A climax would be reached only to recede before a still stronger one. Piling grace upon grace, the solo moved gradually but inexorably up the keyboard, at last ending in a superbly restrained cluster of upper-register single notes. There was an instant of stunned silence before Krupa came thundering back, and those who realized that they had just heard something magnificent believed that what they had heard was already in that Valhalla where all great unrecorded jazz solos go.
“Well, that 1938 solo was a funny thing,” he said, in his soft Southern voice. “Benny generally hogged the solo space, and why he let me go on that way I still don’t know. But I’ve thought about it, and there are two things that might explain it. I think he liked what I’d been doing behind him during his solo, and I think he was mad at Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton, because they had all told him they were leaving to form their own bands.
When I started to play, I figured, Good Lord, what with all the circus-band trumpet playing we’ve heard tonight and all the Krupa banging, I might as well change the mood and come on real quiet. So I took the A-minor chord ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ is built around and turned it this way and that. I’d been listening to Edward MacDowell and Debussy, and I think some of their things got in there, too. I didn’t know what else to do, and I guess it worked out pretty well.” – Whitney Balliett