Herbie Hancock meets Benny Goodman
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- Herbie Hancock filled in for Hank Jones during a Benny Goodman Sextet engagement at The Rainbow Room in early June, 1966.
In his autobiography Possibilities, Hancock wrote of this experience:
My first thought was that Benny Goodman was famous for swing music from the 30’s. He was a legend, but did it really make sense for me to go backward in that way? But another voice in my head said How cool is that! I knew Benny was a great clarinetist, and I was curious about how I’d respond to his kind of music. I told Miles about the offer, and he just said, “Take it. He’s a great player.” So I agreed to do it. The band consisted of…
[Benny Goodman, clarinet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Les Spann, guitar
Al Hall, bass
Morey Feld, drums
Annette Saunders, vocals]
… And I’ll tell you something - Benny could play. I threw a couple of curves in there, nothing out of context but not your usual rhythms, and he just tore right through them. Every time I’d push a little bit to the edge, Benny would run with it, sometimes doing things I’ve never heard of clarinetist do. I had judged him based on the kind of music he usually played, but his scope was much greater than I ever expected. He surprised me, and we really had a great time playing those gigs. It was cool.
I wasn’t completely sure how Benny felt about my playing, but a week or so later Lionel Hampton called me again, to try to convince me to quit Miles’s band and join Benny’s. I was really flattered to get that call, but of course I didn’t want to leave the quintet. But the whole experience with playing with Benny and getting that offer was so much more than my young mind had imagined. I was really glad I’d taken the leap despite my misgivings.
Here is what exists.
Benny Goodman, clarinet
Doc Cheatham, trumpet
Herbie Hancock, piano
Les Spann, guitar
Al Hall, bass
Morey Feld, drums
Annette Saunders, vocals
The music is superimposed over footage of a Belgian rehearsal and concert that Goodman did a couple of months later, with pianist Bernie Leighton in the band.
Unissued for twenty years plus, it was finally shared in one of several albums I put together for Yale Archives as part of their Benny Goodman Collection.
What a fantastic rare find! Props to both Herbie and Miles for being so open to the valuable experience Herbie would have by collaborating with the master musicians from a previous era.
Great - two visionaries out of different eras and movements, meeting up and connecting beautifully.
wow! priceless.. love your posts. Thank you
This is stellar, and so rare!
Thanks for this. The Embraceable You off the top reminds me that BG, on ballads, later and then late in his life, is some of my very favourite of his playing. There's a clip of him on the Merv Griffin show, with the latter singing The Shadow of Your Smile. Benny's short solo, quiet and elegiac and thoughtful, is just lovely.
In my mind Herbie "went backwards" not when he joined great Benny Goodman but when he abandoned jazz to play funk. Sad!..
Doc Cheatham's "feel" is completely his own, almost ragtime, but never stiff.