For example, he writes of Lionel Hampton: “His music alone was enough to startle even virtuoso musicians of Benny Goodman’s caliber. When Hampton’s mallets struck the metallic bars of the vibraharp, a spray of notes burst forth. And each one made perfect sense, one note following another impossibly fast but never forced.” A spray of notes? This is colorful writing, but it doesn’t shed very much light.
Some passages are apt to make even the casual jazz fan wince. Take Prial’s observation that in Kansas City, in the days when Count Basie was a local hero, “improvisational jamming was the preferred style.” One word would have done it: jamming is improvisation.
But the author’s musical expertise is beside the point when he writes, eloquently, about what was perhaps Hammond’s greatest accomplishment: persuading an initially reluctant Benny Goodman to hire two black sidemen, Hampton and the pianist Teddy Wilson.
By bringing a racially mixed quartet on tour with his very successful all-white big band, Goodman made a powerful statement, if not quite as powerful as he would have made by integrating the big band, which he did not do until some years later. (Frustratingly, Prial sometimes acknowledges that the quartet and the orchestra were separate entities but at times seems to forget, as when he praises Goodman for “allowing two black men into his band.”)
Two decades before civil rights marchers shined a harsh light on the reality of segregation, John Hammond, via Benny Goodman, took a brave stand that almost no one else, in or out of the music business, was taking. That, Prial suggests, meant more to him than having a hit record ever could. It meant more to the world too.
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