Music: Clarinetist's Progress

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The five-inch shelf of jazz literature has been considerably increased in the last few weeks by Winthrop Sargeant's anatomy, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid, and Wilder Hobson's up-to-date critique, American Jazz Music. Last week a biography was added to the shelf—Benny Goodman's and Irving Kolodin's The Kingdom of Swing*—which reveals nearly all there is to reveal about Mr. Goodman's life and four-four time.

Of interest mainly to aficionados of America's native rhythm, the Goodman biography provides a play-by-play account of the only jazz artist who, without once compromising with tinhorn commercialism, battled his way up from tootling in a synagogue to running his own band. The book also functions as a sort of Who's Who in hot music. In his 20 years in the business, Goodman has worked with or heard and known all the best players.

Full of interesting detail, the biography notes that all the Goodman kids drank coffee as soon as they were weaned. Milk cost too much for a Chicago garment-worker's family. Goodman recalls that he first met the late great Trumpeter Beiderbecke on Aug. 8, 1923, because that was the day the youngest Goodman, Jerome, was born. The first band under Goodman's direction was a pickup combination that he took to Cannon Club for a 1929 Princeton house party. His first national publicity, on the occasion of his 1935 Sunday concert, while playing in Chicago, is attributed to TIME.

About the only thing that Mr. Kolodin, music critic of the New York Sun, and his subject do not tell about the subject is why he does what he does.