Filmed and recorded live – no retakes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgIObHj4w7M

I remember reading something years ago where Benny mentioned that he dabbled in playing some bop and said something to the effect that it wasn’t his thing. I would have to search to see if I could ever find that again. Eddie Daniels, Buddy DeFranco, Paquito, Tony Scott…each plays excellent music on clarinet with the post 1944 vocabulary, and are great to hear in this style. I think Benny had his ("pre-bop") jazz style and stuck to it.

It’s not really fair to look to Benny for Buddy DeFranco style, anymore than you’d look to Benny Carter for Charlie Parker or to Louis Armstrong for Dizzy…

The author claims that while Benny was obviously a great player, he had a relatively unsophisticated ear and took steps to remove tensions and dissonances from some of his best arrangements. Not the kind of guy to really embrace the upper extensions. I’ve read similar elsewhere about Count Basie. In fact, one of the guys interviewed in "The World of Count Basie" said he thought that Benny Goodman was the only clarinet player that Basie really liked.

If you want to hear his actual 1949 foray into bebop, I think that the original album name was Undercurrent Blues, with most of the more modern charts arranged by Chico O’Farrell. Some say Benny sounds like Benny, and doesn’t really embrace the bop thing.

He supposedly had Stan Hasselgard in the band around that time, but I don’t know if he appears on the album. I think that Wardell Gray is on it, though.

"Always" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg7bB3uVtp4

"Rose Room" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNUc4spVx_U (Clark Terry’s "duet w/himself")

"Air Mail Special" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-Zl3xoqJU

There are some of Sabin Meyer, Sharon Kam, the Mighty Emma and other professionals.

Some are pretty strange…but with a peculiar interest. There’s one in which some guy plays a doubled walled metal clarinet while riding around San Francisco in a cab.

Some of them, the non professionals, play OK.