Jazz Connection Magazine

Remembering Artie Shaw

Jazz Giant/Bandleader Artie Shaw Dies at Age 94

Artie Shaw at the height of his popularity.

Artie Shaw, the jazz clarinetist and big-band leader who successfully challenged Benny Goodman's reign as the King of Swing with his recordings of Begin The Beguine, Lady Be Good and Star Dust in the late 1930's, died on Thursday, Dec. 30, 2004, at his home in Newbury Park, Calif. He was 94.

He apparently died of natural causes, his lawyer, Eddie Ezor, told The Associated Press.

Artie Shaw's virtuosity on his instrument, his groups' highly original arrangements and his explosively romantic showmanship made him one of the most danced-to bandleaders of swing and one of the most listened-to artists of jazz. He quit performing in 1954, but the many re-releases of his discs, a ghost band, and his informed but often sardonic comments on music and many other subjects kept him in the public ear.

Although his musical career closely paralleled that of Benny Goodman, his archrival, who died in 1986, the two men had little in common in their approaches to music.

"The distance between me and Benny," Mr. Shaw said several years ago, "was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I'd never deny that. But listen to our two versions of Star Dust. I was playing; he was swinging."

Mr. Shaw impressed and amazed clarinetists of all schools. Barney Bigard, the New Orleans clarinetist who was Duke Ellington's soloist for 14 years, said he considered Mr. Shaw the greatest clarinetist ever. Phil Woods, a saxophonist of the bebop era, took Charlie Parker as his inspiration on saxophone, but he modeled his clarinet playing on Mr. Shaw's. John Carter, a leading post-bop clarinetist, said he took up the instrument because of Mr. Shaw.

And in 1983, when Franklin Cohen, the principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra, was to be featured playing Mr. Shaw's Concerto For Clarinet, he listened to Mr. Shaw's recording of the work and said he found his playing unbelievable.

"Shaw is the greatest player I ever heard," he said. "It's hard to play the way he plays. It's not an overblown orchestral style. He makes so many incredible shadings."

Mr. Shaw's bands in the 1930s and '40s featured a Who's Who of jazz greats, including Billie Holiday, Buddy Rich, Roy Eldridge, "Hot Lips" Page, Ray Conniff, Helen Forrest, Tony Pastor, Buddy Morrow, among others. At his height, he earned $30,000 a week, a huge sum for the Depression Era.

Mr. Shaw and Mr. Goodman were born a year apart (Goodman in 1909; Mr. Shaw on May 23, 1910); both had Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in the ghettos of major American cities. Mr. Shaw grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Goodman on the west side of Chicago. They began playing professionally as teenagers, and by 1926 they were both far from home performing with major bands of the day: Goodman in Venice, Calif., with Ben Pollack; Mr. Shaw in Cleveland with Austin Wylie.

In the Depression era, they settled in New York City and were the top two choices for the woodwind sections of radio-network and recording-studio orchestras. Frequently, they sat side by side in these ensembles.

By then, however, Mr. Shaw had decided music was a dead end. He intended to be a writer, and he had become a voracious reader. At band rehearsals, his music rack often held a book he was reading along with the compositions he was playing.

But his interests reverted to music after he was asked to play at a concert at the Imperial Theater in New York in May 1936. It was called a swing concert, and it included well-known swing bands like the Casa Loma Orchestra and the bands of Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby. Although Mr. Shaw was not yet known to much of the public, he was asked to put together a small group to play while the band onstage was changed.

"Just for kicks, I thought I'd write a piece for clarinet and string quartet, plus a small rhythm section," Mr. Shaw recalled. "Nobody had ever done that, sort of a jazz chamber-music thing."

His Interlude In B-Flat brought down the house. The audience refused to stop applauding, but Mr. Shaw had nothing else to play because this was the only thing he had written for the group. Finally, they played it again.

On the basis of this success, he was urged to form a band. He was not interested until he learned that with a successful band he could earn as much as $25,000 in six months, which was the amount he needed to complete his education.

The band he formed was an enlargement of the group he had used at the concert: a string quartet and his clarinet, with one trumpet, one saxophone and a rhythm section. But when he arrived in the real world of dance halls and nightclubs, he found himself bucking a tide that clamored for what he later described as "chewing drummers and loud swing fanaticism." So he formed a new band with the same instrumentation as Goodman's, promising it would be "the loudest band in the whole damn world."

With the new ensemble, he got a new name. Originally named Arthur Arshawsky, he had already shortened that to Art Shaw professionally. But when he became a bandleader on radio, there were complaints that an announcement of his name sounded like a sneeze. So he made one more change, to Artie Shaw.

As this band developed during a long run at the Roseland-State Ballroom in Boston, the original concept changed to a concentration on smoothly swinging treatments of the music of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Vincent Youmans and others.

This new concept was epitomized in an arrangement by Jerry Gray, a violinist in Mr. Shaw's original string-quartet band, of Begin the Beguine. Recorded on July 24, 1938, Mr. Shaw's recording of the Porter song became a classic of swing era jazz and allowed him to take over the swing band pre-eminence that Mr. Goodman had held for three years.

Mr. Shaw, however, was not prepared to put up with the demands of his fans, the bobby-soxers who mobbed him and tore his clothes, and whom he called morons. In December 1939, the tension finally made him walk off the bandstand at the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City and disappear.

"I wanted to resign from the planet, not just music," he said later. "It stopped being fun with success. Money got in the way. Everybody got greedy, including me. Fear set in. I got miserable when I became a commodity."

He disappeared to what was then a little-known village in Mexico - Acapulco - where he was ignored for three months until he rescued a woman from drowning and reporters found out who he was. Then he returned home to Hollywood.

He owed RCA Victor six more recordings on his contract, so he formed a 31-piece studio band with 13 strings and recorded, among other things, a tune he had heard a group playing on a wharf in Acapulco. It was called Frenesi, and like Begin the Beguine, it set off a new career for him just when he was trying to get out of an old one.

The success of Frenesi meant he had to form a traveling band once again. This one included a small group, the Gramercy Five, a variation of Goodman's small groups except that it added a jazz harpsichord, played by John Guarnieri.

In December 1941, Mr. Shaw flew to California and married Elizabeth Kern, the daughter of Jerome Kern, before enlisting in the Navy. After an initial period of anonymity in the service, he became a chief petty officer and was ordered to form a band. When he heard the band members he had been given, he went AWOL ("tacitly," as he said) in order to see the Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal.

"I want to get into the war!" Mr. Shaw told him. "And if I have to run a band, I want it to be good."

Mr. Shaw left the meeting with permission to enlist a band to be taken to the Pacific. He recruited some of the best musicians he had worked with in civilian life, including Claude Thornhill, Dave Tough, Sam Donahue and Max Kaminsky. The band played up and down the Pacific, on tiny islands and in jungles. It played so relentlessly that in 1943 it was sent to New Zealand to rest, and a year later it was dissolved. Mr. Shaw received a medical discharge.

In the next 10 years he formed several short-lived bands, including one that played modern classical music in a New York jazz club called Bop City, and one that was in tune with the bebop era but that was scorned by audiences who had come to hear Begin The Beguine and Frenesi.

In March 1954, after a playing with a small group at the Embers in New York, he announced his retirement at age 43. He never performed again, although in 1983 he formed an Artie Shaw Orchestra to play his old arrangements and some newer music. It was directed by Dick Johnson, a saxophonist and clarinetist, and Mr. Shaw appeared with it occasionally as a non-playing conductor.

"I did all you can do with a clarinet," he said in a 1994 interview. "Any more would have been less."

Two years before his retirement, he wrote a well-received autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella.

He continued to write, and published two books of short stories, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead! and The Best of Intentions, and had begun a three-volume novel about a troubled young musician. He became a cattle farmer, a producer and distributor of films, a successful competitor in shooting high-powered target rifles, and a lecturer on the college circuit offering a choice of four subjects: "The Artist in a Material Society," "The Swingers of the Big Band Era," "Psychotherapy and the Creative Artist" and "Consecutive Monogamy and Ideal Divorce," in which he presented himself as "the ex-husband of love goddesses and an authority on divorce."

His source material for this last lecture came from his experience with eight wives, who included, in addition to Miss Kern, three movie stars (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes) and an author (Kathleen Winsor, who wrote the 1940's best-seller Forever Amber).

"People ask what those women saw in me," Mr. Shaw said in an interview with The New York Times. "Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?"

On May 24, 1987, Mr. Shaw was presented a Doctor of Humane Letters from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, near his home in Newbury Park. He also gave the commencement address that day to 225 undergraduates and 145 graduate students in a 15-minute speech entitled "Three Chords For Beauty And One To Pay The Rent."

"It's a fair ratio," Shaw told the graduates. "A lot of us take four chords to pay the rent. At that point there's nothing left. Whatever you do in life, aim at perfection. It will not be understood or even appreciated by most people. However, in the long run, the closer you come to achieving your own inner standards of perfection, and they'll be rising all the time, the better you'll be. In your lifetime you will come reasonable close (two or three times) to perfection. I've come about twice where I can say that is as close to perfection as I can get. I consider myself an 80-percent loser, of which I am proud. So, have fun. Get into your life and do what you enjoy and be the best at what you can be. Maybe you won't be successful and rich by the world's standards, but you will have the best life capable of having. If you don't do that, you're cheating yourself."

In 2003, Mr. Shaw was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes to the 5-CD boxed set from Bluebird Records called Artie Shaw: Self Portrait. The CD package was also nominated for Best Historical Album.

Four of the bandleader's hit recordings have made it to the Grammy Hall Of Fame for recordings of "lasting qualitative or historical significance that are at least 25 years old." The Shaw Hall Of Fame recordings are Begin The Beguine and Any Old Time, vocal by Billie Holiday (both recorded on July 24, 1938), Frenesi (March 3, 1940), and Stardust (Oct. 7, 1940).

The instrument Mr. Shaw played on the recording of Begin The Beguine hangs in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, alongside such other jazz treasures as Dizzy Gillespie's angled trumpet and Ella Fitzgerald's red dress.

In a 2003 ceremony, the Smithsonian awarded Shaw its James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for ``lifelong contributions to American culture and music.'' John Hasse, the museum's American music curator, called Shaw ``one of the giants of jazz, a singular man of extraordinary intellect and a legendary and great American.''

Among Mr. Shaw's other famous songs were Lady Be Good, Indian Love Call, Dancing In The Dark, Temptation, Summit Ridge Drive, Any Old Time, Traffic Jam, Back Bay Shuffle, Jungle Drums and 'S Wonderful, among others.

My first encounters with Artie Shaw begin in November 1979 while I was a student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA. I happened to browse through the Nov. 18 issue of the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle when I saw article written about Mr. Shaw. To my delighted surprise, I read that Mr. Shaw lived in near by Newbury Park.

Acting on a hunch, I looked in the telephone directory to see if he would be listed there. Sure enough, I saw printed on the page, "A. Shaw... 2127 W. Palos Court...Newbury Park." I took out my city directory and looked up where Palos Court was located. I hopped in my car and drove out to his house, more curious than anything as to what kind of home this musical giant lived in.

When I came to address I was impressed by the beauty of Mr. Shaw's home. It was a typical modern-looking California style home with a large drive-in courtyard. Timidly, I walked up to the front door. I noticed a note was posted for the UPS delivery person to bring all packages to the back door. As I was reading the note a familiar face startled me from the kitchen window off to the side.

"May I help you?" said the voice. It was Mr. Shaw himself! I recognized him from the pictures that were published in the newspaper. He was a half-bald gentleman with a mustache. Scared, I quickly mumbled an answer to the effect, "I'm sorry. I have the wrong house." I immediately left feeling frustrated that I didn't stay to say that I was a fan of his. Thinking it over later, it probably would have made no difference if I had. I heard that Mr. Shaw did not seek fan adulation and his notorious gruff attitude would no doubt have made me feel cheap for doing so.

My next encounter with Mr. Shaw was six years later via telephone. I was working as a staff writer/photographer for a monthly feature magazine in Ventura County. Wanting to write about a celebrity that lived in Ventura County, I telephoned Mr. Shaw to request an interview. He was polite but very resolute in our brief conversation together. I must have approached Mr. Shaw in the wrong way or something, as he declined my request for an interview telling me that he was "a private citizen and didn't wish to talk about his past musical experiences." Um... OK.

On May 24, 1987, I attended the 24th annual graduation ceremony at my Alma Mater to hear Mr. Shaw deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate. Decked in a black robe while sporting a full beard with his right hand in a sling (resulting in a fractured wrist a few weeks before and as a result, he was unable to shave), Mr. Shaw gave the best commencement I had ever heard! The 15-minute speech, "Three Chords For Beauty And One To Pay The Rent," was witty and practical and not saturated with flowery postulates as so many graduation speeches are.

A few weeks later, the music professor at Cal Lutheran asked me if I would like to meet the new "Dr." Shaw as he was slated to give a lecture on campus to a group of senior citizens attending a week-long Elderhostle class. I jumped at the chance! I was introduced to him prior to the class. The first thing I noticed about this musical giant was how short he was! I was also surprised at his attire that day. He was wearing jeans, a work shirt, tennis shoes and a baseball cap. He still was sporting the beard as his wrist hadn't completely healed to where he could use it. He was very friendly and pleasant.

"Dr." Artie Shaw, then at age 77, giving the commencement

address at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks,

CA, on May 24, 1987.

- Photo by Stephen Fratallone/Jazz Connection Magazine

I asked if he would like to see the photos I had taken of him at the graduation a few weeks earlier. He said he liked the photos very much and one photo in particular, a close up of him speaking behind the podium, tickled his fancy. I gave it to him and he was very pleased. (I later sent him an enlargement of that same photo to autograph for me which he did.)

Inside the classroom, Mr. Shaw immediately told the group of about 50 seniors of his disinterest in discussing his years as a bandleader. He did, however, share his view about himself, music in general, and his opinions about the then current political climate.

"I pride myself as a semi-schizophrenic," he told the seniors. "I'm trying to understand the universe. There is no sense in the real world. I try to inject a bit of rationality in this wide-range of irrationality. So what am I doing? Criticizing the hell out of everything!"

Mr. Shaw went on to say that he has always considered himself an artist while the public has labeled him as an entertainer. That's the problem which caused him to give up the clarinet in 1954.

"I'm not conditioned to be an entertainer," he said. "An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists are misunderstood by all. I'm not interested in the clarinet but in music. we speak our emotions into music. An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away. My situation is the same. Let them concentrate on my music and not on me. I like the music. I love it and live it, in fact. But for me, the business part of music just plain stinks."

In 1999, I had purchased some Artie Shaw CDs at a local music store. I sent the CD covers to Mr. Shaw requesting his autograph. He obliged. One of the CD covers I had sent to him was not returned. A few days later, I received a letter from Mr. Shaw's secretary stating that the reason why this particular CD cover wasn't returned was it was a pirated CD. The letter asked me to send that CD to Mr. Shaw and that he would reimburse me for the cost of the CD and postage. I did so.

In the meantime, I had written Mr. Shaw a letter requesting a 15-minute telephone interview to discuss the topic of music in general. I wanted to incorporate Mr. Shaw's interview with an interview I was hoping to do with Dick Johnson, the current musical director of the Artie Shaw Orchestra, as the ASO was slated to perform at the Jackson Rancheria in Jackson, CA. The article was designed to herald the coming of the the ASO to the area. I never received a response back from Mr. Shaw.

Three months went by and I still had not been reimbursed by Mr. Shaw for the pirated CD I sent to him. I wrote back to Mr. Shaw's secretary about it and also put in another request for an interview. A week later I received a money order for the amount in question and a letter of apology for the delay but no response either way for an interview.

In 2003, Mr. Shaw was nominated for a Grammy Award for the linear notes he had written to a 5-CD boxed set of his music called Artie Shaw: Self-Portrait. I once again wrote to Mr. Shaw requesting a brief telephone interview to discuss the nomination, and the CD project itself. I never heard back from him.

The world has lost a true musical artist and innovator in Artie Shaw. Thanks for the great music, Artie!

Jazz Connection Magazine . January 2005 . www.jazzconnectionmag.com