Stan Hasselgard was a kid in Sweden who grew up in the early 1940s playing the clarinet. Benny Goodman was a big influence, and blowing in a Benny-like way, he grew well known all across Europe after the war. In 1947, he moved to New York and made a good impression on everybody. A record he cut for Capitol with Barney Kessel and Red Norvo among the sidemen firmed up his reputation. But at the same time as Stan was establishing himself as a very good straight-ahead clarinetist, bebop was moving him toward modern jazz. That was a process I had a hand in.
Through the summer of 1948, Stan and a quartet made up of me, Chuck Wayne, Clyde Lombardi and Max Roach played for several weeks at the Three Deuces. Stan was a nice guy who was enthusiastic about absorbing bebop lessons, and he got those from us that summer.
Stan had already come under Benny's wing, and he played with Benny in a septet that included two clarinets along with modern musicians like Wardell Gray on tenor and the great young bebop trumpet player Fats Navarro. That was a period when Benny was interested in seeing what bebop was all about, though I can't say I ever noticed any difference it made in his own playing.
All of this history led to a phone call I got at home from Stan on the afternoon of September 9. Stan wanted to know if I could hustle into Manhattan that night for a record date with Benny's group. It seemed that Benny, who could be a tempestuous guy, and his pianist, Mary Lou Williams, no shrinking violet herself, had got into a disagreement. Mary Lou was either fired or quit. Would I replace her? Stan didn't need to ask me twice.
That night, I recorded the Fats Waller tune, Stealin' Apples, with Benny's guys: Fats Navarro, Wardell Gray, Mundell Lowe on guitar, Clyde Lombardi on bass and Mel Zelnick on drums. The funny thing was that Stan, the guy who invited me to the session, didn't take part in the recording. I thought that was a shame. Still, when the rest of us started to play, we got a bebop line on the tune, which suited me just fine. I was still at the stage where I thought playing fast bebop was the best thing in the world. Benny seemed to be okay with that. I vaguely supposed he might have been impatient about all the bop I was playing, but I think Stan had influenced Benny to be more accepting of younger players like himself and Fats and, on this date, me.
Benny, still by far the most famous clarinet player in the world at the time, invited me back a week later for another recording of the same tune, Stealin' Apples. This time, on September 17, it took place at the grand opening of the New York radio station WMGM. We were on The Ted Husing Show, live in front of a full studio audience, and we were being recorded at the same time. The band's personnel varied a little from the week before. Billy Bauer replaced Mundell Lowe on guitar. And there was no trumpet player because Fats Navarro just didn't show up. Benny was peeved about that, but I didn't mind because I was given Fats's solo space.
I think I played pretty well, and I knew one other person who seemed to agree. He was the guy who said at the end of my solo, "What was that?" The guy who seemed so astonished was Count Basie who was in the studio to play with Benny in another group. Basie took the time backstage to chat with me about music in general for a few minutes. That was a big deal to me, though I didn't tell him about the personal significance of his Oh! Red. The telling of that story came at another time in another studio in another city.
As for Stan Hasselgard, I never had another chance to play with him. A few months after the Goodman recording sessions, Stan was in a car in Illinois on the way to a gig. Outside the city of Decatur, on November 23, the car crashed. Stan, twenty-six years old, was killed.
More than a decade later, in 1959 and again in 1961, Benny Goodman hired me two more times to play with a group of his for a couple of weeks each time at Basin Street East in Manhattan. Before we opened in '59, he invited me to his house in Stamford, Connecticut, for the two of us to just jam a little. He was still making up his mind about bebop. By that time, I was far more than a straight bebop pianist, and I thought I could oblige Benny with whatever he wanted.
He lived in a big white clapboard house, a beautiful place with plenty of space. Benny's wife Alice came from Vanderbilt family money going back a couple of generations. Before Alice met Benny, she'd already been married once in England to an aristocratic guy named Duckworth. Alice didn't get a title out of the marriage but she looked like someone who might be a "Lady." So that's what a lot of people called her.
Benny led me to his music studio at the back of the house. The first thing that struck me were all the clarinet reeds scattered around the room, mounds of reeds, maybe a couple thousand of them. The second thing I couldn't help noticing was the view out the window. It was of a lovely summer scene of trees and flowerbeds and a swimming pool a few doors down with a bunch of happy kids jumping in and out of the water.
After I'd taken in the general scene, Benny and I began to play. Benny was strictly an ear guy. He didn't go by chord changes. Dizzy was the first musician I worked with who knew about chord changes. Most of the rest of the bebop guys were ear players. The really good players were the people who melded everything, both ear and chord changes. Benny really wasn't much interested in playing in a modern style, but he was a heck of a musician and very exciting to play with.
About thirty years later in Canada, I had a strange and coincidental reason to revisit my afternoon in Stamford, Connecticut. This happened one day when I was driving in the country near my place in the Hockley Valley. I noticed a fairly new restaurant called the Woodside. What naturally came into my mind was Count Basie's famous tune, Jumpin' at the Woodside. I went into the place and met a nice guy who was the chef. Yeah, he said, he liked jazz. His name was Matthew Jamieson, and he said he was from Stamford.
"Stamford?" I said. "I was once there playing piano with Benny Goodman."
"At his house on Rock Rimmon Road?"
"That's the street all right."
"Well," Matthew said. "that's where we lived, and when you were there, I was probably the nine-year-old kid you saw jumping in the swimming pool."
Matthew and I agreed that the world was sometimes a small place.
At Basin Street East in 1959, Benny led a very nice band. It had nine guys including solid and seasoned players like Bill Harris on trombone, Red Norvo on vibes and Flip Phillips on tenor. Everybody knew their business, and it was essentially the same group that played the same club two years later with the exception of Urbie Green replacing Bill Harris on trombone. The gig went well with a couple of highlights. I wrote a tune for Benny called Divertimento in Blue, which he liked. That was one highlight, and the other came one night when we were visited in the club by a group of distinguished Russian composers who were on some sort of American tour. Their visit turned out to be a mixed blessing.
Things started to go wrong when the greatest of the Russians, Dmitri Shostakovich, insulted Benny, though not, I think, intentionally. Benny was playing a solo, and all through it, Shostakovich had his head down while he chewed on his steak. Maybe the guy hadn't seen steak for years, maybe Russia had no steaks, maybe Shostakovich thought it would be the last steak he'd eat in his life. Whatever the reason, Shostakovich's concentration on the steak came as a terrible insult to Benny. He was furious.
During the intermission, the Russia group came backstage to meet the musicians. They were especially keen to chat with Benny. But Benny refused to come out of his dressing room. He wasn't going to spend time with that insulting Shoshtakovich. I went into Benny's dressing room and begged him to come out. Shoshtakovich was one of the world's great classical composers. Benny couldn't give him the cold shoulder. Finally, after much pleading by me, Benny came out, shook everyone's hand, even Shoshtakovich's, and the meeting seemed amicable on all sides.
As for me, I had a wonderful fifteen-minute talk with another of the Russian composers, Dmitry Kabalevsky. He was a very pleasant, obliging, bright guy, and best of all, he spoke English like a guy who'd grown up in New York State.
But on that 1959 Basin Street date, it was something else entirely, not the Goodman band and not the Russian visit, that was most memorable for me about the whole gig. The group playing between our sets was Bill Evans and his trio. I hadn't heard Bill before, and hardly anybody in the Basin Street audience that week paid much attention to him. But I listened, and after what I heard, I don't think I moved for two weeks. I just had this powerful, other-worldly reaction to hear such beauty from his piano.
Later, when I moved to Los Angeles, I heard Bill every time he played at Shelley's Manne-Hole, which was the top jazz club in town. I'd listen to him, then just go out to the car and weep. Bill was touched by something that was incredibly beautiful. It was as if he were visiting from another planet, and the sad conclusion I came to was that he didn't really want to be here on this earth. He had the gift, but he had no wish to stick around and share it with the rest of us. This was a weird idea on my part maybe, but it was the impression I took away from watching and listening to Bill at the piano.
My times with Benny added up to a mixed bag, which was the same kind of relationship he had with practically every musician who worked in a Goodman band. He could be kind to you, and he could be miserable. Usually it was some of both. That's how it was with me.
One summer evening in 1961, he hired me and the rest of his group for a fancy outdoor gig on a Connecticut estate owned by a Goodyear or a Firestone or somebody else incredibly wealthy. The band was really cooking that night, and whenever that happened, Benny liked to position himself in the crook of the piano and really blow.
It was a lot of fun with Benny that night, playing his old warhorses. These were the tunes I'd grown up with, the ones I heard when I was a young kid and my brother Victor took me to the Paramount Theatre. The tunes weren't nearly as difficult to play as Now's the Time or Shaw 'Nuff or any of the other bebop anthems I got used to on 52nd Street. There were a few numbers Benny still had that Eddie Sauter or Mel Powell had arranged, and they were more advanced and challenging. But mostly the tunes were just simple and fun. Benny often took the warhorses at a very quick tempo. He loved to play fast, which meant his piano player needed to have some chops. I qualified in that department, and Benny and I got along wonderfully.
So on that night at the rich people's outdoor party, I was flying along with Benny who was in his favourite spot in the crook of the piano, and it was a great atmosphere. Afterwards, Benny came up to me and said, completely unsolicited, "You were playing the hell out of the piano." That was a very nice thing for him to say, and his praise left me feeling pretty good.
On the other hand, Benny could be thoughtless-or worse. I was at the wrong end of one of his unkind episodes not long after he praised my playing at the outdoor gig. Benny was scheduled to appear on a Revlon TV special. That was a very big thing in those days, a music show in prime time television with a lot of stars. Benny said he'd like me to come on and play with him, Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton. I agreed and was feeling pretty thrilled to take part in such a major TV event.
As Benny had instructed, I showed up for the rehearsal on the designated day, and what did I find? I found Benny's pianist from his big band heyday sitting at the piano in the studio for the Revlon Show. The pianist was Jess Stacy.
"What's up, Jess?" I said. "Benny asked me to play the show."
"He asked me too," Jess said. "You got a contract?"
"No," I said. "But he made it clear I was playing."
"This is why you get things on paper, fella," Jess said, and he reached into his pocket and produced his signed contract for the Revlon Show.
A few minutes later, as I reeled from the shock, the show's producer came over and explained things to me. Benny didn't have the nerve to tell me himself. He sent the producer who said the show would list me as the rehearsal pianist and I'd get some money out of it.
I felt angry-who wouldn't?--and I chased around trying to catch Benny. He took off, not giving me the chance to confront him. But sometime later, he sent me a tie clip with an engraving on it. The engraving read, "Please don't be mad at me. Benny."
I met a lot of guys who'd been through similar experiences with Benny, and all of them said they'd never play for him again. I thought an attitude like that was a mistake. How could anybody deny himself the chance to play with one of the great musicians in the world, even if he was sometimes a thoughtless son of a gun?
As it happened, however, I never again played in Benny's company.