Clarinet virtuoso Ken Peplowski and The Capitol Center Jazz Orchestrap play Oct. 6 at Infinity Music Hall & Bistro. (Handout / September 29, 2013)
By OWEN McNALLY, Special to The Courant
The Hartford Courant
September 29, 2013
One of the great historical and cultural breakthroughs for jazz — music long maligned as lowlife, raffish noise best-suited for speakeasies and whorehouses — occurred Jan. 16, 1938, when clarinetist/bandleader Benny Goodman presented his now famous concert at Carnegie Hall, America's great bastion and holy temple of classical music, sophistication and high culture.
Certainly, there had been other heroic forays into "legitimizing" or "mainstreaming" jazz by other pioneering maestros, including James Reese Europe and Paul Whiteman.
But Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert, with its outstanding performances by the bandleader, his all-star orchestra, classy jazz chamber groups and special appearances by superb sidemen from the Duke Elllington and Count Basie Orchestras, has long been enshrined as the dramatic turning point in the acceptance of jazz as one of America's greatest, original contributions to the international world of arts and culture.
Celebrating the 75th anniversary of that landmark event, the noted clarinet virtuoso Ken Peplowski and The Capitol Center Jazz Orchestra pay tribute to Goodman and the music from the Carnegie Hall concert next Sunday, Oct. 6, at 1:30 p.m. at Infinity Music Hall & Bistro, Rte. 44, Norfolk.
Although Peplowski has profound respect for the historical significance of the Carnegie Hall concert and especially for Goodman — one of his boyhood idols and former bosses — don't look for him to present the standard, museum-like, rote, note-for-note re-creations of the concert's original solos, or what he calls "a jazz under glass approach."
Look, instead, for something fresh and in the moment, nourished by and based on Peplowski's deep knowledge of and appreciation for the past, particularly the rich legacy that Goodman left as a brilliant instrumentalist and bandleader. And also, as Peplowski notes, with acknowledgment of Goodman as an iconic pop culture figure and jazz superstar who was, he adds, as popular and musically innovative in his day as, say, Elvis Presley or The Beatles were in theirs.
Peplowski, with the greatest reverence and love for the original music, presents fresh, interpretive takes on such classic selections from the Carnegie Hall concert as "Don't Be That Way," "Memories of You" and, of course, the ultimate showstopper, "Sing, Sing, Sing."
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