Music: Drummer

In the summer of 1922 a dark, brush-headed trap drummer named Gene Bertram Krupa, not long out of a Catholic college, heard Drummer Ben Pollack's band play in a Chicago hotspot. What struck him most about Ben Pollack's outfit was the playing of Pollack's clarinetist, a sober, scholarly-looking chap named Benny Goodman. Twelve years later Drummer Krupa joined Clarinetist Goodman's own orchestra and rode to fame with that rising organization.

With the passing of time Drummer Krupa's frenzied battering and occasional syncopated solos became principal features of every Goodman performance. Jiggling jitterbugs hung on every drumbeat; some partisans found Krupa the sugar in the Goodman coffee. Last winter, following Goodman's triumphal appearances in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall (TIME. Jan. 24) and elsewhere. Drummer Krupa decided that he was too important a figure to thump modestly along as Goodman's sidekick, decided to form his own band. Experts, pained of late by his exhibitionism, shook their heads dubiously; but last week on Atlantic City's Steel Pier, when Drummer Krupa's new orchestra got into their groove, 5,000 pop-eyed adolescents raised the roof.