Midweek Music Break: Benny Goodman Orchestra, “One O’Clock Jump”

Count Basie wrote this iconic Big Band number in 1937, and played it as his theme song for half a century. Almost every other band of the time recorded its own version; the one presented here made its appearance at the Carnegie Hall debut performance of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, in January, 1938.

Over the course of its six-and-a-half minutes, the performance is apparently structured as a series of solos (we’ll get back to that apparently in a moment), by piano, tenor saxophone, trombone, clarinet, and, well… something else:

You might be curious what the “jump” in the title refers to. Wikipedia provides several hints, without fully answering the question:

• Jump music — more properly, jump blues — “was an extension of the boogie-woogie craze.” (An example of boogie-woogie music previously covered here was “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”… featured, of all things, in a whiskey river Friday post in 2010.)
• “Jump accomplishes with three horns and a rhythm section what a big band does with an ensemble of sixteen,” and
• “The tenor saxophone is the most prominent instrument in jump.”

In Goodman’s version, saxophonist Babe Russin does play a central part. Easily the longest solo comes from Goodman’s clarinet, and Jess Stacy on piano and Harry James on trumpet stake out their own territories with characteristic assertiveness.

But — and here we get back to that apparently mentioned a few paragraphs ago — the real star of the performance is the rhythm section. You may not even notice it through much of the song, although it’s always there, pumping the whole thing along. But at around 5:09 it takes the stage almost exclusively, in an astonishing, all but exhausting run of something like thirty* cycles (bars?) of nothin’ but rhythm, the clarinet and other instruments simply twining around in embellishment.

Just for comparison, here’s one recording by Basie’s own band. It’s shorter and faster, but unmistakably the same song:

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* I’ve counted them several times, but keep getting swept up in the music and losing my place. Thirty is the number which crops up most often, heh.

P.S. No, the image at the top of this post doesn’t really have anything to do with this song. But I cracked up at the title. The singer pictured at the bottom right is Ruth Etting, who recorded one of the very earliest versions of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (as featured at the bottom of this post).