1927 — 2027

The Benny Green Institute

One Life. Millions of words.

One searchable database of previously unreleased research material....

Over more than half a century, Benny Green wrote and broadcast about the things that fascinated him.

Jazz. Popular song. Hollywood. Literature. London. Theatre. Cricket. History.

What remains is not simply the record of a career.

It is an extraordinary body of writing, broadcasting, research, correspondence and cultural observation spanning much of the twentieth century.

One remarkable mind. A century of culture. Stories still waiting to be discovered.

Benny Green spent more than fifty years listening, reading, interviewing and writing his way through the culture of his time. He formed personal relationships with many of the people whose work he chronicled. The broadcaster, saxophonist and author left an extraordinary collection of programmes, articles, books, conversations and research. Much of it has never been available to the public. The Benny Green Institute will open the collection and reveal the connections within it.

01
Hear the music differently
Why does a song survive for generations? What happens when another singer takes it on? Benny followed the writers, musicians and performers behind the Great American Songbook, jazz, Broadway and Hollywood. His broadcasts and writing connect lyrics, performances and the people who made them. They offer the pleasure of hearing familiar music with new ears.
02
Follow the connections beyond music
The same curiosity took Benny into literature, theatre, London history, cricket, broadcasting and the people who shaped twentieth-century life. His writing crosses subjects that are too often kept apart. A reader drawn in by P. G. Wodehouse might find a route into music hall; someone following cricket might encounter a portrait of Britain. This is culture seen through the eyes of someone who lived among its makers.
03
The people Benny knew
Benny knew, interviewed and befriended many of the writers, composers, performers and broadcasters he chronicled. That trust gave him access to memories that cannot now be gathered afresh. The material includes interviews and research involving Richard Rodgers, Johnny Mercer, Alan Jay Lerner and Peggy Lee. These first-hand records bring the history startlingly close.
04
A new way to research a century
The Institute plans to give every broadcast, article and interview rich descriptive data and connect the people, works, places, events and ideas within them in a knowledge graph. Search for a singer and you could follow the trail to a songwriter, a recording, a London venue, an interview and Benny’s original source. That is the promise: discoveries across the whole collection, with a path back to the evidence. The ambition is an indispensable global research portal for twentieth-century culture.

Start with the subject you love. See where Benny Green takes you.

For music lovers, readers, cricket followers, students and scholars, the next discovery may be only one connection away.

Radio

Turning thousands of hours of broadcasts into millions of searchable, cross referenced digital research.

For decades, Benny Green was one of the most distinctive voices on British radio.

His programmes ranged across jazz, popular song, composers, performers, Hollywood, literature and the curious connections between them.

Behind those broadcasts is an enormous written record: scripts, research, notes and programme material documenting a lifetime of listening.

Below are excerpts from scripts from Benny’s archive — they show how the scripts have been converted into detailed metadata, making every script searchable and cross referenced with the tens of thousands of other documents in the collection — helping to create one of the most detailed and significant collection of writing on the Great American Songbook, Jazz and its associated figures

Journalism

Thousands of articles. Decades of writing.

Benny wrote for newspapers and magazines throughout his career.

Jazz was only the beginning.

His subjects included music, books, theatre, film, London, history, personalities and cricket — approached with the same curiosity, knowledge and unmistakable voice.

Thousands of pages survive.

Below are excerpts from some articles from Benny’s archive — with an incredibly diverse range of subjects, covering Music, Sport, Social History, Literature, London and more, all the articles will be converted into detailed metadata, making every word in the BGI searchable and cross referenced with the tens of thousands of other documents in the collection.

Hollywood

Thousands of conversations transcribed.

Benny’s archives include hundreds of interviews featuring many of the people who created twentieth-century popular culture.

Musicians. Singers. Songwriters. Actors. Directors. Producers.

The surviving material runs to thousands of pages and preserves conversations, recollections and first-hand accounts of an extraordinary period in entertainment history.

Below are excerpts from some of the Hollywood interviews in Benny’s archive — the many hundreds of interviews, featuring the people who shaped so much of twentieth century culture will be converted into detailed metadata, making every word in the BGI searchable and cross referenced with the tens of thousands of other documents in the collection.

Books

More than fifty books and hundreds of published works

Jazz. Fred Astaire. P. G. Wodehouse. Musical theatre. London. Britain at war. Cricket.

Benny’s books demonstrate perhaps better than anything else the extraordinary breadth of his interests.

The subject changed.The curiosity didn’t.

The Words Behind the Music

Long before liner notes disappeared into the digital world, they were part of the experience of buying a record.

Benny wrote them for recordings by some of the greatest musicians and singers of the twentieth century.

The record played.The sleeve told another part of the story.Benny supplied some of the words.

Benny wrote several hundreds ion sleeve notes for some of the most influential figures in Jazz — all of these sleeve notes are included in Benny’s archive — all will be converted into detailed metadata, making every word in the BGI searchable and cross referenced with the tens of thousands of other documents in the collection — below are some examples of some of his work with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday.

Scripts & Dramatic Works

There was another Benny Green on the page.

The dramatist.

His surviving work includes adaptations, original dramatic writing and scripts devoted to figures including Cole Porter and Gilbert & Sullivan.

Together they reveal another part of a writer whose interests rarely stayed within one form.

Letters. Papers. Photographs.

Some of the most revealing material was never intended for publication.

Correspondence.Research notes.Photographs.Marked-up manuscripts.Personal papers.

Documents connecting Benny directly with many of the musicians, writers and cultural figures about whom he wrote.

They provide something published work alone cannot:

the evidence behind the story.

Millions of Words

That is the estimated scale of Benny Green’s surviving written and transcribed intellectual estate.

For years, much of it existed as Benny left it.

On shelves.
In boxes.
In filing cabinets.
Across books, papers, scripts, broadcasts and recordings.

But possessing the material is not the same as being able to explore what it contains.

So Leo began bringing it together.

What comes next is the result of Leo’s twenty years spent logging, digitizing, itemizing, listing and researching.