📍Maxwell Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA
1909 – 1925“I was born in Chicago in May 1909, one of twelve children of David Goodman, a tailor from Warsaw, and Dora, who came from Kovno. They were Jewish immigrants who had met in Baltimore, and with so many mouths to feed and so little money, we lived in the Maxwell Street neighbourhood on the Near West Side, a crowded, noisy slum of pushcart markets, tenements and factories near the railway yards, full of Jewish, Black and Italian families. On Sundays my father took us to free band concerts in Douglass Park. When I was ten, he heard that the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue offered music lessons and rented instruments cheaply, so he sent me and two of my older brothers. Harry got a tuba, Freddy a trumpet, and I, the smallest, got a clarinet. I took lessons for two years from Franz Schoepp, a clarinettist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who taught me proper technique, and I joined the boys' band at Hull House, Jane Addams's settlement house, which meant two weeks at a summer camp outside the city, the only time I got away from Maxwell Street. I listened to the New Orleans clarinettists in Chicago, Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone, and at thirteen I had my union card and was playing on Lake Michigan excursion boats. At sixteen I joined Ben Pollack's band in Los Angeles, and in the 1930s I led the band that made swing the music of a nation and became the King of Swing. In 1938 we played the first jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, with Black and white musicians together on stage. Maxwell Street remembers me as one of its own, alongside the blues musicians who played its market.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today