How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?
The answer to the old riddle “How do you get to Carnegie Hall” is not “practice, practice, practice.” On this Saturday’s (June 4) Sound of Swing, we’ll take you there via two jazz concerts. The first is the ground-breaking 1938 Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert billed as “20 Years of Jazz.” American music critic and historian of the Metropolitan Opera, the late Irving Kolodin was one of the first American critics to really pay attention to phonograph records and the classical and jazz performances preserved on them. His view of the Goodman recordings, captured at this very first Carnegie Hall jazz concert by a single overhead microphone, was that they were “one of the authentic documents in American musical history, a verbatim report, in the accents of those who were present on the night of January 16, 1938.”
Also highlighted this week on the Sound of Swing are selections from Duke Ellington and His Orchestra recorded at another Carnegie Hall jazz concert in 1947. Freed from the time limitations of 78 rpm recordings, you’ll hear swing music in its longer form... the way it would have been played on bandstands and in ballrooms all around the country.
The show starts at 11:00 a.m. Saturday morning on WCVE Public Radio. So, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Tune in, tune in, tune in.
Post new comment