Word: sidemen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...King of Swing is playing for dancing once again, and he is bucking a trend he himself started 20 years ago when Benny and his free-swinging sidemen had youngsters clustering around the bandstand to squeal and applaud their riffs and licks. Swing was the thing, and in 1938 Benny Goodman set an altitude record for jazzmen with his concert at Carnegie Hall...
Last week Benny seemed happier than he had been in a long time. Standout sidemen in Benny's new band: Trombonist Urbie Green and Drummer Mousie Alexander, a graduate, surprisingly, of the contrapuntal Sauter-Finegan band. The arrangements were mostly the old Fletcher Henderson "killer-dillers" that Benny made famous in the '30s, and the swinging improvisations did not seem so improvised any more. But this exhibit from the past-venerable enough to have a movie made about his life-was still able to show a new generation that there is something besides Dixieland, "progressive," and the noise...
...playing revealed none of the tenseness that took him out of his ill-fated tour with Louis Armstrong (TIME, April 27, 1953), and little of the formality of his concert appearances with symphony orchestras. Instead, his tones soared pure and liquid above the fanciful riffs of his sidemen, and he seemed to have settled comfortably into a style that had its roots in his own past, with a few overtones of more "progressive" jazz. At the piano was Teddy Wilson, who starred in Goodman's first, well-remembered trio, and most of the tunes came from the same period...
...Fats" (Fats Waller; Victor, 2 LPs). A welter of Wallerana. including the insolent ("I feel so effervescent today") voice, the bouncy piano that somehow sounds ribald, his second-rate sidemen and some previously unreleased material...
...swinging. His program consisted mostly of cool-jazz originals such as Maid in Mexico and Soft Shoe, but also included such rich-chorded pop tunes as Funny Valentine and All the Things You Are. Trumpeter Baker stood with his body motionless, his ears bent for the counterpoint of his sidemen, his eyes tiredly closed...