What did they think, that evening of January 16, 1938, sitting in the hallowed grounds of European musical culture, when Benny Goodman and his “Swing Orchestra” (as they were billed in the program) ignited Carnegie Hall by thundering their way into one of their most high-powered swingers, “Don’t Be That Way?”

The bespectacled 28-year-old clarinetist was showing the world how things were going to be. In fact, with those famous four notes of the theme, Goodman made the world into a different place. Tomorrow night at the famous Hall, the Toronto-based bandleader Bob DeAngelis will celebrate and re-create that historic song, along with the rest of the concert.

On that January night in 1938, the audience knew that Goodman wasn’t there to play minuets or gavottes. Still, it must have been a shock to hear a full-throttle flag-waver — the kind used to lure dancers to the floor at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem — here in the domain of Mozart and Liszt. We know what fans and aspiring musicians in the house felt, thanks to, among others, the then 19-year-old guitarist Turk Van Lake (who later played with Goodman and wrote about the concert for the 1999 Sony edition).

From Van Lake’s point of view in the audience, Goodman and nearly all of his 13 tuxedo-clad sidemen (and one sidewoman) were calm and poised and ready to get going — except maybe for tenor saxophonist Babe Russin, who was so nervous that he couldn’t quite bring himself to stand up when he soloed. Years later, Goodman’s star trumpeter, Harry James, confessed that bringing jazz to Carnegie Hall made him feel like “a whore in church.” But Goodman and his group didn’t go to Carnegie to be reformed. Rather, they were intent on creating a new church of popular music.

In 1938, various forms of Afro-American music had been heard in Carnegie for generations. Spiritual choirs played there, as did James Reese Europe’s ragtime-influenced Clef Club dance orchestra. The popular maestro Paul Whiteman, who commissioned and introduced Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” gave concerts at Carnegie and other bastions of highbrow, “longhair” music (back when the term meant Beethoven, not the Beatles).

Yet Whiteman was essentially smuggling bits and pieces of jazz past the gatekeepers. Goodman, contrastingly, was taking a stand, hurling the gauntlet of jazz into the frightful face of traditional notions of art and pop. Unlike any of his Carnegie predecessors, Goodman presented the real thing, undiluted and hardcore, up on the West 57th Street stage. The clarinetist even had the temerity to feature black musicians in his band; although Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton had been part of Goodman’s organization since 1935 and ’36, respectively, it’s likely that this was the first time most Carnegie goers had ever seen black and white musicians working together.

Leading up to the Carnegie show, Goodman also extended an invitation to select soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras, including the Count himself. In doing so, Goodman signified that this evening wasn’t intended merely to be a boost up the social ladder for the bandleader himself, but a triumph for the whole of jazz. In a single evening, he made possible the entire institution that would become known as the jazz festival. From there, jazz found a permanent place on the concert scene, and in institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center.

It’s those moments of sheer musical miscegenation — of Goodman and his associates playing with their black guest stars — that are among the most exciting on existing recordings of the concert. On the big-band numbers, the band roars with even more energy than it does on its commercial recordings and broadcast remotes, particularly on Harry James’s high-octane riff “Life Goes to a Party,” driven not only by Goodman and James, but by drummer Gene Krupa, another of the concert’s true heroes.

Yet the small-group numbers — the features for trio and quartet — are so powerful as to be like nothing Goodman or anyone else ever recorded, and the jam session on “Honeysuckle Rose” is even more so. What must it have been like to be a jazz man, used to getting little more than an eight-bar solo here and there, all of a sudden being treated with the same respect as Vladimir Horowitz or Fritz Kreisler? The idea of a jam session not being staged in the basement of a gangster-run dive, but in front of 3,000 paying patrons in formal wear, was so new that the players couldn’t help but be doubly jazzed. The 17-minute “Honeysuckle” (which was not heard in toto until producer Phil Schaap restored it in 1999) offers two amazing choruses of the legendary Lester Young soaring at close to his peak, and that’s only the beginning.

The traditionally acknowledged climax at Carnegie — and the official closer, followed by two exhilarating encores — has always been “Sing! Sing! Sing!,” a track that still earns a fortune in commercial syndication rights for its composers, Louis Prima and Chu Berry. At the time, the jazz press viewed “Sing” as even more of a contest than the jam session, with the decision generally going to pianist Jess Stacy. In retrospect, the lusty, wailing solos of Goodman and James sound just as good, especially because they are played mostly with just Krupa’s drums for accompaniment, thereby defining the avant-garde side of swing.

Trumpet-and-drums or clarinet-and-drums duos were hardly common in 1938, but that was the most minor of Goodman’s miracles. By midnight, January 16, Goodman had given jazz its equivalent of what Henry V talks about in Shakespeare’s famous oration regarding St. Crispin’s Day: You would have given anything just to say that you were there.

wfriedwald@nysun.com