By LOREN SCHOENBERG

In a New York Times article on September 6, Professor Joanne Meyerowitz of Yale University made the observation that, "For historians, history is never set in stone … the events of the present, of the contemporary age, always help us reframe the events of the past. And the events of the past always help us to reframe the age we're living in."

Popular culture has always provided a fascinating portal to our past, and the upcoming Juilliard Jazz Orchestra's tribute to Benny Goodman on October 10 sheds light on a vital and fascinating moment when America's youth embraced a music that was, in any objective view, quite sophisticated and at times subtle. It was a time when adolescents strove for adult emotions, and the music reflected this. For better or worse, the subsequent reversal that occurred in the 1950s with the advent of rock 'n' roll and related developments has led us to where we are today.

In the 1930s, what are today disparate strands of music came as close as they ever have to merging in the popular arts, and Benny Goodman (1909-1986) was a vital agent in bringing them all together. He played the blues with masters Bessie Smith and Count Basie, as well as "classical" music with the iconoclastic Bela Bartok and the Budapest String Quartet. Using the bully pulpit of his tremendous popularity, he was our first "crossover" artist in bringing fans of many different kinds of music together.

Benny Goodman in an MCA Management publicity photograph from the 1930s, from the Benny Goodman Papers a Yale University's Irving S. Gilmore Music Library.(Photo printed with permission of the Benny Goodman Estate.)

In a way, Benny Goodman's life is a quintessentially American one. The son of Russian immigrants, raised in what was at times near-poverty in Chicago, he became an international icon by the age of 30 playing a music that was idiomatically African-American. Goodman may well be unique in the sheer breadth of his recorded associations, in which he functioned not as an anonymous accompanist but as a soloist alongside Billie Holiday, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Charlie Christian, Herbie Hancock, Ethel Waters, Bix Beiderbecke, Fred Astaire, Fats Navarro, Barbara Streisand, Charles Munch, Lester Young, and George Benson.

Goodman and his legacy have been debated during the various cultural wars of the last half-century, as America struggles to come to terms with its legacy of racism. In a sense, coming to fame as the "King of Swing" seems in retrospect to have been an albatross around his neck—for if there was such a person in the 1930s, it was Louis Armstrong. In the same way that many who attain great popularity in the arts are dismissed ipso facto, Goodman's actual innovations in jazz have been rarely celebrated. First and foremost, he was a brilliant instrumentalist whose command of the clarinet and the jazz language were firmly in place by the time he was in his early 20s. At a time when jazz was evolving at an exponential rate, Goodman was at the leading edge of players who were assimilating the innovations of Armstrong and Beiderbecke and taking what they could from a range of artists that included Earl Hines, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Frank Teschemacher, and Jimmy Noone, for starters. But for all the citing of influences, as is the case in all nascent arts, the one quality that all the early giants shared was an originality based on the sheer newness of the idiom. In Goodman's case, his extraordinary melodic instinct took him to corners of the harmonies that might have escaped players bound by knowledge of what notes fit to the prescribed chords—plus, above all, it swung. Jazz is at its root a rhythmic music, which is not to slight its melodic, harmonic, and textural qualities, but the first hurdle a jazz player has to surmount is lining up the notes in a manner that has the forward propulsion first defined by Armstrong. While there have been rhythmic emendations over the decades, it still don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, and that's what Goodman and many others did. What distinguished him was his ability to translate that acuity to an ensemble, and to have done it at just the propitious moment when America was ready to redefine its popular music along the lines already outlined by Armstrong and company a decade earlier.

By racially integrating his band at the height of his popularity in the mid-'30s, Goodman brought attention to players (Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson) and composer/arrangers (Fletcher Henderson, Edgar Sampson, Mary Lou Williams, and Jimmy Mundy) who benefited greatly from the increased exposure. Hampton said repeatedly that, while Jackie Robinson's joining the New York Dodgers a decade later played a vital role in addressing the inequality stemming from our societal racism, he and Teddy Wilson had also played a large and frequently forgotten role in the same struggle.

The Goodman small groups championed chamber jazz, a welcome safety valve for the band's greatest soloists, who must have felt somewhat hampered by the structure of the big-band arrangements. In addition to Hampton and Wilson, Goodman was later joined by Cootie Williams, Mel Powell, Charlie Christian, Count Basie (on recordings), Ruby Braff, Zoot Sims, and many other jazz giants in performances that still hold their place in the pantheon of jazz.

Juilliard Jazz Orchestra Sing, Sing, Sing! The Music of Benny Goodman Peter Jay Sharp Theater Tuesday, October 10, 8 p.m. Free; standby admission only. Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

Over the course of five decades, Goodman created a legacy of the highest standards in everything he did. His bands always sparkled with technical precision, sparked by his own inspired playing. In 1984, after four years of working for him in a variety of capacities, I had the pleasure of turning my own big band over to him, and we became the last Benny Goodman Orchestra. What had been a very good group gradually evolved into a markedly superior unit. Goodman's persistence in ironing out each and every technical wrinkle, though it became quite arduous at times, enabled us to reach new levels of expression and freedom. He knew every nook and cranny of the arrangements, and it was an experience none of us there will ever forget. On the day he died suddenly at the age of 77 in June 1986, he was preparing for a concert just a few days later. His doctors had urged him to slow his pace a bit, but it's fair to say he that wanted to go out with his boots on.

Goodman's classic bands of the '30s and '40s could have never reached the heights they did without playing together day in and day out. Outside of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, few big bands have that luxury today. The Juilliard Jazz Orchestra comes close to that vaunted tradition, given their gradual turnover of personnel, and one of the recurrent joys around the campus these days is watching them evolve their own legacy. This opportunity to recast Benny Goodman's legacy in their appropriate and at the same time contemporary purview should be a treat all the way around.

Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001.