching Charlie Sheen’s current bizarre tour—wondering if they might be watching a self-immolation onstage. 

Yes, there was, for those pre-Stonewall days, a gay coterie out to pay homage to a performer already turning into one of their idols. 

Yes, there were even those in show business—not the suits described by Bergen, but the performer’s own acting and music colleagues—who cherished their troubled but talented, funny, endlessly warm-hearted friend.

And there were those who cut across all these groups and more, who wanted to see a once-in-a-lifetime performer who could make them marvel, laugh and cry at every turn because, in giving voice to every joy and sorrow of her heart, they heard an echo of their own.

You can cite the usual results of the concert that night—an album (Judy at Carnegie Hall) earning five Grammy Awards, placing number one on the Billboard charts for 13 weeks—but it’s all pallid and bloodless. It was a night in which not merely a career but a life hang in the balance.

The minutes dragged by after the 8:30 start time, leading some to fret a backstage breakdown. Far from it, though: Garland was milking the excitement for all it was worth, until it could barely be restrained. 

From the moment she hit the stage, singing “When You’re Smiling,” everyone realized that she was in as good physical shape as she’d been in for the last two years—and that not only the pipes remained intact, but that her ability to put over a song might even have been enhanced by the years of heartache.

I’m not going to get into the years after the show—you know the sad story already. What I do want to do is leave you with a sense of what it felt like to be among the three thousand strong in Carnegie Hall that one magical evening of 20-plus songs.

(In a sense, words will have to do. Fields was only able to persuade Garland's record company to audiotape the proceedings that night because they thought they'd never be able to get her into a studio with any regularity. But, except for a few precious seconds caught surreptitiously by a fan that night, contained in this YouTube excerpt, no visual record remains of that evening.)

Garland had true believers in the audience that night, but she made even more, including Mike Nichols. Still a comic partner of Elaine May, not yet a film and stage director, Nichols was unprepared for what he saw, according to what he told Kaplan for the Vanity Fair piece:

“Everybody loved Judy Garland, and I liked her, but I wasn’t obsessed with her. Then she comes out and she’s like on fire from the first moment. You just thought, Holy shit! What is this? I don’t remember what she sang when. I just remember that our jaws dropped, because she seemed to be singing these songs for the first time, which of course was her gift anyway. We kept clutching each other and gasping and cheering and yelling and carrying on.”

Flashback, December 1925: Gershwin’s “Concerto” Debuts at Carnegie

Appearing for the first time on a symphony program as either performer or composer, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway great George Gershwin overcame jitters about lack of formal classical music training by soloing at the piano for his own work, Concerto in F, before a capacity audience at Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1925.

The 27-year-old composer received his commission for the work (originally titled “New York Symphony”) from Walter Damrosch of the New York Philharmonic, who sought him out the day after Paul Whiteman’s orchestra played Gershwin’s incorporation of jazz into classical music, Rhapsody in Blue.

Rhapsody in Blue…for me, and for thousands of other cinemaniacs, that music--as dazzling as a Fourth of July display--is heavily associated with its use in Woody Allen’s 1979 film, Manhattan. My passion for his music continued through the years, whetted by watching six years ago a compelling one-man show on his life and work in Chicago, George Gershwin Alone, featuring Hershey Felder.

Then two years ago, at one of my favorite vacation spots--the Chautauqua Institution--I stayed at the Carey Cottage Inn, where Gershwin came in mid-summer 1925 to work on the composition for Damrosch, then found, at the edge of this grounds, the shack where the composer--feeling that he really needed privacy, lest his instincts to play the piano upon friends' request at any time take over--came to compose in earnest.

In addition to attracting visitors interested in self-improvement and culture, Chautauqua, then as now, was a center for religious education and spiritual seeking. In a letter to Pauline Heifetz, sister of the famed violinist Jascha, that was included in Joan Peyser’s 1993 biography of Gershwin, The Memory of All That, the composer set down, in tones of affection barely winning out over irony, his fish-out-of-water feelings as a member of the Jewish faith in a place heavily imbued with Christianity:

“I’ve been in this place 9 days and I must say I made a happy choice in coming here. The atmosphere is quite different from any other I’ve been in. There are, for example, 40,000 people here, pious people with one foot in the grave, whose greatest pleasure is to go to lectures and sermons on Christ and His return or Evolution versus the Bible. You know the type….However they are very quiet, homely Americans who, aside from their narrowness, are very nice people."

(You can read a prior post of mine about Gershwin’s time at Chautauqua here.)


Gershwin is an American musical progenitor, just as surely as another George--Washington--was this nation’s great political progenitor. Over the last half century, any time a pop composer ventured into a more serious, classical vein—The Pajama Game’s Richard Adler (Wilderness Suite), Paul McCartney (Liverpool Oratorio), Elvis Costello (The Juliet Letters, Il Sogno) and Billy Joel (Fantasies and Delusions, Op. 1-10 )—it’s Gershwin’s lead they were following. But, with the exception of Kurt Weill (Street Scene) and Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd), few of these experiments have been memorable, let alone entered the classical music repertoire, the way Gershwin’s has.

Also like the Father of His Country, Gershwin created something indelibly American by working from Old World models. In a prior post, I mentioned how Washington designed Mount Vernon himself with the help of architectural “copy books.” Similarly, Gershwin got to work on his commission from Damrosch by setting forth for London, he puckishly noted, with “four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form really was!”

The composer was serious about studying this, but of course he wasn’t about not knowing what the concerto was. Yet many critics and composers of the time, to Gershwin’s horror, treated the quote far more seriously than he intended, and till the end of his tragically truncated career (dying of a brain tumor at age 38) they derided him as a musical interloper.

One of these individuals annoyed by this incursion into “serious” musical territory was a violist for the New York Symphony Orchestra, Allan Lincoln Langley. Not content with asking Damrosch point-blank if Gershwin had been given the commission because it would represent good box office, Langley then spread a rumor that the composer’s close friend, William Daly, was largely responsible for the piece’s orchestration.

There was an element of self-interest on the part of the naysayers in all of this—and, not to put too fine a point on it, an element of anti-Semitism, too. In a 1990 Boston College Magazine essay, “Serious George,” William H. Youngren pointed to Ivy League music professors such as Edward Burlingham Hill and Daniel Gregory Mason, who believed “America would find its authentic voice in the work of composers like themselves, men who came of Anglo-Saxon stock, had attended Ivy League colleges and had gone on to conservatory training under European masters. To them Gershwin’s successful bid for recognition as a composer of extended concert works was a serious affront.”

In his history of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built, Wilfred Sheed sums up pretty succinctly how these carpers treated Gershwin from here on out: “The serious New York critics began seriously to give up on George, like philanthropists who’ve tried everything for some child of the streets and found the kid just hopeless.” Adding to their fury: Gershwin’s popularity, which put fannies in the seats of the concert halls—something that the music they championed had trouble doing.

It would be another three years before Gershwin felt emboldened enough to re-enter the classical realm, this time with An American in Paris. When he did so, there was a definite comfort level involved, since the American premiere was conducted by Damrosch again. But he'd also taken the advice of others, such as Maurice Ravel, and trained with the best classical composers in Europe he could find. In the case of Gershwin,

I couldn’t end this post about Gershwin without another point of comparison with Washington: allegations that each man fathered an illegitimate son. In the case of Gershwin, that supposed offspring may have been conceived at the time he was laboring over Concerto in F.

In his analysis of Washington as slaveowner, An Imperfect God, Henry Wiencek examined the documentary evidence concerning the possibility that a slave named West Ford was the product of a relationship between the President and a woman named Venus. Wiencek’s verdict: impossible to disprove, barring DNA tests (and even this would only demonstrate whether Ford was a member of Washington’s family, not whether the master of Mount Vernon was indeed the father of the slave.)

(My own feeling is that it is highly unlikely that Ford was the product of such a union. Tellingly, before marrying George in 1759, Martha Washington had given birth to four children in a prior marriage; yet, though the widow, in her late twenties at the time of her remarriage, was still well within childbearing years, she never had a child with the Father of His Country. Very likely, Washington was sterile because of his medical history of smallpox and genito-urinary tuberculosis.)

The case involving the musical George is more complex and harder to dismiss. A man calling himself Alan Gershwin (born Albert Schneider) claimed, in a 1959 article in the notorious entertainment scandal rag Confidential, that he had been fathered by the composer during an affair with a married chorus girl in the mid-1920s. His date of birth was May 18, 1926, in Brooklyn--meaning that he would have been conceived in the fall of 1925.

This claim troubled the retirement years of George Gershwin's devoted surviving brother (and lyricist brother) Ira. Peyser, who gave the claim the greatest prominence, has had her credibility assailed by reviewers and other Gershwin biographers. But the evidence of her subject's circumstances and character cannot be rejected out of hand.

Unlike Washington, George Gershwin (who never married) carried on relationships with many women, included married ones. It’s altogether possible that a child resulted from such a liaison. On the other hand, Alan Gershwin never submitted to DNA testing, and biographers of the composer do not have hard evidence to prove his claims.

This Day in Rock History (The Raspberries Play Carnegie Hall)

September 26, 1973—In perhaps the highlight of their career—a moment that would pass all too quickly—the quintessential Seventies power pop group The Raspberries made their New York City debut at Carnegie Hall.

Ah, The Raspberries! They have been the subjects of one of those before-and-after arguments that periodically divide devotees of Seventies rock ‘n’ roll like myself. 

Specifically, was Eric Carmen better as a solo artist (“All by Myself,” “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again”) sometimes given over to emotional weepies, or as part of the tougher Raspberries, where his bandmates could keep his lyrical side in check? 

(Similar battles have raged over whether Grand Funk Railroad was better before or after producer Jimmy Ienner, or whether Bruce Springsteen’s best work came before or after Darkness on the Edge of Town.)

I came of musical age during Carmen’s solo career, but after repeated listening to his work over the years, I’m now more inclined to lean toward his output with this quartet that never really got its due until it was too late.

The group from Cleveland had waited several years for its big New York show, and had been bitterly disappointed when a 1972 backup tour gig with the Hollies had fallen through.

Now Eric Carmen, Wally Bryson, Jim Bonfanti, and Dave Smalley made the most of the opportunity in front of a standing-room only crowd.

You want to know what makes me chuckle about this show? The boys started with some chords from The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” before ripping into their high-energy hymn to teenage lust, “I Wanna Be With You.”

What made that move so unusual was that a number of critics had taken them to task for what was seen as overly heavy indebtedness to the Fab Four, a perception undoubtedly enhanced in their early days by management’s decision to put them in matching outfits, just like the Liverpool moptops. (See what I mean in the photo accompanying this post.)

This time, in the same performance venue that had launched The Beatles’ invasion of America in earnest in February 1964, Carmen and Co. were, in effect, giving the finger to the critical powers that be by invoking the memory of the British musicians that had transformed their lives.

It didn’t matter—their fans loved it, as hit after hit from their first three albums came from the group, including “Go All the Way,” “Let’s Pretend,” and “Ecstasy.”

It all ended so soon afterward. Smalley and Bonfanti left the group by the end of the year. Though the LP that Carmen and Bryson made with two replacements, Starting Over, won critical acclaim (particularly for what might have been the group’s production masterpiece, “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record”), the sales just weren’t there, and it all ended up messily in a parking lot brawl. 

From then on “it was Ricky and the Tooth,” Carmen noted in “No Hard Feelings” (“The Tooth” being producer Ienner, who went on to make Carmen’s first solo album).

Among rock ‘n’ roll musicians, Carmen might have the greatest affinity for my literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as witnessed by the fact that two of his song titles were inspired by The Great Gatsby author: “Winter Dreams” and “Boats Against the Current.” 

It is ironic, then, that in the last five years, Carmen’s career disproved Fitzgerald’s observation that “There are no second acts in American lives.”

In 2005, after 30 years of going solo, Carmen reunited with Bryson, Bonfanti and Smalley in what was originally supposed to be a one-shot gig at Cleveland’s House of Blues but that soon ended up creating a small concert tour. 

The affection that had belatedly welled up for the group over the years was best illustrated by one of their greatest admirers, Bruce Springsteen, who referred to these fine musicians three different times in his summer 2005 concert tour.

This Day in Cultural History

January 16, 1938 – For one night “The King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, captured the holy temple of classical music, New York’s Carnegie Hall, for the jazz world, bringing to the form unparalleled recognition and respectability.

In a way, it was only natural that Goodman should be an ambassador for the form, because he was used to breaking down barriers. One of 12 children born to Russian immigrants, the Chicago native had, by the time he was 30, vaulted to the top of one of the few art forms that were distinctively American, jazz.

Taught for two years by the classically trained clarinetist Franz Schoepp but soon falling under the influence of New Orleans jazzmen like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Goodman had already, by the time of the Carnegie Hall appearance, become the first prominent jazz musician to perform the classical repertory. In 1936, he played publicly with two African-American musicians, pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, then hired them for his band, breaking the jazz color line separating white from black.

Orchestrated by entertainment impresario Sol Hurok, the Carnegie Hall concert sold out weeks in advance. The 28-year-old Goodman was tentative at first, using the first half hour to highlight guest soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras. His 13 tuxedo-clad sidemen (and one sidewoman) may also have been nervous, with trumpeter Harry James later confessing to feeling “like a whore at church.” But Goodman gained momentum when he came out with his “small group,” including Wilson and Hampton. (Indeed, notes critic Will Friedwald, their appearance might have marked the first instance when a Carnegie Hall audience saw black and white musicians playing side by side.)

After intermission, Goodman’s big band finally showed what the dance-crazy kids at New York's Paramount had been screaming about a couple of years before. Rousing renditions of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and "Swingtime in the Rockies" built the audience’s enthusiasm until late in the show, when Goodman unfurled his piece de resistance: the orchestra’s barn-barning signature tune, “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Goodman, drummer Gene Krupa, and trumpeter Harry James took rousing solo turns before Goodman turned the spotlight over to pianist Jess Stacy, who had never before been featured on this particular song. Stacy’s two-minute turn, evolving from steamboat stride to impressionist chords that reflected his interest in Ravel and Debussy, had audience members on the edge of their seats, wondering what could possibly come next – until Krupa and the rest of the band kicked in for the conclusion that left the capacity crowd hoarse.

Demanding of himself, Goodman was equally so with his band, insisting on precise arrangements and playing. In interview he gave critic Gary Giddins late in his career, Goodman – whose nickname “The Professor” might owe as much to his cerebral musicianship as to his owlish appearance – summed up the paradox at the heart of his career: “Listening to music is emotional. Sometimes you like something a lot, and another time you hate it. The whole goddamn thing about jazz is emotional. I like to feel the excitement. If it doesn’t come out as a wide endeavor – wild with restraint – it doesn’t have it.”

Beloved by the public throughout his 40-year career, Goodman was respected by fellow musicians for his accomplished playing but also universally scorned for displaying what Giddins called “his legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”

Even his liberal outlook on race was marked by his curmudgeonly nature. His later pianist-arranged Mel Powell remembered his boss this way to jazz critic Dan Morgenstern: “Benny was one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color blind…One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”

Even family members were not exempt: a PBS documentary on his life included in an interview with one of his daughters, who recalled that when she was considering a career in music, he told her curtly she did not have the talent.

No matter how much of a martinet he might have been offstage, Goodman secured a distinct place for himself and the jazz world with his Carnegie Hall appearance. Its importance – and Goodman’s unique crossover appeal – was underscored on the 50th anniversary of the concert, when the great jazzman’s daughter, Rachel Goodman Edelson, handed one of her late father’s clarinets to Isaac Stern on stage as the first donation to a future museum at Carnegie Hall (later called the Rose Museum).