TODAY’S dark and brooding selection of photographs from concert and music venues show some famous musical faces and others who are not so well known.

Most iconic of all, though, is jazz and swing legend Benny Goodman.

He is pictured here at the Brighton Dome in 1971, but more famous still is his concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, which was described by one critic as “the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz’s ‘coming out’ party to the world of ‘respectable’ music.”

As band leader of an integrated (multi-racial) jazz band in the era of segregation, Goodman was also responsible for a significant step in racial integration in America.

In the early 1930s, black and white musicians could not play together in most clubs and concerts.

In the Southern states, racial segregation was enforced by law.

Goodman broke with tradition by hiring Teddy Wilson to play with him and the drummer Gene Krupa in the Benny Goodman Trio.

This integration in music happened ten years before Jackie Robinson became the first black American to enter Major League Baseball, widely considered a milestone in American race relations.

Goodman’s popularity was such that he could remain financially viable without touring the South, where he would have been subject to arrest for violating Jim Crow laws.

By the time of this appearance his career was nearing its end, by which time he had also retrained as a classical clarinettist.

According to one biographer, he studied with Reginald Kell, one of the world’s leading classical clarinetists, at the age of 40 and to do so had to change his entire technique.

Despite increasing health problems, he continued to play until his death from a heart attack in New York City in 1986, at the age of 77.