Artie Shaw Centennial Tribute

[Chas]

This week marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, known to music fans as Artie Shaw. I will be doing a 2-hour tribute with music from his 1936, 1938, 1941 and 1944 orchestras, as well as The Gramercy Five recordings.

I highly recommend the wonderful NPR Interview that was he did in 1985.

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[Forgotten Man]

Love that clip! One of my favorites... as well with "Simphony in Swing".

Here's a great photo of Artie with Eva Gardner... Kind of lookin' like he's not happy about the photo being taken! lol

Now a shot from Simphony in Swing from '39. A shot with the band and Helen Forrest... the best singer he ever had! Well, my peresonal favorite anway.

I recall hearing of Artie's passing in December of '04... knowing that the last of the Big Band leaders has left us. Kind of a grumpy bitter person when speaking of music, or his years as a band leader... he liked talking of his books he wrote.

Well Artie, you left us some wonderful music whether you like it or not!lol

By the way, the sound on that clip ain't workin'... I wonder if there's a way to tell the poster that it needs sound to be any good! lol

 

[bunnyb.gal]

When/where is the tribute taking place, Chas?

Slightly fftopic: ...

On Tuesday I did my first Ballroom medals test, and chose Artie's Diga Diga Doo for my Quickstep. I hope that gorgeous song helped me to pass!

 

[Chas]

It will be on my podcast address, bunnyb.; The link is in my signature. Artie Shaw had a lot of brillaint, beautiful songs. He was different inasmuch as he chose his songs very well, did a lot of arranging and wrote some pretty amazing songs of his own, "Any Old Time", "Man From Mars", "Nightmare" "Non-Stop Flight", "Don't Fall Asleep". AFAIK, Only Duke Ellington wrote more for his own band than Shaw. Some of the solos he did on the radio transcriptions and live recordings are absolutely out of this world.

He was absolutely top drawer.

 

[dhermann1]

I'm a huge huge Artie Shaw fan. Of course the more I read and hear of him, the more obvious it is that he was a . . . . let's just say . . . difficult person.
But what fabulous music. I think he really did the swing band with strings added thing better than anyone else of the time.
I have 3 interesting Shaw albums (all on vinyl, don't know if they're available on CD).
One is a group of airchecks from an engagement at the Hotel Pennsylvania (it think) from 1938. It has announcer intros and people talking in the background. Very evocative of a real hotel gig. The coolest thing on the LP is a 6 minute long rendition of Joe Garland's "In The Mood". This was before the immortal Glenn Miller arrangement. It is recognizable as the same song, but strikingly different from the Miller version.
The other LP is from about 1981. There was a Shaw Tribute band assembled, with Shaw supervising the recording, but not actually playing. Probably as close as you'll ever come to hearing the authentic Shaw sound in high fidelity.
I also have a 10 inch lo fi LP from around 1953, 4 songs per side, of Shaw with Mel Torme. Very tasty stuff indeed.
I hope this centennial brings a lot of attention to this great swing musician.

 

[Chas]

The Hindsight Records release is prob. what you're writing about; they're both very good, and yes, the Cafe Rouge Ballroom was in the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. The ballroom is gone now, and the hotel gift shop sits where the ballroom entrance used to be. The Hotel Lincoln is now gone, but I digress...

The Hotel Lincoln gig meant that AS had a weekly cross-country radio gig as it was a live broadcast location for NBC. The broadcasts were also picked up by The Canadian Broadcast Corporation as well. The cd's (Artie Shaw & His Orchestra 1938, Vol's 1 & 2) are excellently remastered and sound terrific for radio transcriptions. They exist on LP's from Hindsight as well. I have seen them around in the collector vinyl sections of the better record stores. I encourage all AS fans to keep and eye our for them.

So much is made about Artie's personality that I wonder how much of it is true- much less is said about Benny Goodman, who also had a prickly personality and was a bear to work for. The same could be said about Tommy Dorsey, who had a really bad temper. AS was single-minded and touched with a good dose of intellectual arrogance, but for all that, musicians loved working for him and they always had a high opinion of him. That's enough for me. The present Artie Shaw Orchestra is not so much a 'ghost' orchestra as AS picked Dick Johnson to lead it; Dick passed on a couple of years ago, and I'm not sure who is running it now.

 

[bunnyb.gal]

It will be on my podcast address, bunnyb.; The link is in my signature. Artie Shaw had a lot of brillaint, beautiful songs. He was different inasmuch as he chose his songs very well, did a lot of arranging and wrote some pretty amazing songs of his own, "Any Old Time", "Man From Mars", "Nightmare" "Non-Stop Flight", "Don't Fall Asleep". AFAIK, Only Duke Ellington wrote more for his own band than Shaw. Some of the solos he did on the radio transcriptions and live recordings are absolutely out of this world.

He was absolutely top drawer.

Thank you, Chas; I'll have a listen now!

 

[Fletch]

Chas:

The big thing about Goodman is that he was both insistent on getting what he wanted and completely unable to communicate it! Because of this, he expected his players to deliver at a very high level of musicianship and frustration. He was very concerned about the former and did not give one good ******* about the latter.

Shaw was an utterly uncompromising musician, but he was somewhat hip to people. He knew what it meant to give up your dignity and he didn't ask that of his people. I do remember reading Max Kaminsky's book Jazzband, tho - he was a great trumpeter of the era and worked with Artie. One time Art got the idea Max was corking off a little too much in rehearsal and let all the guys know who was the real leader. Max got his notice, but Shaw brought him back during WW2 to play in his Navy dance band.

Another thing about Shaw - and I realized this attending a q&a session cum lecture he did at age 88, during which he did not sit down ONCE in 2 hours - was that he was a pure musical absolutist. He so disdained any hint of commercial compromise that he couldn't stand to listen to most White orchestras of his era - including some that by today's standards seem to have played a very high quality of music. It's a testament to his drive and dedication that he managed to stay in the band business as long as he did, so frustrated was he by the demands put on him as first a sideman, then a leader.

During that somewhat less enlightened (or maybe just more realistic) era, it was a very widely accepted myth that a good guy didn't make a good leader. My favorite, Joe Haymes, a top arranger and talent scout, was always being slagged off for being too much one of the boys. (Besides being a barely-functional alcoholic...probably the real reason he never hit the big time despite years of touring.) Jimmy Dorsey and Charlie Barnet were others whose outfits were regarded as too loose - even tho they turned out a thoroly professional sound. Barnet was a complete party animal personally, and JD couldn't, or wouldn't, live up to TD's fearsomeness and suffered for it.

Someday I hope to find out more about Isham Jones. He was a fascinating character and very much in the TD mode - a blue collar guy with a fierce work ethic who had very little patience with people, be they his musicians or the idiot public. Woody Herman was quoted about working with him: "He was all right until you missed your first eighth note. Then he would tell you to step outside." On his last band, in the early 50s, his MD recalled, Isham could not stop ranting about the quality of music, musicians, you name it. He was beside himself. And he'd been doing it for 40 years, and between the bands and his song royalties, he'd made as much money as any of them. Like I said, a fascinating character.

Anyway. I suppose Shaw is flipping in his grave at the idea of anyone giving him a centennial tribute. Tough t!tty, Artie. You were that good.

Has anybody read that book that just came out about him, Three Chords for Beauty's Sake? I'm in the middle of it right now. Interesting. Not as interesting as its subject, tho.

 

[Chas]

Thanks for that, Fletch. Thinking about Goodman and Shaw's childhoods; the common ground was they were both of Russian Jewish extraction and grew up dirt poor. That's pretty much where it ends, but it explains the ambition and drive that they both had.