Benny Goodman in the Interstices

Benny Goodman’s jazz album was featured as a part of my 2018 exhibition at the MHHE, Refugee or Refusal

Last night, as I drove the two miles of curving, sloping streets between the Decatur YMCA and my house, in order to retrieve my son’s sneakers so he could participate in his basketball practice, I turned on my music to discover that I had Benny Goodman’s sextet, the small group sessions from 1941-1945, on my usb key. 

I had acquired the music while I was curating Refuge or Refusal, looking for a perfect example of an American cultural form that would not have been possible without the coming together of the European immigrants (many of them Jewish) and Black migrants that the authors of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Jim Crow segregationists were desperately hoping to keep out and keep down through legislation and cultural policy. 

There, the youthful artistry of Benny Goodman’s integrated band came through my speakers, negating time and space as I drove quickly (but safely) through the dark streets of Decatur. Mel Powell’s celeste added drops of starlight to Peggy Lee’s dreamy vocals, as my favorite lullaby, “The Way You Look Tonight,” accompanied me on my frenetic errands of middle-aged parenting. For the endless and fleeting years of our children’s early childhood, my husband and I sang this song at bedtime every night. Coached by the inimitable Gayanne Guerrin and Will Robertson, I sang it at the CBH Purim cabaret the night before the world shut down for Covid and, it has seemed to me lately, the timeline took a pronounced shift toward the ugly trajectory that has characterized the dominant reality of the past decade.

In 1942, when Benny Goodman and his band recorded this track, the fate of European Jewry hung in the balance. There was no guarantee that Hitler would be defeated, or that Stalin’s prisoners would be released from the gulags. Martin Luther King, Jr., was thirteen years old, and Rosa Parks, just seven years older than Peggy Lee, was just beginning her work for the NAACP. In this world, marked by violence and uncertainty, a group of artists gathered to preserve the sound of their breath, of the vibrations called into the air by the swing of their hands, and the pressure of their fingers. Their choice to make music brought comfort and inspiration to soldiers in the field, to young activists in NAACP field offices, and to me, running circles in the night.

I have been plagued by my tendency to live in the future conditional. I see all the darker places we can go, and I fear that my outlook will be mired in bitterness and disappointment forever. But if Benny Goodman’s clarinet can cut through the darkness and stillness of a January night more than 80 years after his lips touched the reed, who am I to deny the ripples that may come from my life, and from the people who come together in defiance of the narratives that insist on our separation, and our isolation, and our deference? Who am I to deny the power that flows from the interstitial spaces, from the cracks in the brittle certainty? 

“Someday, when I’m awfully low, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you are tonight.”