Shaw vs. Goodman: After 73 years, we’re still arguing!

by Jim Cullum

Hal Smith, esteemed jazz drummer, is clearly one of the great experts on the origins of jazz. He knows a lot about it and he knows a lot about how to play it.

Hal Smith

“You really prefer Shaw to Goodman?” he quizzes me. He knows in advance that he has a fight on his hands.

Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman

Let me tell you, I think that these arguments, so common among jazz nuts, are mostly hot air. Hal prefers the Coca Cola. I’ll have a Pepsi, please! Most of the time, that’s how silly this stuff is. But, for old time’s sake, we go at it.

Shaw vs. Goodman! Of the two, Shaw thrills me more.

“No comparison!” I say, “Shaw wins in all the ways I can measure.”

Hal fires back, “How could you measure so that you prefer Shaw?” He lists numbers of Benny’s early recordings.

We might go on like this for days – especially if we are on the road.

Swing Crazy Kids

The Shaw vs. Goodman battle was first waged by the jazz weirdoes during the late 1930s. A tidal wave of jazz, newly re-packaged as “Swing” had young Americans by their throats. A performance by one band or another would ignite passions never known before in American music. The jazz camps lined up. The excitement about Shaw and Goodman caused one of the biggest battles. Mainly Benny won out. He was the most popular of all swing-era figures and generally he eclipsed all other clarinetists.

However, Shaw began to challenge Goodman’s preeminence, and between the two of them, a high water mark of jazz clarinet performance was set.

Goodman and Shaw

For my money, no one ever played the clarinet more beautifully than Artie Shaw. As much as I admire Benny, here are reasons I admire Shaw more:

1) Shaw’s tone is a little darker – I think it is more mellow and richer and more interesting than Benny’s. In a few words, Shaw’s tone is unique, recognizable and gorgeous. 2.) Shaw is more careful about picking out the most interesting notes. This may be small potatoes, but I don’t think there are quite as many surprises in Benny’s playing.

When you listen to Shaw, think of Bix and listen that way. Shaw’s sound is special like Bix’s and he doesn’t waste many notes. He is like Bix in telling the story. Somehow the Bix influence is in there. Maybe it is accidental. But I suspect that Shaw had been very impressed by Bix. Both Beiderbecke and Shaw had special tones and both tended to find unexpected patterns.

Shaw had heard Bix play at his peak. He was amazed by the sound. “The whole horn vibrated,” he said.

A few years later Shaw roomed with Bix for a while.

After another 60 years, an aging Shaw attended the Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival at Davenport, Iowa. He discovered that the Beiderbecke home where Bix was born and had grown up was becoming dilapidated and the roof had failed. Shaw began to yell about the condition of the house.

In the end, the whole place was well restored. This was a big deal. To the hardcore devotee, the Beiderbecke house is a Mecca.

Bix Beiderbecke - classic photo

I suggest that when you listen to Shaw, listen to the similarities to Bix.

Shaw possessed and often displayed more technique than Bix. But don’t let that confuse any point about their similarities.

Goodman, also considered a kind of genius by many, swung just as hard. His playing was always perfect, flawless.

But Shaw is where a special, individual art lies. Listen to Shaw that way and see what you think.

Great though it is, I do not recommend another round of “Begin the Beguine.” Rather get into Shaw in depth. There is a huge wealth of recorded material, and Shaw, who retired early, was always at the top of his form.

“So if you’re so smart,” Hal asks, “who are your fingers-on-one-hand favorite jazz musicians?” You know the bit − whose records do you take with you to a desert island, when there can only be five artists?

I am ready for him. “Here you go,” I say. And I toss them off, for I have played this game for a lifetime: “Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith, Artie Shaw, and there is a 10-way tie for 5^th and last place.”

“That 5^th place is a cop out,” Hal says.

“Why are you worrying about my 5^th place, anyway? We’re talking about Goodman and Shaw. You go figure out your own 5^th place choices.” This is the way these jazz arguments have been going ever since Buddy Bolden, having finished with the waltzes and schottisches, came on with a slow, grinding blues.

There are some strong similarities in the Shaw/Goodman comparison. 1.) Both were unique and brilliant musicians. 2.) They were eccentric in the extreme. 3.) They were driven by their egos and their talents and the clear rivalry that was between them. 4.) They took great advantage of the rising tide of the swing era to carry the form to a high art.

If you can find it, try the double CD set of the Artie Shaw “At the Blue Room, At the Café Rouge” air checks. To my ear, big band swing just does not get any better. Shaw’s hands are all over this stuff. He wrote or directed the writing of the arrangements. He set standards for solo quality. The result: everyone in the band absorbs much of Shaw’s taste, and solo notes are not wasted. Ensemble precision is amazing. The rhythm section, with young Buddy Rich on drums, is as good as it gets.

If you do find this CD, I suggest that you experiment with turning down the high frequency response. In the transfer from LP to CD, the audio has become a little too edgy to be faithful. But I think you’ll like it – really like it!

I enjoy this size band too: four rhythm, three trumpets, two trombones, four saxophones, plus Shaw (14 pieces in all). Benny’s band had the same instrumentation.

I never cared as much for the later swing bands – often with nine brass, five reeds and usually only three rhythm.

If you hear a swing band today it is usually extra large and more about volume than it is about swing. Often you will see 20 mikes on a band already loud enough to peel the paint. Rock starts to creep in on some numbers.

Or, sometimes there is the other extreme − moo cow, slavish imitations of Glenn Miller.

Of course it would not be impossible to create a swinging band like Shaw’s. But it would take an obsessed genius like Shaw to drive it. And the market is not there. To realize full potential, a band like this must actually work every night for hundreds of nights.

Jim Cullum

PS. A tip-

The other night I saw a movie, “Dancing Co-ed,” starring Lana Turner and Artie Shaw. The movie is terrible, but Shaw plays a lot, and his playing is magnificent. You can find all this on your computer. I can’t − I am computer challenged. But you can find it, you lucky dogs!

Exponential Change

A lady I know has cats under her house. She makes no attempt to neuter or spay them. They constantly produce new litters of cats.

For the moment, they are just under the house, not bothering anyone. The lady gives them some food every day.

If things continue this way the multiplying cats will, in about five years, increase from two cats to about 5,000 cats. This is a pretty good example of exponential growth. Eventually, the smell will take over and the house may begin to rock on its foundation.

Here in the U.S. we depend on serious growth. We just gotta have it. Without it all the wheels really start coming off, as in the current recession. For most of our history, we have been able to grow and grow.

Generally, the vast majority of our citizens have wanted as much growth as we could wring out. Damn the torpedos!

And with exponential growth comes exponential change. Here is a tiny example you might enjoy:

Eloise

The other day, I took my granddaughter Eloise for an ice cream cone. Eloise is three years old. These days, as you know, getting her in the car requires strapping her in a plastic chair which must first be strapped in the back seat. So I drive to my daughter's home, where I must remove a car seat from the back seat of one car, take it back home and install it in still a third car.

I am gadget-challenged. There is a learning curve that sets in. So, I have a hard time getting the child seat properly anchored in the back seat of the car. Most people have no trouble at all.

The next step is to get Eloise into the thing and she has grown a little large for the chair I am using. To make it all go I must get in with her and squeeze with everything just short of putting my knee on her.

I am thinking the typical things such as, "The guy who invented that chair should be condemned to a lifetime of struggling with them." (This as his punishment).

Ah, these gadgets. You will remember when the Wizard of Oz is finally revealed to be a funny old snake oil salesman, and he accidentally pre-launches in the helium balloon -- "Come back! Come back" Dorothy yells, and the Wizard leans out over the basket: "I can't, I can't," he says. "I don't know how it works!"

Finally we do make it to the ice cream store, get Eloise out, get the ice cream, make a mess of it, get her back in--sticky this time--get her home, undo the seat, get Eloise and the seat in the house, get wet cloths, wipe Eloise off--the car seat, too, and the whole ice cream ordeal is finally over.

In early 1948, at age six, I moved with my family to Caracas, Venezuela. We lived there for two years.

If I pleaded, my mother might drive me to downtown Caracas to have an ice cream cone.

She would say, "Okay, get in the car and I'll be along," and pretty soon we would take off. I would stand on the front seat next to her.

The car was a one year old 1947 Ford four-door sedan. As we cruised through the Caracas streets she, with complete ease, would, in her high heeled shoes, work the clutch, brake and gas pedals, steer the car, and make hand signals out the window with her left arm. The car was not equipped with turn signals. She would shift gears with her right arm and hand. When she came to a stop sign or a red light, she would extend her right arm out to the right to keep me (standing on the seat) from falling into the dashboard! Through all this she would casually smoke a cigarette!

This must seem absurdly dangerous, particularly to anyone under 50. But, we all rode around this way all the time. Everyone's mother held her right arm out to keep the children from sprawling into the dash. And cars had no seat belts.

Caracas in the 40's

However, there were no freeways. That was one of the huge changes started by the war. The country was transformed in many ways. Before the war, two-thirds of Americans lived on farms or in small towns. The cities were smaller. There was one car per family, not one car per person, and generally, cars were driven more slowly. Much of the time, people walked. (As a result, obesity was minimized). Our mothers were quick on the draw.

But now, get ready in the change department! You are going to see so many changes going faster and faster. The change rocket ship is just starting its blast off.

One theory, outlined in a recent book, The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil, attempts to measure the rate of this exploding change and more or less predicts that soon we'll arrive at a singular point when we will be largely able to fix all of our problems. This assumes we won't blow up the planet in the meantime. Ray is saying that we are closer to a new technical "big bang" than most of us realize. a lot of this is about computers and chips and how powerful they are becoming and this very rapidly. I recommend Ray's book.

Isn't it nice, however, to have some things, like the jazz band, around where almost nothing changes? We are still using some of our original 1963 arrangements. The band is still mostly a seven-piece ensemble. The only change that has occurred during the last 48 years is that the band is better! The most recent additions, Hal Smith, drums, and Steve Pikal, bass, have added more swing and power to the Rhythm Section.

Unlike the rest of the world, we in the band have stubbornly avoided electronics. You hear the real sound -- not one that has been filtered through microphones and speakers.

There is no reverberation system -- no amp on the bass, etc.

When your head is spinning with data overload, and you are cursing your computer, close the laptop and come to the Landing We will fix you up!

More about Teagarden

In 1945, my father joined Jack Teagarden’s big band, where he played tenor in the reed section and clarinet in the “Dixieland Band.” On clarinet, he stayed in the low register – this almost all the time. The sound was rich and resonant. He favored long blue notes, punctuated by arpeggios.

I think the sound was more important in those days.

Jack particularly liked that low-register clarinet. It reminded him of clarinetist Gilbert O’Shaughnessy. Jack had played with Gilbert in San Antonio when they were very young.“Gilbert was the best in the world,” Jack would say, thus informing his bold-exaggerating-to-make-a-point statement about Bix being the best artist in history.

“I named my son Gilbert Teagarden for Gilbert O’Shaughnessy,” Jack said. In later years, Gilbert O’Shaughnessy came in a few times to sit in at the Landing. He was an interesting clarinet player, and he did stay in the low register most of the time. Clearly, however, he was not the best in the world.

Being with Teagarden was heady stuff for my father. He and Jack became running mates.They went at the whiskey. Going around after hours and sitting in was a big part of this. For Jack, the music never stopped. My father said that a couple of times at a “black and tan,” they ran into and sat in with Louis Armstrong.

Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong

Jack, who sometimes didn’t go to bed at all, often took Benzedrine and kept going. Life was too much fun to waste it on sleeping. My father tried to keep up – said that Jack had an extra gland. Toward night’s end, when all the music was finally slowing down, Jack would wash out his trombone in the bathtub and have fun even with this, fooling around, showing off, with things like how he could pump water with the slide. Then he would oil the slide with Jerris Hair Oil. “World’s best slide oil,” he would say.

Not everyone used Benzedrine, but many did. In those days, my father said, you could go to the drug store and buy Benzedrine inhalers. Then, if you could not get Benzedrine, you could break open the plastic inhaler, drop the Benzedrine filament in a Coca Cola and drink the Coke.

Benzedrine inhaler

At daylight, Jack, up on Benzedrine, would go out to the band bus and begin to take the engine apart. Nothing would be wrong with the engine, but Jack loved mechanical things. Then at about noon, he would begin to practice for a couple of hours. The trombone was always out of its case and ready.

Jim Cullum, Sr. on saxophone

On tour with a different band, and traveling in a 1938 Ford, my father ground away at the one-nighters. The distances could be vast. Fighting it out, they often drove against the night, pushing hard to make it.

On one night in Oklahoma, the two-lane blacktop road stretched straight and long. The driver struggled to stay awake. “Gimme one of those ‘bennies,’” he said. Soon he was wide awake.They rolled on. My father dozed in the back seat.

Sometimes they called the Benzedrine pills “California Turn-Arounds,” meaning you could take one, drive to California and turn around and drive back!

Suddenly, the car lurched, almost turned over, skidded, rotated and plowed sideways into the black dirt of a muddy field.

1938 Ford

“Holy crap, man! What happened?” They all turned to the driver.

“It was that train!” he said. “We just barely missed it! Came out of nowhere. We just almost hit it!”

The driver kept on. “Thank God! Just barely missed it!” he said over and over.

They struggled out to the road. The car was completely mired down. Dawn slowly came on. An occasional car came by, but no one wanted to stop for five musicians in muddy tuxedos.

Still shaken, a couple of them began to walk up and down. There were no railroad tracks anywhere!

The Teagarden Band toured on the bus. The driver took no Benzedrine. Jack carried a lathe and rode in the very back where he turned his own mouthpieces. “Let me fix your mouthpiece,” he would say to unsuspecting trumpet players, and out would come the lathe. Mostly, he ruined the mouthpieces.

Jack was always inventing things. He built a huge electric fan to go at one side of the band and keep things cooler in the un-air conditioned summer heat. When the fan was first turned on, it blew all the music off 18 music stands – blew it all the way to the other side of the ballroom and jumbled up the parts.

One of Jack’s inventions was a big trunk – like a steamer trunk – that doubled as a music stand. The trunk stood on end – opened with its hard sides toward the audience. There was a music rack on the top of the thing. The inside of the trunk, which faced the band, contained Jack’s dinner jackets, a bit of music, his mutes, and all kinds of other stuff.

After dances the band often hit the road. Jack wore a carbide miner’s hat to light up his tinkering. He always said that carbide was the most perfect method of illumination ever devised.

Jack was a nut about steam engines. Many musicians are fascinated by trains, especially steam trains, but for Jack it was steam cars. He said to me, “Some fellows I know took an old Stanley all the way down the Pan American highway, from Alaska to the bottom of South America, and the cost of the oil to fire the boiler was only $17.00 – for the whole trip! For years, I’ve been storing my steam car in a garage in Fort Worth. There’s a guy there that loves it just as much as I do. He dusts it off every day – fires the boiler every week – keeps it in perfect condition. It’s been there for years. I owed him for some past storage. Last month I phoned him and gave the car to him. ‘It’s yours,’ I said. He got so excited I thought he was going to faint. I’m busy with the band. I don’t have time for steam touring.”

By the time I came along, in his last days, it seemed that Jack was depressed. Among a handful of the greatest jazz players of all time, stardom had slipped through his fingers. When Bob Crosby’s band was being organized, the members wanted Jack as front man. This would have made Jack a huge Swing Era star, for in the late 1930s the Crosby band was the second most popular, right behind Benny Goodman.

But in 1935, Jack had signed a contract with Paul Whiteman who refused to release him. So, the Crosby band musicians sought out Bing’s younger brother, Bob.

Many years later when I was following Jack’s band, I stood out of sight and off to the side, and quietly watched Jack Teagarden leave one of the concerts. He slowly dragged his square case by its end handle. Now portly and tired with his head down, he looked like a very sad man.

But the music will buoy you up. When he was up there, with that trombone in his hand, the swing of the thing, and that sound coming from his trombone, made Jack Teagarden higher in the 1960s than the Benzedrine had in the 1940s.

PHOTO CREDITS

Teagarden and Armstrong photo courtesy jackteagarden.info

Jim Cullum, Sr. photo courtesy Jim Cullum, Jr. private collection

1938 Ford photo courtesy fordflathead.com

Benzedrine inhaler photo courtesy addictionscience.net

Kid Stuff

by Hal Smith

The first recordings of Jazz giants Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke never cease to amaze me, no matter how many times I listen to those historic sides.

Though subsequent recordings would showcase his virtuosity on cornet, trumpet and vocals, Armstrong's first record ("Chimes Blues," with King Oliver from 4/15/23) shows that his playing style was almost fully formed at the age of 21.

Similarly, Teagarden's solo chorus on "She's a Great, Great Girl" with Roger Wolfe Kahn and his Orchestra (3/14/28) showcases Big T's beautiful tone, effortless technique and his gift for melodic improvisation. The record was made when Teagarden was 22.

Beiderbecke's first recording, "Fidgety Feet" with the Wolverines Orchestra (2/18/24), is more of a preview of things to come. Bix was 20 when the record was made. The listener will hear flashes of his ethereal tone and the rhythmic concept that spawned a new way of playing jazz. Still, Bix's style in 1924 was still "under construction."

Many other great musicians made their first records at early ages, but one of those recordings continues to be a real mindblower, "Deed I Do" by Ben Pollack and his Californians (recorded 12/17/26) with Benny Goodman on clarinet.

From the mid-to-late 1920s, Ben Pollack's orchestra was considered to be one of the best hot bands anywhere. Pollack, an outstanding Chicago drummer, cut his musical teeth with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. His own '20s-era ensembles included top jazzmen such as Goodman, the aforementioned Teagarden, and Glenn Miller, Fud Livingston, Frank Teschemacher and Bud Freeman.

Unfortunately, not all of the Pollack recordings allow the listener to hear the hot music that the band was capable of playing. But "Deed I Do," recorded in Chicago on 12/17/26, is plenty hot and includes an absolutely spectacular half-chorus by Goodman.

Composed by Walter Hirsch and Fred Rose, "Deed I Do" was a current popular song when the Pollack band recorded it (Pollack's photo adorns the sheet music). The recording begins with a "symphonic jazz" introduction and leads into an ensemble chorus in the key of F, with reeds playing melody, violins accompanying and brass "pecking." A brief interlude leads into the rarely-heard verse, with eight bars of Bix-influenced cornet played by Earl Baker. The reeds take the second half, and the orchestra makes a quick modulation to Eb for bandleader/drummer Pollack's vocal (Critics tend to be harsh concerning Pollack's vocals, but this writer believes that drummers make excellent vocalists!).

After the vocal, there is another "symphonic jazz" interlude with Goodman playing peek-a-boo between ensemble passages, then another modulation to Bb. Fud Livingston, a fine Chicago style reedman, takes the first half of the chorus on tenor sax and manages to quote his own composition "Imagination" on bars 7 and 8. He is followed by Glenn Miller, paying homage to Miff Mole. Both men's solos, and Goodman's later on, are punctuated by the leader's swinging cymbal work - choked, in this particular case.

Next is yet another "modernistic" modulation with breaks by Goodman. The fluid technique and rich tone on the first break suggest Jimmie Noone. The second break has a lemony tartness that recalls Johnny Dodds. After hearing only a few bars of Goodman's solo, it quickly becomes apparent that Bix's influence was not limited to cornetists! The "sock-time" phrasing is much like Bix's on Jean Goldkette's recording of "Proud of a Baby like You." And, like fellow Chicago clarinetist Frank Teschemacher, Goodman sometimes employed an almost brassy tone, more like a cornet. There is definitely some Tesch in Goodman's solo too (particularly bars 10 and 11). Before that, there is even a nod to Pee Wee Russell (bars 8 and 9). The final break, on bars 15 and 16, combines the graceful melodic lines of Jimmie Noone and Leon Roppolo with Beiderbecke-like phrasing.

Benny Goodman's first recording is a genuine tour-de-force. His flawless technique makes the solo sound as though it was casually tossed off, but the intensity is still white-hot. The half-chorus is a textbook demonstration of how to play "Chicago Style" clarinet, recorded almost a full year before the classic McKenzie-Condon sides with Teschemacher. Still, Goodman's musical identity is not lost in the process. What you hear on this 1926 record is not far removed from the Goodman clarinet sound of the '30s, '40s and beyond. "Deed I Do" and subsequent sides with Pollack such as "He's the Last Word," "Waitin' for Katie" and "Singapore Sorrows" continue to astound and delight musicians over eight decades after they were recorded (I hear that our own Ron Hockett was speechless after hearing them the first time!).

Meet Hal

I want to take a minute to introduce Hal Smith, regarded by many as the county's finest jazz drummer. To those of you who don't already know him, I'm pleased to tell you that Hal recently joined the Jim Cullum Jazz Band. He is also a respected jazz historian who has written for publications all over the world. Hal is a band leader in his own right and has played on hundreds of recording sessions and broadcasts including Riverwalk - Live from the Landing, A Prairie Home Companion, and Ken Burns' "Jazz."

Now here's the good part - Hal is joining me here at Le Blog Hot. He'll be blogging every other Wednesday, talking about every sort of jazz-related subject you can think of - deconstructing what you hear on the radio, stories of jazz greats and jazz history, and on and on. Hal and I even disagree on a couple of things and we might get a debate started once in a while. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

See you at the Landing!