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| I will never see this photo the same way. |
I reviewed just two sources for this shallow dive into Artie Shaw - his Wikipedia page, plus a fairly lengthy article titled "The Trouble with Artie Shaw" on a site called Jazz in Europe - but those gave me the essential yin and yang that, based some earlier reading, matches my impression of Shaw. The Jazz in Europe piece unsparingly examines the great clarinetist’s flaws - the word “sociopath” repeats like a refrain - while the Wikipedia page leans into his preferred reputation of a frustrated genius. To start with an odd bit of framing:
“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”
Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.
“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”
Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.
Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe:
“Unable to play professionally in New York during this period, Shaw haunted the jazz clubs of Harlem, where he would sit in with black musicians. The one he credited the most with teaching him how to improvise was stride pianist Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith.”
When he got his cabaret card back, Shaw returned to the mainstream music business and angled to get his own band. In an effort to stand out, he revived an innovation that made his reputation: the blending of strings and brass (or woodwinds) to make a richer sound. Shaw wrote a couple compositions and debuted them at an amateur night held at a venue called the Onyx Club (and was one of them 1935’s “Interlude in B-Flat”?). The crowd applauded those two songs, but because the band had only rehearsed the two songs, they had to play them again. That performance drew enough notice to get Shaw on the map and in front of his own band. His first stab at headlining continued to bounce under the radar and audiences were scarce. When the manager of the venue gave him grief for it, Shaw answered that he’d done his part by “playing great music,” and that getting people in the door wasn’t his problem.” The manager responded by introducing him to the music business:
“Your problem is to get people in here. And if you want to take your pants down on that goddamn bandstand every night and take a crap up there, and if people’ll pay to come in here and see you do it—I’ll pay you to take a crap up there every night.”
“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”
Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.
“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”
Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.
Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe:
“Unable to play professionally in New York during this period, Shaw haunted the jazz clubs of Harlem, where he would sit in with black musicians. The one he credited the most with teaching him how to improvise was stride pianist Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith.”
When he got his cabaret card back, Shaw returned to the mainstream music business and angled to get his own band. In an effort to stand out, he revived an innovation that made his reputation: the blending of strings and brass (or woodwinds) to make a richer sound. Shaw wrote a couple compositions and debuted them at an amateur night held at a venue called the Onyx Club (and was one of them 1935’s “Interlude in B-Flat”?). The crowd applauded those two songs, but because the band had only rehearsed the two songs, they had to play them again. That performance drew enough notice to get Shaw on the map and in front of his own band. His first stab at headlining continued to bounce under the radar and audiences were scarce. When the manager of the venue gave him grief for it, Shaw answered that he’d done his part by “playing great music,” and that getting people in the door wasn’t his problem.” The manager responded by introducing him to the music business:
“Your problem is to get people in here. And if you want to take your pants down on that goddamn bandstand every night and take a crap up there, and if people’ll pay to come in here and see you do it—I’ll pay you to take a crap up there every night.”
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| Artie Shaw's better (non-sociopathic) side. |
The next several years saw more of the same - to borrow Wikipedia’s phrasing, “his fledgling band had languished in relative obscurity” - but Shaw stepped onto the main stage when he recorded his reworked version of “Begin the Beguine” in 1938. That breakthrough single set doors flying open for him and, before long, he was fielding offers to perform for live radio broadcasts, holding residencies at bigger clubs (which also broadcast him live) and, by 1940 (and with his third band; hold that thought), Shaw landed a job as the house band for the Burns and Allen radio show. Though the two stars - George Burns and Gracie Allen - headlined, Shaw pulled down $60,000 per week to their $5,000. And he hated all of it. He hurt his career by complaining about the “obnoxious jitterbugs” who would jump on stage and dance during performances, and he complained to all and everyone about no one would give him time to create and, for the rest of his long life (he passed in 2004), Shaw used “Begin the Beguine” as a sort of mnemonic for this loathing of the music business.
As alluded to above, Shaw’s burn-rate on orchestras out-stripped that of any bandleader of his era. From Wikipedia:
“Throughout his career, Shaw had a habit of forming bands, developing them according to his immediate aspirations, making a quick series of records, and then disbanding. He generally did not stick around long enough to reap his bands' successes through live performances of their recorded hits. Following the breakup of what was already his second band in 1939, he rarely toured at all and, if he did, his personal appearances were usually limited to long-term engagements in a single venue or bookings that did not require much traveling.”
That’s not to say he tolerated those long-terms engagements any better. During a stint as house band at the Hotel Pennsylvania’s Café Rouge, Shaw walked off the stage and quit his band two days later to run off to Mexico. When his label reminded him of his contractual obligations, he made it clear he was set on leaving: “Tell ‘em I’m insane. A nice, young American boy walking away from a million dollars, wouldn’t you call that insane?” He came back after a couple months and, after pulling together another band, he built another landmark hit out of the strings/woodwind combo, 1940’s “Frenesi.” Shaw slipped back into the routine for a period…and then Pearl Harbor happened. He actually got word of the attack during a performance and was asked to tell any soldiers in the crowd to return to their bases, but Shaw kept word within his band and carried through the rest of the show without mentioning it.
Like a couple other big bandleaders - Glenn Miller, most notably - Shaw signed on to the war effort and joined the Navy. He was mainly charged with keeping up morale and, after a period of playing bases close to his home in Southern California, Shaw asked to go “where the action is.” The Navy responded by sending him into the thick of it - e.g., Guadalcanal and other hot-spots in the Pacific theater - at the end of which, aka, 1944, “shock and battle fatigue” had caught up with him and he returned home.
Shaw’s post-war career was somewhat anti-climactic, if arguably by no fault of his own. The big band’s popularity fell off a cliff and/or victim to the more popular singers they used to hire to front their orchestras - think Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra - and Shaw’s star faded along with everyone else’s. He had a couple moments - e.g., when he teamed up with a young Mel Torme and his Meltones - but Shaw “gradually withdrew” from the music business (if less by choice than circumstance by Jazz in Europe’s account). With the exception of a revival in the 1980s - which he got pulled into by a long-time fan/clarinetist Dick Johnson - Shaw checked out as a musician in 1954. An odd after-life followed, one where he tried his hand as a writer with an autobiography (The Trouble with Cinderella: The Outline of an Identity), plus some semi-autobiographical fiction (I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!), and with some success. He also had a sideline in sharing bitter reminiscences of his time at the top to anyone who would ask about it. That’s not to say he hid his feelings about it as it happened. As Shaw volunteered in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post in 1939:
“My job is to play music, not politics, and my only obligation is to the people who pay to listen to me. I don’t attempt to ram hackneyed, insipid tunes down the public’s throat just because they’ve been artificially hypoed to the so-called ‘hit’ class. This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies, people who think I’m a longhair, impressed with my own ability. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My faith in dance music — I refuse to call it swing — borders on the fanatic. I have the utmost respect for the many real musicians who are creating a new music as important as the classics, but I have no respect for musical clowns who lead an orchestra with a baton and a quip. However, more power to them if they can make it pay.”
And that list of “musical clowns” included some of the biggest names of the era. The things Shaw said not just about, but to Goodman and Miller….
About the Sampler
Before simply listing some of Shaw’s most popular songs - again, most of which he either hated, or wished he could stop playing - I wanted to flag a couple interesting wrinkles in his career. While a lot of musicians from the era didn’t like Shaw, they didn’t mind playing with him - and he took some pretty big swings. For instance, when he lined up a tour through the Jim Crow South, he hired on Billie Holiday as the first full-time black singer for such a tour. His obliviousness to how that would impact Holiday says one more thing about Shaw - she quit halfway through - but I acknowledged that caper by including “Any Old Time" on the sampler.
Also, like a number of big band leaders from his day, Shaw somewhat regularly pulled smaller bands out of his larger orchestra, something he did for a short-lived, post-war project he called Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five (he used his telephone exchange to name the band). It was a somewhat unique set up, one that featured a pianist (Johnny Guarnieri) on the harpsichord, an electric guitarist (Al Hendrickson), a trumpeter (first Billy Butterfield, then Roy Eldridge). I repped that little pull-out on the sampler with “The Grabtown Grapple, “Hop, Skip and Jump,” “Special Delivery Stomp,” and the group’s biggest hit, “Summit Ridge Drive.”
I’ll close by just listing the rest of the songs on the sampler, but, as/if you listen, keep in mind that Shaw collaborated on these projects more than he ever acknowledged - e.g., Jazz in Europe gives more credit to Ray Conniff for “Frenesi” than he gives to Shaw. At any rate, the following round out the sampler:
“Moonglow,” “Stardust” (the song he recalls playing when he heard about Pearl Harbor) “Deep Purple” (good one), “St. James Infirmary” (best of the several versions I’ve heard, ft. Oran “Hot Lips” Page on trumpet), “Oh! Lady Be Good,” “Back Bay Shuffle,” “Indian Love Call,” “Traffic Jam,” “Nightmare” (Shaw’s signature song, one with “Hasidic" tones), “Shoot the Likker to Me, John Boy,” “The Chant,” “Carioca,” “Man from Mars,” “Everything’s Jumpin’,” “Serenade to a Savage” (too many with names like that to count), “Rosalie,” and, finally, one of his earliest hits, “Non Stop Flight.”
As alluded to above, Shaw’s burn-rate on orchestras out-stripped that of any bandleader of his era. From Wikipedia:
“Throughout his career, Shaw had a habit of forming bands, developing them according to his immediate aspirations, making a quick series of records, and then disbanding. He generally did not stick around long enough to reap his bands' successes through live performances of their recorded hits. Following the breakup of what was already his second band in 1939, he rarely toured at all and, if he did, his personal appearances were usually limited to long-term engagements in a single venue or bookings that did not require much traveling.”
That’s not to say he tolerated those long-terms engagements any better. During a stint as house band at the Hotel Pennsylvania’s Café Rouge, Shaw walked off the stage and quit his band two days later to run off to Mexico. When his label reminded him of his contractual obligations, he made it clear he was set on leaving: “Tell ‘em I’m insane. A nice, young American boy walking away from a million dollars, wouldn’t you call that insane?” He came back after a couple months and, after pulling together another band, he built another landmark hit out of the strings/woodwind combo, 1940’s “Frenesi.” Shaw slipped back into the routine for a period…and then Pearl Harbor happened. He actually got word of the attack during a performance and was asked to tell any soldiers in the crowd to return to their bases, but Shaw kept word within his band and carried through the rest of the show without mentioning it.
Like a couple other big bandleaders - Glenn Miller, most notably - Shaw signed on to the war effort and joined the Navy. He was mainly charged with keeping up morale and, after a period of playing bases close to his home in Southern California, Shaw asked to go “where the action is.” The Navy responded by sending him into the thick of it - e.g., Guadalcanal and other hot-spots in the Pacific theater - at the end of which, aka, 1944, “shock and battle fatigue” had caught up with him and he returned home.
Shaw’s post-war career was somewhat anti-climactic, if arguably by no fault of his own. The big band’s popularity fell off a cliff and/or victim to the more popular singers they used to hire to front their orchestras - think Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra - and Shaw’s star faded along with everyone else’s. He had a couple moments - e.g., when he teamed up with a young Mel Torme and his Meltones - but Shaw “gradually withdrew” from the music business (if less by choice than circumstance by Jazz in Europe’s account). With the exception of a revival in the 1980s - which he got pulled into by a long-time fan/clarinetist Dick Johnson - Shaw checked out as a musician in 1954. An odd after-life followed, one where he tried his hand as a writer with an autobiography (The Trouble with Cinderella: The Outline of an Identity), plus some semi-autobiographical fiction (I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!), and with some success. He also had a sideline in sharing bitter reminiscences of his time at the top to anyone who would ask about it. That’s not to say he hid his feelings about it as it happened. As Shaw volunteered in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post in 1939:
“My job is to play music, not politics, and my only obligation is to the people who pay to listen to me. I don’t attempt to ram hackneyed, insipid tunes down the public’s throat just because they’ve been artificially hypoed to the so-called ‘hit’ class. This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies, people who think I’m a longhair, impressed with my own ability. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My faith in dance music — I refuse to call it swing — borders on the fanatic. I have the utmost respect for the many real musicians who are creating a new music as important as the classics, but I have no respect for musical clowns who lead an orchestra with a baton and a quip. However, more power to them if they can make it pay.”
And that list of “musical clowns” included some of the biggest names of the era. The things Shaw said not just about, but to Goodman and Miller….
About the Sampler
Before simply listing some of Shaw’s most popular songs - again, most of which he either hated, or wished he could stop playing - I wanted to flag a couple interesting wrinkles in his career. While a lot of musicians from the era didn’t like Shaw, they didn’t mind playing with him - and he took some pretty big swings. For instance, when he lined up a tour through the Jim Crow South, he hired on Billie Holiday as the first full-time black singer for such a tour. His obliviousness to how that would impact Holiday says one more thing about Shaw - she quit halfway through - but I acknowledged that caper by including “Any Old Time" on the sampler.
Also, like a number of big band leaders from his day, Shaw somewhat regularly pulled smaller bands out of his larger orchestra, something he did for a short-lived, post-war project he called Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five (he used his telephone exchange to name the band). It was a somewhat unique set up, one that featured a pianist (Johnny Guarnieri) on the harpsichord, an electric guitarist (Al Hendrickson), a trumpeter (first Billy Butterfield, then Roy Eldridge). I repped that little pull-out on the sampler with “The Grabtown Grapple, “Hop, Skip and Jump,” “Special Delivery Stomp,” and the group’s biggest hit, “Summit Ridge Drive.”
I’ll close by just listing the rest of the songs on the sampler, but, as/if you listen, keep in mind that Shaw collaborated on these projects more than he ever acknowledged - e.g., Jazz in Europe gives more credit to Ray Conniff for “Frenesi” than he gives to Shaw. At any rate, the following round out the sampler:
“Moonglow,” “Stardust” (the song he recalls playing when he heard about Pearl Harbor) “Deep Purple” (good one), “St. James Infirmary” (best of the several versions I’ve heard, ft. Oran “Hot Lips” Page on trumpet), “Oh! Lady Be Good,” “Back Bay Shuffle,” “Indian Love Call,” “Traffic Jam,” “Nightmare” (Shaw’s signature song, one with “Hasidic" tones), “Shoot the Likker to Me, John Boy,” “The Chant,” “Carioca,” “Man from Mars,” “Everything’s Jumpin’,” “Serenade to a Savage” (too many with names like that to count), “Rosalie,” and, finally, one of his earliest hits, “Non Stop Flight.”
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