Still Playing What He Feels

The couples stopped dancing and edged forward, still bobbing and clapping in rhythm. On the bandstand, his lips puckered into a smile around the mouthpiece and his thick eyebrows arched above horn-rims, Benny Goodman raised his wailing clarinet over the listeners' heads and set the pace for his sextet's jet-propelled delivery of Air Mail Special.

It could have been a scene from the late '30s, when Goodman's cheerfully crisp, driving style made him the King of Swing and started a new era in American music. Actually, it was Goodman's opening night last week at Manhattan's Rainbow Grill, high in the 70-story RCA Building. Typical of his sentimental sojourns into jazz in recent years, it created a momentary illusion that nothing much had changed. The dancers were mostly of the generation that grew up with him back when cats were hep instead of hip. The tunes were such period favorites as Don't Be That Way and Stompin' at the Savoy. Goodman's clarinet sound, although it missed some of the fiery flow of earlier years, was as limpid and nimbly melodic as ever.

Private Stock. But in fact a lot has changed, including the times and jazz --and Goodman's relation to both. For one thing, at 58, he now devotes at least a quarter of his professional life to classical music, and has emerged as a leading concert performer. He broadened the clarinet repertory by commissioning works from such composers as Bartok, Hindemith, Copland and Milhaud, and he has made his mark in the standard works through such recordings as Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, which has sold 40,000 copies, an impressive total for a classical LP.

Another change is symbolized by the fact that where Goodman once merely played a Selmer clarinet, he is now a top consultant to (and former director of) H. & A. Selmer, Inc. With record royalties, investments in real estate and Wall Street, and fees of up to $7,000 a night, he earns an estimated $300,000 a year--and at that, he works only about half the time. The rest of the time he spends "doing whatever I feel mostly like doing." Prowling the art galleries and fishing are two favorite relaxations: his penthouse apartment on Manhattan's East Side is decorated with paintings and drawings by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh and Vlaminck, and his twelve-room home in suburban Connecticut--built around a converted, 100-year-old schoolhouse--has a fresh-water pond containing a private stock of trout.

Strange Sounds. The focal point of Goodman's house, however, remains the music studio. He practices almost daily, plays for friends at parties, and often works on classical pieces with his daughter Rachel, 24, an accomplished amateur pianist. "After all," he says, "this is my life--music. I couldn't be content any other way." He even seems to have made his peace with the rapid evolution of jazz styles away from swing in the past two decades. Not that he approves. "I can understand the modern in classical music--in a composer like Bartok, for example--but I don't understand it in jazz," he says. "To me it's just strange sounds." He accepts his conservatism unabashedly, makes no attempt to conform to fashion by changing his own style. "When I play what I feel, that's how it comes out," he says. "At least I can be myself."

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