Caption: BENNY GOODMAN:"Detroit has always been interesting."BY CHUCK THURSTONFree Press Staff WriterWhen Benny Goodman was a young man playing with the Ben Pollack orchestra in Chicago the who band drove to Detroit to hear Bix Beiderbecke at the Graystone Ballroom."That was longer ago than I like to admit," said the 66-year-old Goodman, who plays at Meadow Brook at 8:30 p.m. Friday. "It was a long haul from Chicago in those days. It was expensive, too. We had to hire a replacement for the band in Chicago. Then Bix didn't do much at that time.He'd just sit there most of the time and play eight bars and eight bars there."Goodman, like most musicians of the golden band years, has fond memories of the Detroit area. "Detroit has always been interesting," he said. "We played at Graystone and Walled Lake and I think it was Buckeye Lake."It was always fascinating territory for musicians, and a lot of great musicians came from Detroit. The Jones brothers, Thad, Hank and Elvin - Hank is playing piano with me now."Hank Jones is in the Goodman Sextet - there are eight all together in the sextet., including Slam Stewart and Zoot Sims, who date way back to the early Goodman days.The eight-piece sextet works steadily, mostly in concert. They played recently at Interlochen. Goodman's reason for preferring concerts above nightclub or cabaret appearances is different from the usual.He prefers concerts because the price is spread across more tickets. "Clubs are too expensive for most people. It's cheaper to go to the concerts.THE WONDER of Goodman's listeners and the despair of his mimics is his sparkling tone and clean-cut technique. Tone is important to Goodman and he never sacrifices it to speed. No matter how fast or how high his clarinet goes, it is still full and liquid as a clarinet should be."Tone is important and I've always strived for it." he says, "but after you've mastered technique a certain amount of abandonment is necessary.There's no telling how many clarinets have been sold over the past 30 or 40 years to young musicians who were inspired by Goodman records. Attics must be full of them.One learns too late that the only way anyone can play like Benny Goodman is to be Benny Goodman.
The front and back of this photograph are pictured below.
