Benny Goodman

March 4, 2019. Catherine Russell is part singer, part musical anthropologist, part necromancer. On her new album, Alone Together, she breathes new,…

Eighty years ago, barriers were broken when Benny Goodman took a mixed race band to play jazz to Carnegie Hall.

In the late 1930s, a bespectacled white man who played the clarinet was a teen idol. That was Benny Goodman, and he got to be that way from leading a…