KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Eighty years ago on the night of January 16, 1938, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman made music history when he took a jazz band onstage at Carnegie Hall in New York. That performance took the music out of the dance halls and the nightclubs and onto the country's premiere concert stage. And it made people think about integration in a time of segregation. Tom Vitale has the story.

TOM VITALE, BYLINE: By 1938, Benny Goodman was already known as the King of Swing, leader of the most popular dance band in America at a time when swing jazz was America's most popular music. But nobody knew how it would be received in America's temple to classical music, as Benny Goodman said in a commentary recorded for the concert's first commercial release 12 years later.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BENNY GOODMAN: That January 16 back in 1938 was a Sunday and a cold one. We didn't quite know what would happen, how we would sound, what the audience would think of us. Until they got there, we didn't even know how many people would be on hand. So we just went out and played.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "DON'T BE THAT WAY")

VITALE: The concert was recorded, but there were no plans to release it.

PHIL SCHAAP: Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert historically is the most important concert in jazz history.

VITALE: Phil Schaap is a curator of jazz at Lincoln Center. He also produced the Columbia Records CD reissue of the 1938 concert. Schaap says the event with no dancing and no booze elevated jazz to an art form.

SCHAAP: The Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall is the cornerstone to jazz having performance space in the concert hall. But most importantly, aesthetically, it establishes that jazz has value for listening purposes only.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "DON'T BE THAT WAY")

VITALE: The musicians sensed the importance of the event, and they were nervous, says Schaap, who recalls drummer Gene Krupa's version of how he broke the ice.

SCHAAP: Krupa senses something's wrong. I had to do something. So I had my drum breaks. So I just hit everything I possibly could, - made a lot of noise. It woke everybody up. And from then on, it was smooth sailing.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "DON'T BE THAT WAY")

VITALE: The concert turned out to be such a hit that Goodman went back to Carnegie Hall a few months later and again the following year. There have been recreations over the years including one last week in New York and another later this week in California. At a 30th anniversary celebration in 1968, Goodman insisted in an interview with radio host William B. Williams that for him, the Carnegie concert was just another gig.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GOODMAN: So it never crossed our mind to think that on the night of January 16 we would give a jazz concert that would turn out to be a historic occasion.

VITALE: The concert was historic in another way. In 1938, bands and music venues were segregated, but Goodman took more than a half dozen African-American musicians with him onto the Carnegie Hall stage, including pianists Teddy Wilson and Count Basie, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and saxophonist Lester Young.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "ONE O'CLOCK JUMP")

VITALE: Onstage at Carnegie Hall, Benny Goodman made a stand for integration nine years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in America's pastime. At the 30th anniversary celebration, Lionel Hampton praised the bandleader.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LIONEL HAMPTON: Benny Goodman deserves a lot of credit because he did this with not the idea of being commercial or for any money. He did it for the feel and the heart. He said that we need the white keys and the black keys both to play together to make good harmony. And that's what he did.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "BLUE SKIES")

VITALE: But at that same celebration, Benny Goodman said it was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and he didn't think the concert could be restaged with the same effect.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GOODMAN: No, I don't think so. I think it was a particular time, a particular thing. And that was it.

VITALE: Times have changed, but the music can still bring people together, says 38-year-old Israeli-born clarinetist Anat Cohen, who played Goodman's parts at last week's recreation of the 1938 concert.

ANAT COHEN: His music is alive. And the when you hear it live, it's happening. And it's vivid. And it's happy. And it's swinging at any moment. No matter - since the '30s and after today, it doesn't matter who plays it. When they play the music, the spirit of his music is always current.

(SOUNDBITE OF BENNY GOODMAN'S "SING SING SING")

VITALE: When Benny Goodman's historic 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall was finally released in 1950, it became one of the first LPs to sell more than a million copies. For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale in New York.

[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Saxophonist Lester Young did perform with Benny Goodman on the Carnegie Hall stage in 1938, but the saxophone solo during "One O'Clock Jump" that is heard in this story was played by Babe Russin.]