Benny Goodman, NYC, 1958
Credits: Photo by Don Hunstein ©Sony Collectibles. All rights reserved.
The ninth of twelve children born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants in Chicago, the jazz clarinetist and band leader Benny Goodman would grow up to head the vanguard of a musical and cultural revolution in the 1930s. He famously broke down the wall between polite high culture and the swinging Dionysian jazz pulsing on the edges of society with an historic Carnegie Hall concert in January 1938, marking the first time a note of jazz had ever been performed in that citadel of European classical music. Goodman, jazz's King of Swing, would return the favor with frequent forays over the years into the world's classical repertory. Beginning in the 1930s, Goodman's music found a home at Columbia Records, who released "The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert" as the first-ever double album in the newly emerging LP format in 1950. Don Hunstein caught Goodman in the 30th Street Studio in February 1958, the year of his enormously popular appearances at the Brussels Worlds Fair.
