Artie Shaw

Musician and writer

• Born: May 23, 1910
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 30, 2004
• Place of death: Thousand Oaks, California

A virtuoso clarinetist and well-known bandleader of the swing era, Shaw wrote popular classic arrangements, and his music was used by orchestras and in films.

Early Life

Artie Shaw (AHR-tee shaw) was the son of Sarah and Harold Arshawsky, Austrian and Russian immigrants living in New York’s lower East Side. His mother was a dressmaker, and his father was a tailor who also did portrait photography. When Shaw was seven, his family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where the Jewish community was much smaller. The young boy was stung by the bigotry of Gentile classmates at Dwight Street School, and he withdrew into reading and the world of his imagination. He became fascinated by the C melody saxophone and, with his savings from a summer job at a delicatessen, purchased one. With few social distractions, he practiced up to eight hours a day, and he won a talent contest the following year.

Shaw’s first professional job was playing alto saxophone with Johnny Cavallaro, who led a group based in New Haven. Around this time, his father left, and he shortened his family name to Shaw. Although he was only fourteen, he dropped out of school to play music full time. At one point he started learning clarinet to keep a post in Cavallaro’s band. An engagement with Joe Cantor brought Shaw and his mother to Cleveland, Ohio, where he joined Austin Wylie’s ensemble. Wylie, a violinist, engaged Shaw as an arranger as well as a performer. Shaw’s early influences included Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong. Shaw’s next group was Irving Aaronson and his Commanders, which went on tour, eventually taking Shaw to Chicago, where he interacted with some of the leading jazz improvisers. He continued to expand his sphere of musical knowledge, and his natural intellectual curiosity led him to explore the work of Western classical composers, including Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy.

Life’s Work

His work with Aaronson brought Shaw to New York, where he delighted in the company of pianist Willie “the Lion” Smith and other great musicians in Harlem as well as some of his colleagues who had relocated from from Chicago. Shaw remained in New York, and in the early 1930’s he worked successfully as a freelance musician, frequently playing alto sax and clarinet. His work included radio broadcasts as well as live performances. In 1935, disillusioned with the commercialism of his work, he dropped out of music for the first time, purchasing a farm in Pennsylvania and working on writing a novel.

The following year, he returned to music, and over the next few years, he rose to national fame. In 1937, after the success of his “Interlude in B-Flat,” Shaw led his own big bands. Although Shaw’s musical interests extended into arranging and composing, critics sometimes compared him to Benny Goodman, a contemporary popular bandleader who played the same instrument. One of the many parallels between the two musicians was their shared resistance to segregation in music. In 1938, Shaw hired African American vocalist Billie Holiday to tour with his band, which had explosive results when they performed in the South. Before leaving the band, Holiday recorded “Any Old Time” with them. At the same session, Shaw recorded an arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” which became a huge commercial success and sold more than a million copies. In 1939, he and his band appeared in a Hollywood film, The Dancing Co-ed, with actorLana Turner.

Shaw hated this initial experience with film, and later that same year, he quit the music business for a second time, abandoning his band and a lucrative contract. He went to Acapulco, Mexico, and returned in 1940 to record with a sixty-five-piece orchestra. Shaw had heard the song “Frenesi” during his stay in Mexico. His performances of this piece, along with“Stardust” (also recorded in 1940), became popular. Later, Shaw made several important recordings with his combo, the Gramercy Five, including “Summit Ridge Drive,” a blues with harpsichord replacing piano. He also returned to film, appearing with his orchestra for a performance of his Concerto for Clarinet in the Fred Astaire film Second Chorus (1940).

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, drew the United States into World War II, Shaw enlisted in the Navy, and starting in 1943, he led a group that entertained troops and toured throughout the Pacific theater, sometimes in areas exposed to enemy attack, and he maintained a breakneck schedule that exhausted him. After being hospitalized, he was discharged from the Navy, and he resumed his performing and recording career. In 1947, Shaw focused on Western classical music, and he recorded several pieces, including Hebrew Sketches (1914), a clarinet quintet by Alexander Krein, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Quintet in A Major (1789). Shaw appeared at Carnegie Hall and disappointed the audience at Bop City, a New York jazz venue, by conducting a program of modern classical music.

Again, Shaw began to lose interest in performing, and he retired in 1950 to farm and to work on his autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella, which was first published in 1952. After playing for a time in a new version of his Gramercy Five combo, Shaw retired from music permanently in 1953, although he continued to lecture about music and occasionally contributed to films. In 1953 also, like many of his friends in the arts, Shaw was summoned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was suspicious of his sympathy for the Soviet Union, but he eventually was excused. He continued writing, including fiction, and lived a long and productive life. In 1985, he was the subject of Brigitte Berman’s documentary filmArtie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got, which won an Academy Award. Another documentary, Artie Shaw—Quest for Perfection, was made by Russell Davies for BBC Television in 2003, the year before Shaw died. At the age of ninety-four, Shaw died of natural causes in Thousand Oaks, California.

Significance

While many focus on Shaw’s eight marriages (including those with beautiful film stars Turner and Ava Gardner) and other glamorous aspects of his life, Shaw inspired many with his devotion to musical perfection. Although his parents were not religious, he occasionally drew upon his Jewish heritage in musical quotations, and the experiences of his immigrant parents shaped his early development, no doubt contributing to his fierce individualism. His career exemplified the tension between popularity and creativity, commercialism and art. As a writer, he was able to document the rising power of the culture industry.

Bibliography

Downs, Hugh. “Artie Shaw.” In My America: What My Country Means to Me by 150 Americans from All Walks of Life. New York: Scribner, 2002. Interviews by Hugh Downs of prominent Americans, including Shaw.

Nolan, Tom. Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Includes material from extensive interviews with Shaw and his contemporaries.

Pacheco, Ferdie. Who Is Artie Shaw . . . and Why Is He Following Me? Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2005. Written from the perspective of a sincere admirer who, years after having developed a love for Shaw’s music, is able to meet and to interview him.

Shaw, Artie. The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian Press, 1992. Autobiography, first published in 1952. Colorful and detailed personal account.

Simosko, Vladimir. Artie Shaw: A Musical Biography and Discography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Focus is on the musically active portion of Shaw’s life, with attention to cultural context. Includes comprehensive discography.

White, John. Artie Shaw: His Life and Music. 2d ed. New York: Continuum, 2004. Part of the Bayou Jazz Lives series. Utilizes extensive research and thorough documentation of written sources.