Thursday, 29 October 2026
“What am I supposed to do with Benny”: how Benny Goodman won over a Viennese modernist
In November 1980 Benny Goodman, the American clarinettist and bandleader known as the “King of Swing”, was to play at West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s reception at the Berlin Philharmonie, with a band put together specially in Europe.
Harry Pepl at first said no, swing was not his music: “what am I supposed to do with Benny, I was just deep into a completely different kind of music”. It took his father to talk him round. There was no sheet music and no programme either, and at the start of the second concert Goodman announced a guitar solo without any prior arrangement, which became “Harry Pepl's Blues” on the album “Berlin 1980”. A week later Goodman’s manager Kurt A. Müller wrote that Benny had “really got going” during it, “in a way I had not seen him for many years”. In 1981 Goodman brought Pepl to Rome, Italy, for the score of Dino Risi’s film “Fantasma d'amore”, and to Copenhagen, Denmark, and inscribed a rehearsal photograph to him: “To Harry, a great guitarist, my best, Benny”.