I first became aware of Benny Goodman during last gasp of the 1930s-40s Popular Front era, which was also the time when the civil rights movement and the new left were being born. Around 1955, shortly after acquiring our first television, a public service commercial used to run that promoted racial tolerance. It was an 30 second animated film that depicted Benny Goodman's famous small ensemble including Teddy Wilson on piano, Gene Krupa on drums, and Lionel Hampton on vibes. The voice-over stated that the best music is made by the best musicians whatever their race or national origin. Krupa was Polish, Wilson and Hampton were black and Goodman was Jewish. This was the zeitgeist of Earl Robinson's "The House I Live In", Paul Robeson and Ben Shahn murals.

For the next ten years or so, I was only aware of Benny Goodman as a traveling spokesman for American values as he toured the Soviet Union and other countries less fortunate than us, who lacked not only the right to vote for Richard Nixon, but the right to listen to big band music. As an early 1960s hipster and then a hard-core Marxist in the late 60s and for most of the 70s, Goodman's image had changed for me. I saw him as a white-bread sell-out who stole the black man's music. Archie Shepp and Charlie Mingus were my kinds of musicians, not this clarinetist in a tuxedo.

After returning to NYC in 1979, following my failure to break into the industrial working class, I began listening to the radio a lot, now that I had free time on my hands. God knows how much I missed prowling around in dormitories at the age of 35, trying to sneak past security guards, in order to sell my quota of Militant newspaper subscriptions to snot-nosed undergraduates.

One of the shows I really got into around this time was Phil Schaaps "Traditions in Jazz" that came on every Saturday evening. He featured music of the pre-bop era and was a big Goodman fan. From Schaap I learned to appreciate the sophisticated arrangements of Goodman's orchestra, which were often written by Fletcher Henderson, the African-American bandleader who virtually pioneered the big band form in the 1920s. I discovered that Goodman was a real innovator. For example, he hired Charlie Christian, the part black, part American Indian guitar player out of Oklahoma, who, along with Lester Young, was the most innovative musician in the 1930s. It is said that Charlie Parker's bop stylings could not have been developed without exposure to both Christian and Young. It is also not widely known that Goodman hired beboppers in the late 1940s, including the legendary Wardell Gray of "Four Brothers" fame.

So with that in mind, I couldn't resist the chance to hear a band led by clarinetist Ken Peplowski play the Goodman repertory two nights ago as part of the NYC Jazz Festival. Peplowski, along with Eddie Daniels, are among the US's most respected Jazz clarinetists. In the band were two other musicians I looked forward to hearing. Loren Schoenburg was on saxophone. He, like Schaap, has a jazz show on WKCR, Columbia's FM station. Jack Stuckey was also on saxophone. He is the leader of the John Kirby repertory band that I reported on a couple of months ago.

There is another reason I go out of my way to hear this type of performance, which has to do with my interest in left-wing culture. I want to be able to experience the sound that was so important to the period I have been studying, namely the 1930s and 40s, when the American labor movement and radical movement were at their high point. It is important to me to hear what working-class audiences were listening to back then, so as to help me identify with their frame of mind.

That is where the importance of that 1955 animated commercial comes into play. It is no coincidence that Goodman was chosen, because he actually was identified with the radical values of the New Deal Era as much as Phil Ochs or Joan Baez were identified with the 1960s radicalization.

>From David Stowe ("Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America", Harvard, 1998), we learn that Goodman, like Duke Ellington, was a member of the Musicians' Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. His band did a benefit for Spanish Loyalists in May 1937. When Goodman came to CCNY to give a lecture on jazz in 1939, he was sent to an auditorium where an anti-Nazi rally was just coming to a conclusion. Goodman told the students, "What just went on here is important too, and I'm sorry I wasn't here." Goodman's ties to the left were almost inevitable given his background. He was a child of immigrant Jewish garment workers, who grew up in Chicago's Maxwell Street tenements. He got his early musical training in a synagogue band and then at the Hull House.

When CP'er Benjamin Davis ran for the NYC city council in 1943, Goodman endorsed him, along with Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and other jazz greats. When the witch-hunt began a few years later, Goodman and other stars were threatened by powerful agents like the William Morris Agency to cut their ties to the left or else forget about bookings.

The witch-hunt proved too powerful for most artists and Goodman began shifting to the right. He became a consultant for Voice of America in 1947 and picked tunes that Russian teenagers might enjoy. He attempted a half-hearted self-justification: "I suppose it could be called propaganda, but it is the right kind of propaganda. In a world filled with doubts, music is one common bond."

For those who want to experience the best Benny Goodman has to offer, I'd recommend the 2-CD set from Columbia, "Live at Carnegie Hall, 1938". Also, Ken Peplowski's "The Natural Touch" is highly recommended.