FOR a long time, too long perhaps, I did not listen too closely to Benny Goodman. In those far off days I went by way of Pee Wee Russell and once you were hooked on that rasping growling eccentric style of Pee Wee then Goodman was not for you.

All of that has changed now.

Well, not quite all, I still adore Russell but I have also found myself listening more and more to Goodman too. Especially to the recordings which have been appearing during the past five years or so culled from the material left to the Yale University music library after Goodman's death in 1986.

There have been 10 CDs issued on the Musicmasters label and there is a promise of more to come from the treasure trove in the Goodman archives. Goodman is featured in various settings, small groups, big bands, live concerts, and studio sessions, sometimes with old friends, sometimes with younger men who often inspired Benny to new heights of creativity.

Two of the latest to be issued - and remember all of this music has never been heard before - have Goodman at his finest. On Volume eight, for example, Benny teams up in small group settings with Andre Previn on piano, and in a larger group he performs some Hawaiian songs which had been arranged for him specially by Bill Stegmeyer, a one-time member of the Bob Crosby reed section and a founder of the Lawson-Haggart Jazz Band in the fifties.

The group is made up of New York-based musicians including trumpeter Bernie Privin, trombonist Lou McGarrity, and the tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims.

Privin, too often buried in the studios at this time, takes a marvellous Armstrong-inspired solo on My Little Grass Shack while the other numbers are punctuated by bursts of that swaggering shouting trombone of McGarrity, long a Goodman favourite.

Volume 10 features the original Benny Goodman Quartet. The four men were brought together again in February 1963 when these songs were recorded, and back once more in August when two sessions produced an album entitled Together Again. This material was left unissued.

It is wonderful to hear the pianist Teddy Wilson as elegant as ever; the vibes player Lionel Hampton as exuberant as always; and Gene Krupa's rackety drumming a sheer delight as always.

This material, like all the other material, has never been available before. The tenor saxophonist Loren Schoenberg, who worked closely with Benny towards the end of his life, has been appointed by Yale University to select these recordings. He has done a superb job.

Schoenberg reveals in his notes that the session tapes allow even more of these glimpses into how the men worked together. It would be good if some of these could be issued too. In the sleeve note he tells: ``On more than one occasion, just when they were about to rap up a completed take, Gene would break into a hypnotic tom-tom rhythm and get things swinging dangerously. It's refreshing to discover those moments when they round a corner, Chaplin-like, on their musical heels - with Gene in red hot pursuit. Beneath their professional relationships and personal differences (and there were many), there was a lot of love there, and it shows.''

KEN GALLACHER