Sol Yaged

Yaged counts among Benny Goodman's most dedicated followers, possessing such command of the clarinetist's idiom that Steve Allen engaged him as technical advisor for the 1956 motion picture The Benny Goodman Story. Exposure to Goodman's 1935 National Biscuit Company broadcasts prompted the teenager to take up the instrument; years of subsequent instruction from a New York Philharmonic member earned him an offer to join the Buffalo Philharmonic, which he turned down. Opting instead for jazz, he performed at Manhattan venues including Jimmy Ryan's and the Swing Club throughout the 1940s. Military service in the Army during World War II interrupted his career, yet both before and after the conflict he freelanced extensively as a sideman, most notably alongside Phil Napoleon's Memphis Five and such luminaries as Coleman Hawkins, Henry "Red" Allen, and Jack Teagarden. Beginning in the mid-1950s he primarily directed his own ensembles, becoming a regular presence over ensuing decades at New York clubs such as the Metropole, Jimmy Weston's, and the Gaslight. By the late 1990s he fronted the Felix Swing Band under keyboardist Felix Endico, a thriving society orchestra headquartered in New York's Westchester County just north of the city whose book highlights charts popularized by Goodman, Artie Shaw, Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, and Count Basie, among others.