 Turn your sound on. This episode of Out of Frame is about music, or specifically how jazz, R&B, and soul musicians smashed cultural barriers and helped America and the rest of the world end racial segregation. But first listen to this. This is the Benny Goodman Orchestra's most famous recording. Sing Sing Sing, Carnegie Hall, January 16, 1938. That show was remarkable for several reasons. For one thing, it was the first time Big Band Jazz had ever been taken seriously as art music. Just like today, Carnegie Hall was considered a venue for only the most critically acclaimed performers, and unfortunately Big Band was seen as little more than pop music for unruly teenagers. For many people at the time, even worse, it was black or negro music. Nothing could have been less acceptable for such a prestigious venue. But even so, on a cold winter's night in the heart of New York City, Goodman's concert at Carnegie Hall solidified jazz as one of the most significant forms of American music. And something else happened that was even more important. Benny Goodman took the stage with his entire band, including pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Not only that, Benny Goodman brought musicians from Duke Ellington and Count Basie's bands on stage as soloists, including Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Joe Jones, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Cootie Williams, Freddie Green, Bobby Hackett, and Count Basie himself. In front of a sometimes uncomfortable audience of New York City's majority white elite, Goodman put on the first racially integrated show at a major venue in American history. It's actually fitting that this happened at Carnegie Hall. When the Scottish American industrialist billionaire Andrew Carnegie established the venue in 1890, he said, here all good causes may find a platform. He meant it. Andrew Carnegie's friend and fellow entrepreneur Booker T. Washington took that stage more than a dozen times to raise money for African American education. Carnegie himself used his considerable wealth to help fund Washington's Tuskegee Institute. But for most of American society, racial integration was still decades away. Even so, musicians were always ahead of the curve. Following Benny Goodman's lead, white and black led jazz groups continued to play integrated concerts throughout the U.S. at the height of Jim Crow, often risking backlash, violent protests, and arrest. But in the wake of World War II, American culture started to evolve, as did its taste in music. By the 1950s, jazz split away from big band, simultaneously moving towards more harmonically complex forms like bebop featuring virtuoso players like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, and into the more laid-back, cool jazz style that was becoming popular on the west coast, featuring guys like Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. Particularly with his groundbreaking album, Time Out, Brubeck's massive commercial success as a recording artist created opportunities to perform in major venues across the country, including throughout the South. Only one problem. His bass player, Gene Wright, was black. This was nothing new for Brubeck. He led the army's first fully integrated band during the war. But when he got home, he saw how his friends and colleagues were treated in more stark terms. In 1958, Brubeck was told that he had to fire Gene Wright in order to play university concerts at Georgia Tech, Louisiana State University, and Memphis State. The Bell Telephone Hour also invited his quartet to perform on TV under the same conditions. Brubeck refused. In 1960, the Dave Brubeck quartet had to cancel 23 out of 25 concerts on a tour of southern universities. It cost the band over a third of a million dollars in today's money, but it cost each of those venues more, and not just in lost revenue. Legally mandated segregation limited the acts that could or even would be willing to play in the South. And those club owners and their customers missed the opportunity to hear the greatest performers of their generation. A year later, in 1961, Ray Charles famously refused to play in Augusta, Georgia, when the management at Bell Auditorium told him that the dance floor would be reserved for whites only. You see this thread running throughout the history of American music, and it makes sense. Musicians don't need to care what anybody looks like as long as they can play. But there's more to it than that. Commercial incentives played a huge and often unappreciated role in the cultural shift towards integration. Newly accessible recording technology allowed entrepreneurial producers like Sam Phillips, Jim Stewart, and Barry Gordy to bring new styles of music like blues, country, gospel, and soul to audiences around the world. These guys wanted to make great music, but they also wanted to make money. What a lot of those audiences didn't know is that the new music they were hearing on the radio coming from Sun Studios, Stacks, and Motown Records were racially integrated bands. The music we often think of as white or black is, in fact, the product of racial and cultural integration and wouldn't be possible without the unique personal experiences and perspectives of the writers, performers, and producers. In 1962, two years before the Civil Rights Act, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, the song Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs became a major hit, featuring the talents of a black organist and drummer, and a white guitar and bass player in Memphis. Booker T Jones, Al Jackson Jr., Steve Cropper, and Donald Duck Dunn went on to have such a profound impact on popular music that John Lennon and Paul McCartney repeatedly cited them as one of the most significant influences for the Beatles. Even today, I think a lot of people would be surprised to see the people behind some of the most famous recordings. But that's really the point. In the end, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how the music makes you feel. As I've thought about the history of music over the years, I've come to see it as one of the greatest tools for cross-cultural unification humans have ever created. Louis Armstrong loved the opera. Duke Ellington drew from European classical composers in his own music, and Benny Goodman worked with Fletcher Henderson and Billie Holiday before anyone else knew who they were. In a 1989 interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Dave Brubeck said, jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom. That's true in more ways than one. The very essence of jazz is freedom. It represents a celebration of individual voices and improvisation. Jazz as an art form is built on the idea that free people exploring the limits of their creativity can produce greatness. It's the musical equivalent of what economists call spontaneous order. The point is, the individual performers matter. The Dave Brubeck quartet without Jean Reitz, the Benny Goodman orchestra without Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson, Booker T without the MGs, Gladys Knight without Bob Babbitt, Stevie Wonder without Carol Kay. None of these groups would have sounded the same. It's no surprise that jazz, R&B, and soul musicians would be the first to disregard the arbitrary restrictions imposed on society by law and bring people of all backgrounds together in service of both art and commerce. Of course, all the styles that evolved out of jazz like modern blues, R&B, and eventually rock and roll could only have developed in a society that however imperfectly valued freedom. Indeed, this music has been banned at one point or another in most of the least free parts of the world like the USSR, Afghanistan, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Authoritarians are always fearful of anything that elevates individuals above their collective identity. And that's the nature of this kind of music. As much as people praise the US government for the civil rights movement, the truth is politicians reacted very slowly to changes in culture. And the eventual policy shift towards integration and equal rights came after decades of powerful examples like these. Brave artists and entrepreneurs who cared more about the character and skills of individual people than the color of their skin. Thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. There are so many incredible stories of artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs leading important cultural changes. And I can only get to a few in this video. What are some of your favorite stories? 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