Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall Concert of 1938 is well established as a milestone in jazz history, so it is surprising that a full account of it has not been published by a major press until now. And while several extended works on the concert do exist (including two chapters in James Lincoln Collier's Benny Goodman and the Swing Era and this reviewer's 2011 dissertation), Catherine Tackley's Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert is the first publication detailing the concert in book format. One might still ask why the 1938 event needs such treatment, since the basic facts of the event are readily available. However, Tackley's book attempts to do more than just relate the details of the concert; instead, she seeks to place the event among larger contexts, from the use of recordings as a basis for canonisation to embodiment of the musical past.

Tackley's work is divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘Context’, is dedicated to a thorough explanation of the forces at work prior to the concert. She includes a section on jazz's transition from functional music for dancing to music audiences treated as artistic, even though Scott DeVeaux (‘The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935–1945’, Reference DeVeaux1989) and John Howland (Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz, Reference Howland2009) have covered this topic thoroughly. Several events in Benny Goodman's history indicate that band members saw the transition directly, and Tackley notes these events and places them in their larger context. She details the types of audience members present at Goodman's shows, using the terminology of the time: jitterbugs, ickies and okays, the latter two of which helped make the Carnegie event popular by being listening-only audience members. Occasionally, she gives an important event short shrift: for example, she includes a paragraph on Goodman's appearance at Palomar Ballroom in 1935 – a symbolic moment in which the audience proportion tipped to favour listeners instead of dancers – but neglects to detail what made the Palomar so unexpected (namely, that the preceding cross-country tour was considered a failure, in part due to the dancing audiences). This kind of context is not often missing, though, and Tackley goes on to give a thorough explanation of the events that led to the conception, planning and promotion of the Carnegie Hall concert.

In Part 2, ‘Performance’, Tackely details separately each of the arrangements heard on the programme (and reproduced on the recording). This is where Tackley's experience as the leader of a big band serves her well. She displays a thorough understanding of each performance, previous versions of the arrangements, and the musicians in Goodman's band. She includes both transcriptions and reproductions of the original scores. The heart of her work, Tackley's analyses are astute and well located among the larger discourse of jazz analysis (of which swing-era jazz suffers a distinct lack). However, this section will be the most difficult for casual readers and listeners; it requires a complete knowledge of both the arrangements and the specific performances at Carnegie Hall. For the musically literate reader who is willing to spend a lot of time listening to the recordings, though, this section will be valuable. This section will likely stand with Jeffrey Magee's The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz as one of the most well-written books of swing music analysis in recent years.

The final section, Part 3, ‘Representation’, presents the strongest cultural critiques found in the work. On the surface, the subsections of Part 3 seem straightforward: ‘Repercussions’ details the departure of several prominent members of Goodman's orchestra in the months following the concert, as well as reviews. ‘Recording’ discusses the 1950 issue of the original acetates, ‘Reception’ compares audience responses in 1938 to those of 1950, and ‘Re-creation’ describes several attempts to present similar concerts or exact replicas of the 1938 event. And while Tackley gives all the pertinent information one expects, including a particularly thorough section on the changes made to the original acetates for the record release and the ones restored on reissues of the recordings, she also attempts to dismantle some of the prevailing perceptions of the concert. For example, she connects the original issue of the recordings with the attitudes toward jazz in the 1950s, noting both that some of the lauded solos (such as Jess Stacy's in ‘Sing Sing Sing’) were aesthetically similar to the popular cool jazz of the day and also that the chronological distance allowed the concert to be understood as nostalgic. In some isolated cases, these critiques leave more questions than they answer; she writes that ‘… The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert was unusual because it was a recording of a quantifiably “historic” event’ (p. 161), but does not challenge often enough the notion of the concert as ‘historic’ or confront the fallibility of memory. Did the recording make the event seem more historic, or did it force re-evaluation of the perceptions that had developed over the gap of 12 years between the concert and the record release? Still, she presents the concert and the post-concert effects as a complex object, well worthy of study (and leaves some work for future scholars).

The work as a whole will be of interest to jazz scholars, who will enjoy both the cultural criticism as well as the analyses. Casual listeners, too, will be intrigued by Tackley's treatment of the pre- and post-concert events, including the section on the Carnegie Hall concert's central position in the well-known The Benny Goodman Story film of 1956. All will be inspired to obtain the recordings, not only of the concert itself, but also of the multitude of rich sonic evidence that Tackley cites from Goodman as well as his swing era compatriots.