American clarinetist and swing bandleader Artie Shaw (1910 - 2004), at the peak of his career in the years just before World War II, was matched by few other musicians in popularity and technical skill. Almost as compelling as his musical feats was his attitude toward his own success, which ranged from ambivalence to outright distaste. In his autobiography, "The Trouble with Cinderella", he spelled the word "$ucce$$."
Shaw's legion of fans was international. An often-quoted Time magazine article from the war years stated that to ordinary Germans, America meant "Clark Gable, skyscrapers, and Artie Shaw." And when he sought to retreat from the spotlight, that only increased public fascination with his unusual career and a spicy private life that included eight failed marriages, several of them to headline-making Hollywood beauties. After Shaw laid down his clarinet for good in 1955, however, the publicity died away and Shaw's purely musical legacy came into sharper view. Artie Shaw's hit recordings, such as "Begin the Beguine," "Stardust," and "Frenesi," matched musicianship and popular appeal in a marriage very few other musicians of the twentieth century would accomplish.
Suffered from Anti-Semitic Remarks
Shaw was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in New York, New York, on May 23, 1910; his parents were Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants who worked in the dressmaking business. For the first seven years of his life Shaw lived on New York's heavily Jewish Lower East Side, but financial problems forced the family to move to New Haven, Connecticut. There he encountered anti-Semitism for the first time. A classmate, he recalled in his autobiography, threatened him after he said the Lord's Prayer with the rest of his class, saying, "We don't want no goddamn Christ-killers saying the Lord's Prayer around here, see? Go on home and say your lousy kike prayers, and keep your dirty sheeny nose out of other people's prayers, you hear what I'm telling you?" Such experiences, Shaw wrote, "had more to do with shaping the course and direction of my entire life than any other single thing that has happened to me, before or since." As a teenager he changed his name to Art Shaw; "Artie" was a further modification suggested by a recording executive who thought "Art Shaw" sounded too much like a sneeze.
Although he studied the piano halfheartedly at his mother's behest, Shaw's real introduction to music came when he sneaked into New Haven's Poli's Palace Theatre while skipping school, and heard a saxophonist take a solo during a vaudeville act. Shaw asked his parents for a saxophone and lessons, but encountered strong parental resistance to his idea of becoming a musician; the best he could do was convince them to let him finance his own instrument purchases and lessons by working at a neighborhood delicatessen. He threw himself into practicing for as much as seven hours a day, stopping only when his lips were worn raw. Within a few months he had won five dollars in a talent contest. He was hired as a substitute sax player and then a full-time touring member of the Johnny Cavallaro dance orchestra. On Cavallaro's instructions he switched from saxophone to clarinet.
Shaw was hired by Cleveland, Ohio, bandleader Austin Wylie in 1925 and spent several years in that city, performing with Wylie's bands in theaters and, from time to time, in Chinese restaurants. He volunteered to write arrangements for the band, learning at first by trial and error with help from the other musicians, and he soon became a proficient orchestrator. Shaw tried to emulate the fiery new jazz styles that were coming out of Chicago, Illinois, and made a trip to hear trumpeter Louis Armstrong in person. In 1928 he traveled to Hollywood and joined another dance band, this one led by Irving Aaronson. That group moved in 1930 to Chicago, where Shaw encountered contemporary classical music, and then on to New York, where he decided to stay on and resume his interrupted education.
Shaw never obtained a high school degree, but he became a voracious reader and sat in on classes at Columbia University. For the rest of his life, Shaw would educate himself on subjects ranging from literature and art to Zen Buddhism. He made a living in the early 1930s as a recording session player, often with the CBS Orchestra, appearing on numerous recordings of the time. But he became frustrated with what he regarded as purely commercial activity. He listened to the music of jazz pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith and sometimes played in jazz groups that backed the young vocalist Billie Holiday, among others. Rehearsals would often find him with a book propped on the music stand beside the score he was supposed to be learning. Around 1933 Shaw dropped out of music and urban life in general, buying a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and making a living from its products while trying to write a novel about cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, another major influence on his own style.
Surprised Audience with Classical-Jazz Fusion
Back in New York in 1936, Shaw was booked into the Imperial Theatre to play during an interlude, in front of the curtain, while the stage was set up for the headlining Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby swing bands. He seized the opportunity to experiment, forming a band with the then unheard-of combination of classical string quartet, rhythm section (with no piano), and his own clarinet, and writing an original Interlude in B flat for the group. When the audience cheered wildly, the players repeated the piece, having no encore planned. Promoters urged Shaw to form a more conventional swing band, and he agreed.
At the time he was unknown to national audiences, but the Artie Shaw Orchestra soon emerged as a rival to clarinetist Benny Goodman's swing band. The two clarinetists (and another major clarinetist-bandleader, Woody Herman) were often characterized as rivals, but Shaw emphasized the importance of forming one's own style rather than competing with other musicians. He hired Holiday as a vocalist, becoming one of the first white bandleaders to employ a full-time black ensemble member, but she departed after a few months of racist abuse from audiences. Signed to the Blue-bird label, Shaw and his orchestra recorded an instrumental version of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" in 1938.
The recording featured a sequence of subtle Shaw solos (and inventive little solo fragments) and rapidly became a massive hit. Shaw contended for Goodman's title of King of Swing and, at a point when swing was the dominant form of American popular music, became one of the most famous figures in the American entertainment industry - "a sort of weird, jazz-band-leading, clarinet-tooting, jitterbug-surrounded Symbol of American Youth," as he called himself (according to Atlantic Monthly writer Mark Steyn). Shaw made other hit recordings and appeared on national radio broadcasts, but the bookish performer detested the frenzy of fame. On a bandstand in New York in 1939 (according to a jazz historian quoted by Jesse Hamlin in the San Francisco Chronicle) he told vocalist Helen Forrest, Holiday's replacement, that "I hate selling myself. I hate the fans. They won't even let me play without interrupting me. They scream when I play. They don't listen. They don't care about the music." Shaw walked off the stage and hid out in a Mexican seaside town.
Publicity hounds caught up with him after he rescued a drowning swimmer, and the episode, if anything, heightened Shaw's mystique. He formed a new band in Los Angeles in 1940, appeared in several films (including Second Chorus), and recorded hits that would become jazz standards - a flawless arrangement of the Mexican popular song "Frenesi"; his own "Summit Ridge Drive;" one of the definitive versions of the Hoagy Carmichael song "Stardust"; and a classical-influenced "Concerto for Clarinet." Shaw's personal life stayed in the headlines, as he dumped one pin-up girl movie star, Betty Grable, to marry another, Lana Turner. Shaw himself had matinee-quality good looks to go with his musical abilities, but his marriages, including one to star Ava Gardner, all soured soon after they began.
Sent to Pacific
In 1942 Shaw enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was instructed to form a band that would perform for the troops, and played a heavy schedule of concerts in the Pacific theater for a period of 18 months, performing under bomb attack on the island of Guadalcanal at one point. He likely suffered from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder and spent time under a psychiatrist's care, an experience that gave The Trouble with Cinderella (1952) an introspective spirit rare among jazz biographies. A new marriage to Betty Kern (daughter of composer Jerome Kern) dissolved. Back in New York in 1944, Shaw formed a new band that some observers consider his best; it featured rising African-American trumpeter Roy Eldridge and guitarist Barney Kessel.
Shaw also revived a small group, called the Gramercy Five, that he started before the war; the name came from that of a New York City telephone exchange. The Gramercy Five served as a forum for some of Shaw's more experimental ideas, including the introduction of the harpsichord, a then-rarely-heard predecessor of the piano, into a jazz context. In 1947 Shaw again took a break from performing in order to study classical clarinet. He performed with a number of symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic under the conductorship of a young Leonard Bernstein, and released an album called Modern Music for Clarinet that featured his arrangements of contemporary classical pieces.
Shaw's classical experiments were not enthusiastically received by his core of jazz fans, and neither did they follow him as he mastered the new angular bebop jazz style - something few other major swing performers succeeded in doing. The music of the large band Shaw formed in 1949, and the recordings he made with the Gramercy Five toward the end of his career, received only moderate levels of attention at the time but are highly esteemed today. Increasingly restless, Shaw took another break from performing in 1951 and moved to a dairy farm in upstate New York's Dutchess County. In 1955 he stopped performing on the clarinet and was never lured back, although he did emerge to conduct a revived Artie Shaw orchestra in 1983. Shaw felt that he had accomplished all he could on the clarinet and never touched the instrument again. "I sought perfection," he was quoted as saying by Steve Voce of the London Independent. "I was constantly miserable. I was seeking a constantly receding horizon. So I quit."
The final decades of Shaw's life were eventful ones, even if they had little to do with music. He built a house on the northeast coast of Spain and lived there with his eighth wife, Evelyn Keyes, for five years. Shaw, who had two sons (one by Kern, one by sixth wife Doris Dowling), moved to northwestern Connecticut in 1960 and to California in 1973. He took up shooting and was at one point ranked as the fourth-best precision rifleman in the United States. Shaw formed a film distribution company and was a fixture on the college lecture circuit; presenters could choose from one of four talks, one of which dealt with serial monogamy and divorce. According to Steyn, he called himself the "exhusband of love goddesses." The bulk of Shaw's energy was spent on writing fiction; in 1964 he published a trio of novellas under the collective title I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead. In his final years he worked on a giant novel about a young jazz musician named Albie Snow; it was never finished or published. Shaw died in Newbury Park, California, on December 30, 2004.
Books
Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era, Oxford, 1989.
Shaw, Artie, The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity, Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952.
Simosko, Vladimir, Artie Shaw: A Musical Biography and Discography, Scarecrow, 2000.
White, John, Artie Shaw: His Life and Music, Continuum, 2004.
Periodicals
Atlantic Monthly, March 2005.
Commentary, March 2005.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), January 1, 2005.
Independent (London, England), January 1, 2005.
New York Times, December 31, 2004.
San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2004.
Smithsonian, March 2004.
Times (London, England), January 1, 2005.
Online
"Biography," http://www.artieshaw.com (February 13, 2006).
