Carnegie Hall, 1938

DRUMS WEEK 2025: Carnegie Hall, New York City, 16 January 1938. An eager audience is keyed up with excitement, awaiting the first jazz concert at this prestigious classical music venue.

The Benny Goodman Band launch into their opening number, ‘Don’t Be That Way’. The drummer pushes the beat with urgent press rolls, but the band are edgy, afraid of cutting loose.

Then comes a split-second drum break, a dazzling blitzkrieg of cymbal and snare drum violence, hotly pursued by a battering offbeat. The audience immediately goes wild. Even the musicians yell encouragement. Gene Krupa has broken the ice and worked his percussive magic. Swing is here!

The man who electrified that celebrated Benny Goodman concert became the most famous drummer in the world. As well as being an innovative soloist, armed with tremendous speed and stamina, Gene Krupa was a charismatic figure. Fans were thrilled by the tousle-haired, gum-chewing drummin’ man with movie star good looks.

Gene was always an extrovert who hit hard and played loud. As a teenager, he insisted on his bass drum being recorded, even when engineers thought it was impossible. When he played ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ with the Benny Goodman Band, his roaring tom-toms rekindled the African spirit of jazz. Drummers from Buddy Rich to John Bonham idolised Krupa, and his influence was felt well beyond the swing era.

Gene’s playing career spanned five decades of jazz history, but it wasn’t until he joined Benny Goodman’s band in late 1934 that his fame began to spread. The Krupa story became an explosive mix of ego clashes and dramatic incidents.

Frequent onstage rows with Goodman and a heavily publicised drugs bust were just some of the incidents that put him in the headlines. Yet Krupa was far from being the ‘drug crazed jazz fiend’ the press tried to portray. He was dignified, quietly religious, proud of his achievements and sensitive to criticism.

The early years

Gene Krupa was born in Chicago on 15 January, 1909, the youngest of six children. Brought up a Catholic, Gene’s mother wanted him to become a priest. However, at the age of 10 he took a part-time job as an errand boy in a local music store. Growing up on Chicago’s notoriously tough South Side, he could have got caught up in the local street gangs.

Instead, he listened to all the latest jazz records in the store, took up the alto sax and began playing with The Frivolians, a high school junior band. One night, after a rehearsal, he tried out the band’s drum kit. It was then that he decided he’d much sooner play the drums than the saxophone. He showed such ability that his older brother Pete bought him a set of traps.

Gene grew up listening to the New Orleans drummers and the enthusiastic young local musicians playing Chicago-style jazz, like sax player Bud Freeman and drummer Dave Tough. When Tough left his band, The Blue Friars, Gene was offered the gig. At last he could play regularly with a real jazz band. Although self-taught, he took advice from Dave Tough on tuning the drums, choosing the right cymbals and playing them tonally to complement the instruments in the band.

He also studied hand-to-hand press rolls, as performed by the New Orleans drummers. In 1925 he took lessons from drum teacher Roy C Knapp and joined the musicians union. Now he could play in bars and clubs like the Three Deuces, where gangsters often engaged in gunplay and fights broke out.

One of the regulars who jammed at the club was teenage clarinet prodigy Benny Goodman. Gene teamed up with the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans for a recording date, and it wasn’t long before many of the Chicagoans, including guitarist Eddie Condon, Benny Goodman and Gene headed for the Big Apple. Gigs were hard to come by, but Gene found work in theatres and rapidly began to build up a strong reputation.

In January 1930, Krupa played alongside Glenn Miller in the orchestra for the Broadway show Strike Up The Band. Gene couldn’t read the drum score and Glenn had to help him out by humming the parts. Gene was determined to learn how to read. He took lessons with Sanford E Moeller – the finest teacher in New York – and also learnt how to use his arms in a flailing motion to add more power.

It was this combination of power and visual appeal that made him so popular. Composer George Gershwin pronounced Krupa his favourite show drummer. Said Gene later, “I didn’t have the right technique. I resolved to learn the drums from the bottom up. I used to practise seven hours a day.”

A big influence on Gene was the contrapuntal playing of Vishnudrass Shirali, who played 12 drums for Hindu dancer Uday Shan-Kar. Krupa also heard African drumming on recordings made by explorers in the Belgian Congo.

Years later, when he became the leader of his own big band, he would give each musician a small tom-tom to play. And one young drummer who saw the Krupa Band beating out African-style cross-rhythms was none other than Max Roach.

In 1932, Gene was booked to play with crooner Russ Colombo’s band. The ‘fixer’ turned out to be Benny Goodman, who insisted that Krupa only play wire brushes. The restriction infuriated the drummer. He told A&R man John Hammond: “I’ll never work for that son of a bitch again!”

By 1934 Gene was working for a ‘commercial’ band in Chicago, which at least provided a regular income. Back in New York, Goodman was planning an exciting new band and desperately wanted Krupa to join. Gene was the only man who could really make it swing.

John Hammond (who much later discovered Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen) enticed Krupa back from Chicago, explaining that Benny’s new band would be playing top arrangements by Fletcher Henderson. After a particularly dull gig, Krupa agreed to join the new Benny Goodman Orchestra in December 1934. The band began making regular appearances on a live radio show.

The show, Let’s Dance, was heard from coast to coast and these broadcasts sowed the seeds of acceptance for swing music. Armed with trumpet soloists Ziggy Elman and Harry James, the band developed an attacking sound of its own. On the road, they often developed ‘head arrangements’ – one of the most famous was ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ which developed into a marathon epic built around Gene’s dramatic tom rhythms.

As well as sparking the big band, Krupa also drove The Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet, the latter featuring vibraphone genius Lionel Hampton. The small groups made dozens of exciting recordings, with Gene blowing up a storm with sticks and wire brushes on tunes like ‘Dizzy Spells’, ‘China Boy’ and ‘Runnin’ Wild’.

Swing, Swing, Swing

At first the brash Goodman-Krupa sound shocked ballroom managers, who threatened to cancel gigs and demanded their money back. A nationwide tour seemed doomed to failure, and Goodman was on the verge of packing up. Krupa urged him to keep going.

When the band arrived at the Palomar Ballroom, Los Angeles, an audience of college kids gave them an ovation. When they played the Paramount Theatre in New York in March 1937, 3,000 fans danced in the aisles, while another 3,000 tried to get in. The 1938 Carnegie Hall concert saw the drummer get almost as much hero worship as the leader.

The clarinettist began to resent the way audiences cheered and applauded Krupa and Goodman began to restrict Krupa’s solos, ordering him to play brushes instead of sticks and looking bored on stage while Krupa was playing. They couldn’t even agree over the tempos. The row went on for several shows, with both men arguing in public. Eventually, Krupa quit the band.

Within weeks he had formed the Gene Krupa Orchestra, signed to MCA and made his debut at the Steel Pier ballroom in Atlantic City, on 16 April 1938. The new band went down a storm in front of 4,000 fans. His band was hugely popular and became even hotter when the added Anita O’Day and Roy Eldridge in 1941.

The trumpet player had recorded several sides with Krupa in the ’30s including ‘I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music’ and ‘Swing Is Here’. It wasn’t long before The Krupa Band was hitting the charts with ‘Drummin’ Man’ and ‘Drum Boogie’. Gene and Anita also cooked up hip vocal and instrumental numbers like ‘Let Me Off Up Town’ and ‘Bolero At The Savoy’, while Gene was showcased on ‘Wire Brush Stomp’ and ‘Blue Rhythm Fantasy’.

Such was his popularity, Hollywood beckoned. Krupa showed his ability as an actor and was able to deliver lines with ease, notably in Bob Hope’s 1938 movie Some Like It Hot and in 1941’s Ball Of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.

In one scene, Gene plays paradiddles on a match box with a pair of matches. On the last beat, he strikes them with a flourish and they burst into flame. It was a neat trick that thrilled wartime movie audiences.

Fall and rise

Despite all his public success, Gene’s personal life was in turmoil. He split with his wife Ethel in 1941 and had to pay her a settlement of $100,000. Worse was to come. In 1943, Gene fell victim to a drugs bust that almost ruined his career. He endured two trials and an 84-day jail term which shattered him.

The drugs issue was grossly exaggerated and the effects of the imprisonment and bad publicity were a source of great distress. In August 1943 he was released on bail, pending an appeal, and finally freed when the charges were dropped.

Gene felt like giving up appearing in public after the experience, and planned to teach and write music. The jail sentence had ruined Krupa, but it brought about a reconciliation with Ethel. She helped him out financially and they remarried in 1947. He was even offered his old job back with Benny Goodman and he returned to the stage in September 1943.

He was grateful to Benny, but switched to Tommy Dorsey’s band rather than risk a nationwide Goodman tour where he might be greeted by placard-waving moralists.

When he sneaked onstage at the Paramount Theatre with Dorsey, fans recognised him and cheered. Krupa burst into tears. But he was back behind a kit of drums, where he belonged. It wasn’t long before Gene formed another band of his own in 1944. Inspired by Dorsey, Gene added a 10-piece string section and even brought in another drummer to play while he conducted.

This idea didn’t go down too well with fans or the press and Gene got fed up, especially when the strings couldn’t keep in tune with the brass. He finally returned to a regular band in the summer of 1945.

By 1946, bebop was spreading beyond New York’s 52nd Street clubs. Gene listened to the new music being played by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and accepted the need for change. He brought in bop trumpeter Red Rodney and featured modern arrangements by Eddie Finckel and Gerry Mulligan on tunes like ‘Bird House’, ‘Disc Jockey Jump’ and ‘Up And Atom’.

Gene worked surprisingly well in this context and soloed effectively on ‘Lover’ and ‘Higher Than The Moon’. On one of his best numbers, ‘Leave Us Leap’, he utilised the ‘freeze beat’, a trick Krupa had picked up playing for dancers.

Krupa kept his band going until 1951, but crooners and rhythm and blues were ousting big bands. At one stage, in desperation, he began to play country and western music, although his musicians rebelled and threatened to quit.

The band finally broke up and Gene began touring with tenor saxophonist Charlie Ventura, playing heavily-stylised versions of tunes like ‘Dark Eyes’, ‘St Louis Blues’ and ‘Body And Soul’. Although often panned by the critics for being too showy, their trio was enormously popular.

In the ’50s Gene joined Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic touring troupe. He was featured with a quartet and often engaged in drum battles with Buddy Rich. His playing on these dates was increasingly erratic and lacked control. In March 1953 Gene came to Britain with Jazz At The Phil for a special flood relief concert.

They played at the Gaumont State, Kilburn and the late jazz writer Benny Green recalled the show. “Nobody who saw the concert will forget the sight of Krupa, dwarfed by his own giant shadow behind him, playing like a man possessed.”

In 1954 Gene set up a drum school with Cozy Cole in New York and also went on a tour of Australia. The following year he filmed a guest appearance in The Glenn Miller Story playing alongside Cozy Cole in a jam session with Louis Armstrong on ‘Basin Street Blues’. Hollywood duly attempted to equal the success of this biopic by making The Benny Goodman Story. This entailed a reunion with Goodman, and Gene reprised his solo on ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ for the movie’s soundtrack.

In 1959 the drummer was portrayed by Sal Mineo in another Hollywood film Drum Crazy, The Gene Krupa Story. Sal made a good stab at the role and a fascinating promo film made at the time showed the two drummers rehearsing and jamming together. However, the movie was full of anachronisms and has since fallen into obscurity. It depicted Gene as a crazy guy, prone to dropping his sticks and smashing up his drums. Astonishingly there was no reference to Benny Goodman (due to contractual reasons), which made it impossible to feature many of the highlights of Gene’s own career.

The show goes on

In 1960 Gene had a heart attack and doctors warned him to take life more easily. Typically he carried on playing and recorded an excellent album with Charlie Ventura, The New Gene Krupa Quartet in 1964. He also toured Japan, Mexico and South America. In 1967 he said he felt ‘lousy’ and admitted his playing wasn’t so hot. After a period of retirement, he was reunited with the original members of the Benny Goodman Quartet for an album called Together Again.

During most of the ’60s Gene played with his quartet at the Metropole Bar in New York. One night, Benny Goodman dropped in unannounced and sat in without being invited. “Brushes, please…” said BG. Gene went white with fury but played as he was bidden.

Gene’s last gigs with The Benny Goodman Quartet were in 1973. They included a return appearance at Carnegie Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. Although Gene played with all the energy at his command, he was clearly very ill. A hospital check revealed he was suffering from leukaemia and he had to undergo a course of blood transfusions and chemotherapy.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, early in 1973 Gene’s home in Yonkers was badly damaged by fire. All of his precious records, tapes, drums and memorabilia from a lifetime in music was destroyed in the blaze.

The last performance by the Goodman Quartet was in Saratoga Springs, New York on 18 August 1973. Two months later, on 16 October 1973, Gene Krupa died at home in bed at the age of 64.

Tributes poured in from fellow drummers, but it was left to his old sparring partner Buddy Rich to put his contribution into perspective. “Gene was the inspiration for every big-name drummer in the business. At one time every drummer in the world wanted to play like Gene Krupa.”

A suitably adept appraisal of Gene’s enormous influence as a man, an icon and, above all else, a true rhythm king.

The long-awaited documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin is due for release in May 2025. And it includes a 1972 interview with Zeppelin’s late drummer John Bonham, as well as new interviews with the other three members of the band - guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones.

A new trailer for Becoming Led Zeppelin combines extracts from these interviews with the sound of one of the band’s classic tracks, Whole Lotta Love.

The documentary focuses on the early part of Zeppelin’s career - tracing the origins of the four musicians and charting the band’s rise to stardom up to 1970.

In the trailer, John Bonham says of the band’s instantaneous chemistry: “The first time we played together it was stunning. It was like a gift from heaven, wasn’t it?”

Bonham is also heard recalling some early struggles: “You could tell it was going to be a good group, but people wouldn’t even book the band.”

In the new interviews, John Paul Jones also remembers a negative reaction to the band in the very early days. “Everybody said, ‘You’re mad, completely crazy,’” Jones says, before adding: “I knew we were on the right track.”

Robert Plant recalls the excitement of that period. “We knew something was in the air… it was an electric atmosphere.”

And Jimmy Page says of his masterplan: “I knew this was going to be the way to go… I wanted this to be something that they hadn’t heard before.”

Officially billed as “the first ever authorized documentary” of the band, Becoming Led Zeppelin has been a long time in the making.

“In true Led Zeppelin style, it’s been a long running saga,” says Dave Lewis, the world’s foremost Zeppelin expert, whose fanzine Tight But Loose was for decades the Bible for Zep fans.

“They started working on it in 2019,” Lewis explains. “Then a cut was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, and Jimmy [Page] was there.”

Lewis says of the finished version: “As I understand it, there’s quite a lot in there about what the band members did pre-Zeppelin. There’s a lot of emphasis on 1969. And it goes up to 1970. There’s the Albert Hall show from that year, and the Bath Festival performance from June 1970 might also be included.”

Lewis says in conclusion: “As the first ever officially sanctioned Zeppelin documentary, it is eagerly anticipated. I can’t wait to see it!”

RECORDING WEEK 2023: Led Zeppelin IV - actually, the album is officially untitled - was released on 8 November 1971, and has so far racked up over 37 million sales. Here, to celebrate the anniversary of its release, read on to learn how the album's distinctive sonic signature was created.

Classic Interview: Andy Johns, the younger brother of another famed engineer, Glyn Johns, began his career working as an assistant engineer with Eddie Kramer on Jimi Hendrix sessions. 

Andy also engineered The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and worked with Free, Blind Faith and Van Halen.

Andy was instrumental in shaping the sound of Led Zeppelin's seminal fourth album, including John's Bonham's ferocious drum sound on When The Levee Breaks.

Sadly, Johns passed away in 2013, but in this 2009 interview he recalled the highs and lows of those sessions...

Where did you kick off the sessions for Led Zep IV?

"The Rolling Stones had the first mobile recording unit in Europe. I had done the Stones' album Sticky Fingers and I had also done two other album projects at Mick's house, Stargroves, with the truck and I really liked it. It was a lot of fun and you got so many different spaces and it was better than being stuck in some airless, windowless room.

"We were getting ready to do the next Led Zeppelin album and I said to Jimmy Page: 'Why don't we use the Stones' truck and we'll go to Mick's house?' So Jimmy says: 'How much will that cost?' It worked out to be the same as a regular studio and a thousand pounds a week for Mick's house. 

"He said: 'I'm not giving Mick Jagger a thousand pounds a week for his place. I'm going to find something better than that.' And he found Headley Grange, which was rather fortunate. We did a few tracks there including When The Levee Breaks, Rock And Roll and Boogie With Stu [the latter would appear on Physical Graffiti]."

What was your approach to recording at that time?

"I'd been using very few mics on tracks like Can't Find My Way Home by Blind Faith. I had recorded the whole thing using just two mics including vocals, guitar and Ginger Baker's drums. So I was really getting into that."

John Bonham was famous for his very particular drum sound. How hands on was he?

"I never had Bonzo turn round to me and say, 'oh that's a great drum sound, Andy.' He'd just say, 'There's not enough 'frudge' on the bass drum.' That was his word and I knew exactly what he meant by 'frudge'."

When The Levee Breaks put Bonham centre stage, held down by that monstrous 26" Ludwig bass drum. What was the process behind achieving that sound?

"One night Zeppelin were all going down the boozer and I said, 'You guys bugger off but Bonzo, you stay behind because I've got an idea.' So we took his kit out of the room where the other guys had been recording and stuck it in this lobby area. I got a couple of microphones and put them up the first set of the stairs."

It wasn't just the stairwell that got that famous, earthy delay sound though...

"I used two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones and I put a couple of limiters over the two mics and used a Binson Echorec echo device that Jimmy Page had bought. They were Italian-made and instead of tape they used a very thin steel drum.

"Tape would wear out and you'd have to keep replacing it. But this wafer-thin drum worked on the same principle as a wire recorder. It was magnetised and had various heads on it and there were different settings. They were very cool things!

"And so playing at that particular tempo on 'Levee the limiters had time to breathe and that's how Bonzo got that 'Ga Gack' sound because of the Binson. He wasn't playing that. It was the Binson that made him sound like that. 

"I remember playing it back in the Stones' mobile truck and thinking, 'Bonzo's gotta f**king like this!' I had never heard anything like it and the drum sound was quite spectacular."

What was Bonham's reaction to hearing the track back?

"I said: 'Bonzo, come and listen to this, dear chap.' And he came in and said, 'Oh yeah, that's more f**king like it!' And everyone was very happy. I guess I must have done it as a one-off thing and I didn't start using that technique of room mics all the time until later in the '70s with people like Rod Stewart. 

"Jimmy picked up on it and used it on 'Kashmir'. When The Levee Breaks came out quite well and people still ask me about it when I appear on music biz panels and what-not."

You then moved onto Island Studios…

"Black Dog was the first thing we did there. That was a collaboration with Pagey and John Paul. My contribution to that was triple-tracking the guitar riff played on a Gibson Les Paul. I used a couple of universal limiters. It worked really well but as soon as Jimmy stopped playing, with all that gain it went 'Ssshh woarg!'"

Tell us about the recording of Rock And Roll and Stairway To Heaven…

"[Rock And Roll] was a little tough to record because with the hi-hat being so open and [Bonham] hitting it that hard it was difficult to control. But I managed somehow or another. We did Stairway To Heaven upstairs in the big room at Island.

"I had said to Jimmy that we needed a song that builds up and hadn't been having much luck. But then he said: 'I think I've got something that you'll like and we'll do it next week.' And he came in with Stairway To Heaven.

"We tracked it with drums and acoustic guitar and John Paul was playing an upright Hohner piano. I'd never even seen one before or since. The drums come in later because it's a 'building song', innit! I didn't have a lot to do with Stairway except for the 12-string guitar sound that I really liked at the time.

"Jimmy was always running his 12-string Rickenbacker through a box, which is a good sound. But if you do it direct and compress it, you get a much more bell-like quality. So I suggested we try that and he really liked it. 

"There was a bit of a struggle on the solo. He was playing for half an hour and did seven or eight takes. He hadn't quite got it sussed. I was starting to get a bit paranoid and he said, 'No, no you're making ME paranoid.' Then right after that he played a really great solo."

The initial mixing sessions took place at Sunset Sound studios in LA...

"I had mixed an album with Gary Wright at Sunset and there were some wonderful mixes coming out of that studio. We got there just after a big earthquake had struck in 1971 and we were running around like maniacs. In Going To California there is mention of an earthquake in Robert's lyrics. I remember Jimmy saying: 'oh don't put that on there, it will cause another earthquake.' I said, 'oh, don't be so bloody stupid, gimme a break!'

"So the tapes began rolling and sure enough there was an aftershock. Totally coincidental of course but Jimmy was convinced it was the power of the music. So that was rather funny. But Peter Grant [Led Zep manager] would lie on his bed clutching the sides. 

"He was a hard-nosed character but he was petrified of the earthquakes. Everyone thought the place was going to fall into the ocean. And as it turned out, mixing the album was an absolute disaster. That's why I didn't get to work with Zeppelin again after that album.

"It all sounded great at Sunset but the only mix that got used was When The Levee Breaks. That, for some reason turned out alright. But we did this playback at Olympic Studios in London and it wasn't the greatest place to hold a playback session. I should have chosen Island. 

"Anyway the first song goes by and it doesn't sound very good at all. Jimmy and I are sitting on the floor with heads in our hands going 'What the hell is this?' Then we played the next one and the next one… and it all sounded 'orrible.

"The other three guys were turning round and giving us funny looks. 'What's happened here?' If it had been anyone else I would have been booted off the project there and then. Jimmy said: 'Well, that's not very good is it? Let's go back to Island where we should have been in the first place. We'll mix it there.'"

You must have been devastated?

"My bottle had gone and obviously I was shattered. The previous stuff I'd done at Sunset had come out Jim Dandy and was really good. I thought Sunset was a cool place but they had changed the room since I was last there. I don't know what happened. So we went back to Island and re-mixed Zeppelin IV although we still used the Levee Breaks mix from Sunset. But it had all cost a few bob, flying us over there to LA and staying at the Hyatt House. And I know that Bonzo was furious about it."

The When The Levee Breaks drum sound has been sampled and copied many times over the years, notably by the Beastie Boys.

"It's funny actually. I remember mixing some tracks in Tokyo and there were three 32-track machines all strapped together. It was insanity. One machine had all the percussion tracks and I found it even had a little of bit of When The Levee Breaks. Who would have thought all those years later I'd be stealing my own stuff!"

If an image says a thousand words, then Bernard Purdie has just delivered one of the most efficient drum lessons of all time, and it’s all to do with his famous ‘Purdie Shuffle’.

The beat — which Purdie has explained before as an all-encompassing groove comprising quarter-notes, eighth-notes, sixteenth-notes, dotted-eighths and triplets — is a half-time shuffle which became synonymous with Purdie, who most notably played it on Steely Dan’s Home at Last and Babylon Sisters. 

Late session drummer, Jeff Porcaro cited the Purdie Shuffle as a big influence on his halftime shuffle from Toto’s Rosanna, and John Bonham’s playing on Led Zeppelin’s Fool in the Rain also borrows heavily from Purdie’s groove.

But now, Purdie has taken to social media with a picture, telling us everything we need to know to learn what has become a drumming rite of passage. It begins with a photo of the beat’s notation, accompanied by the caption “Don’t worry ’bout those ghost notes, ain’t nothin’ but rebounds, to make it sound, and feel, good.”

Purdie told us in 2019, that the origins of the Purdie Shuffle came from his interpretation of a train, rather than anything kit-related, "The way a locomotive kind of pushes and pulls, that's what I was feeling. I played it for my music teacher, Mr Leonard Haywood, when I was a kid, and he tried to stop me. 'That's not the way to play a shuffle,' he said. 

“But I heard what I heard - whoosh, whoosh, whoosh - so I kept it. Eventually, he said, ‘OK, you work on that. It that could be something…but not today.’ [laughs] That’s all right. I knew I’d get my chance.”

Meanwhile, Purdie also announced A Pretty Purdie Christmas! - a two-night stand at the New Bern Civic Theatre, North Carolina on 15 and 16 December 2023. Promo for the event promises that The Hitmaker will deliver “A Christmas event to New Bern like no other”. You can buy tickets here.