The Jazz Life — Jess Stacy and Gene Krupa
The Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert of 1938
On a cold and wet Sunday night in January 1938 the Benny Goodman Orchestra — and a few very illustrious guests such as Count Basie, Lester Young and Buck Clayton — played Carnegie Hall in New York.
They were the first jazz orchestra ever to do so, and changed forever the way jazz was perceived, and one man, the pianist Jess Stacy, changed forever the way jazz piano was played.
On that night, and until the extraordinary twelve minute long version of Sing Sing Sing (With A Swing) came along near the end of the concert, Stacy had played his normal role of laying down chords, plus the odd honky tonk inspired solo. No one — and I suspect not even the pianist himself — was prepared for the extraordinary solo that Stacy came up with on this old Louis Prima war horse (cleverly stitched together by arranger Jimmy Mundy with Redman’s Christopher Columbus) that has now gone down in jazz history.
The piece starts with drummer Gene Krupa laying down a hard tom tom pattern that ushers in the brass and sax sections blowing wild counter riffs kicked along by some beautifully executed double and triple time rim shots from Krupa (a man who changed drumming forever too, but more of him some other time), until the orchestra are forced to rest seemingly out of sheer…
