But now Benny Goodman was being hailed as the King of Swing, and his swing was real jazz. Just a couple of years before, Benny had been one of the house bands for the Let’s Dance program, which was broadcast live from New York across the country all Saturday night. Benny was told to keep the music pretty tame, since the show was aimed at a national audience. But as the hour grew late, he’d play some of the wilder numbers from his book, arrangements that were too hot to pump into respectable East Coast living rooms in the mid-evening hours.

That fall, Benny toured the country for the first time. Everyone in the East and Midwest knew him as this polite dance band and the crowds stayed away—until he hit California. What no one, including Benny, had figured out was that the hot music he’d played very late at night in the East had hit the young California crowd mid– Saturday night, and they’d been eating it up all this time.

After five miserable months, Benny and his men wheeled into Oakland and saw a line outside of Sweet’s Ballroom that went around the block. That night, the fans either jitterbugged and Lindy-Hopped themselves into a frenzy on the packed eight thousand square feet of Bill Sweet’s dance floor or simply surrounded the elevated stage, six, seven deep, just basking in the heat. And while Negro bands like Chick Webb’s and Fletcher Henderson’s had been playing this kind of music for years, this was really the start of swing as a national art form.

The names given our kind of musical aggregation were dance band, swing band, big band, and we were big all right, big enough to justify calling ourselves orchestras, though the only strings permitted were strung on the bass and the rhythm guitar, or closeted inside the piano. Violins were not invited. Everyone knows a violin can’t swing, except the French, who also hold the accordion in high regard.

It was a tight, fat sound. Five saxes: two altos, two tenors, one baritone, all doubling on clarinet. Four trumpets, each carrying a toy box of mutes: the throaty Harmon, steely straight, comic wahwah, rubber cup of a plumber’s plunger, and derby hat.

Four trombones with all the same gizmos.

Add to that a four-piece rhythm section. Our guitarist, Chop Halliday, played a Gibson acoustic to which he’d attached an electronic pickup. I didn’t much like the resulting sound, and I was pleased a week earlier when there’d been a power failure at the Nortonia Hotel in Portland. Until electricity was restored, Chop’s right arm was forced to work for a living like the rest of us.