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" Artie Shaw
(Filed: 01/01/2005)
Artie Shaw, who died on Thursday aged 94, was the last of the four great white big bandleaders of the Swing Era.
He achieved his position alongside Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller with a recording of Begin the Beguine, in which his clarinet seductively soloed over a little known Cole Porter melody; its sudden popularity prompted his publicists, if not quite the critics, to hail him as "the new King of Swing" in 1939.
But instead of enjoying his good fortune, Shaw exhibited a strong misanthropic streak by denouncing his jitterbug fans as "morons". He issued a retraction, saying that he had not meant the majority who danced to his music, but explained that he still disliked autograph hunters and "prima donna" musicians. Soon afterwards he announced that he was quitting the music business "permanently", to consider his future in Mexico.
This period of contemplation involved some excitement when he broke his leg while rescuing a drowning woman off Acapulco, but it did not last long. Shaw soon returned to fulfill a recording contract, and to pick up on his continuing popularity. Nevertheless, the bemused public gradually came to find more interest in his romantic exploits, as Shaw ran through eight marriages, two of them to the film stars Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.
As his musical career wound down, he launched himself as an author. In The Trouble with Cinderella (1952) he recorded with self-hatred the anti-semitism he had experienced as a child; but the book was written with some skill, without the aid of a publicist, and has been periodically republished.
The son of Yiddish-speaking parents, Arthur Jacob Arshawsky was born in East Manhattan on May 23 1910 and brought up at New Haven, Connecticut, where he went to Hillhouse Hill School. He took up the alto saxophone at 12, switching to the clarinet four years later while touring with Johnny Cavallaro's dance band.
He then became musical director for a band led by the violinist Austin Wylie in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also exposed to the music of Debussy and Stravinsky. His most important experience, however, was hearing Louis Armstrong play the opening cadenza of his West End Blues. On moving to New York, Shaw came under the influence of the stride pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith. He then took well-paid work with the CBS orchestra and several dance bands before deciding to write a novel about the cornet player Bix Biederbecke; at the same time he was running a 27-acre farm in Pennsylvania.
Having decided to return to New York, Shaw was asked by a club owner to form a band for the first swing concert. He came up with an unusual combination of clarinet, strings and drums, which performed his composition Interlude in B Flat. This proved such a success that he was immediately offered the financial backing to form his own band. This consisted of two trumpets, a trombone and a string section plus himself and a conventional rhythm section. Some of its recordings were uneven, though they included an agile version of Streamline and a wistful Sweet Lorraine, which showed off his clarinet to advantage.
Eventually, Shaw had to accede to the demands of popular taste and drop his strings in favour of a conventional unit of five brass, four saxophones and a rhythm section of four. But in doing his own arranging, he developed a distinct style, combining show numbers, instrumental features and occasional blues played with restraint and shading and eschewing rousing climaxes. Taking the disturbingly serpentine Nightmare as his theme tune, he hired Billie Holliday, who soon quit because of barracking from white audiences. He recorded the scat vocalist Leo Watson in a brilliant Shoot the Likker to Me, John Boy, and, against his manager's advice, insisted on recording Begin the Beguine, a number plucked from an unsuccessful Broadway show.
Shaw's angry renunication of the music business in 1939 lasted less than three months, and he returned to fulfill a recording contract by making a swing version of Frenesi, a Latin tune he had heard in Mexico, which became his second most popular recording. His soaring solo work was also shown to advantage in the classic Stardust and the awesome Gloomy Sunday, which earned valuable publicity when it was banned by the Catholic archdiocese of Boston because of its suicidal theme. His renewed success enabled him to include a string section again along with such fine musicians as the trumpeter Billy Butterfield and Johnny Guarnieri, who played harpsichord in Shaw's Grammercy Five chamber unit.
Another band, featuring the trumpeters Oran "Hot Lips" Page and Max Kaminsky, lasted seven months until Shaw enlisted in the US Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was soon leading a navy band on a long tour of the Pacific. It set off in the battleship North Carolina, and went from Guadalcanal to New Caledonia, New Zealand and Australia. By the end of the tour the instruments were held together with elastic bands, and the musicians were showing signs of even greater strain after surviving air raids and spells in damp foxholes. Shaw had been promoted only to chief petty officer, and he was not well-disposed to the fan who asked: "Can I shake the hand that held Lana Turner's tit?" On being invalided home after 18 months, he was photographed, on his knees at the dockside, kissing the ground.
After three months in a naval hospital, Shaw went on to form another civilian band, which featured the black trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who soloed on an exciting version of Little Jazz. During the rest of the decade, Shaw had a series of, usually short-lived, bands. Unlike some other leaders, he found it easy to accommodate modern jazz musicians, which give his later recordings a freshness that is absent from the many other swing organisations of that era; but then Shaw saw no reason to be restricted by the harmonic limitations of the time.
In 1949 he got a chance to play at the club Bop City with a 40-piece orchestra that featured the music of Debussy and Prokofiev. The first performance lasted more than four hours, and jazz fans protested so strongly that the management insisted on cutting Shaw's programme on subsequent dates. Yet when his jazz of this period was released on record 40 years later, it drew the admiration of both critics and musicians.
In the early 1950s he began to revert to occasional bands featuring Begin the Beguine and earlier safe numbers. But by then Shaw's reputation had been tarnished by his appearance before Congress's UnAmerican Activities Committee, which questioned him about Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry. Shaw admitted that he had criticised capitalism in the early 1930s, but could not remember whether or not he had joined the Party; he had, however, signed "some piece of paper" with a pseudonym when approached by a representative in 1946. Eventually, Shaw agreed that he had been a dupe, and facetiously declared that he would never again sign anything unless he had "the advice of seven lawyers" as well as the committee's permission.
In the latter part of his life, Shaw ran a dairy farm, lived in Spain for five years and then settled in Connecticut, where he adapted scripts for the theatre.
The first of his eight marriages was in 1932, to Jane Cairns, a typist whose parents were said to have hauled her home next day on the ground that she was too young. Two years later he married Margaret Allen, whom he long described as a "wonderful girl, a lovely girl"; she divorced him after three years.
His next bride was the starlet Lana Turner, whom he met on a film lot. Although he was engaged to Betty Grable at the time, he and Lana flew to Las Vegas to be married at 4 am on the day after they met - she sent her mother a telegram which failed to mention the bridegroom's name.
This match lasted a mere four months. Afterwards, Shaw recalled that Lana Turner was a "dumb chick", while she complained about the inordinate amount of time that he spent at the hairdresser's.
Shaw's fourth marriage was to Betty Kern, daughter of the composer Jerome Kern; she bore him a son. After their divorce in 1942, Shaw married Ava Gardner, whose literary education he undertook to expand beyond Gone with the Wind by introducing her to Dostoievsky, Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Mann. She even studied economics in the hope of saving the union. Eventually, however, "he told me to leave," Miss Gardner reported, "and I left".
Kathleen Winsor, author of the then risqué bestseller Forever Amber, was the sixth bride. She and Shaw planned to write together and "share joint pursuits". But they had not been married long before he came home belligerently drunk, boasting how he had kicked Lana Turner downstairs and how this had improved their marriage; he had also kicked Ava Gardner, who had "responded magnificently". Subsequently Shaw denied this, and claimed that he had divorced Kathleen Winsor because she refused to have children.
Shaw's seventh wife was Doris Dowling, also an actress, with whom he had a son. She was followed by Evelyn Keyes, another actress. "I am an incurable optimist," he declared. "I would be the last to decry my own skill at botch-making, but I picked myself some damn good partners when it came to gumming up the works." On being quizzed by a reporter in Spain a couple of months after his last marriage failed, he responded: "I don't want to talk about it."
In 1965 Shaw published a collection of three novellas about disintegrating marriages, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!, which attracted some praise - though one critic remarked that the book might be more interesting if the readers knew the real names of the characters. Twenty-four years later he brought out The Best of Intentions and Other Stories.
Although Shaw refused to pick up his clarinet again, he returned to a bandstand in 1983 when an Artie Shaw Orchestra was launched. In the 1980s he also conducted a full orchestra playing one of his own works.
His marital career left him with some uncharitable reflections on film star wives: "These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially if you're married to one," he said. "They all think they want a traditional marriage, but they aren't married for that sort of thing. Somebody's got to get the coffee in the morning, and an Ava Gardner is not going to do that. So you get up and get it, and then you find you're doing everything."
Although Shaw drew a line under his marital career, this did not mean an end to his love life. There continued to be a series of liaisons contracted on an informal basis. The last companion moved into his Los Angeles house, which he had crammed with books, shortly before his 80th birthday. This relationship also failed.
Even in extreme old age, Shaw did not mellow: "If anyone comes up to me and says, `Oh, I just love your Begin the Beguine'," he declared, "I want to vomit."
(Filed: 01/01/2005)
Artie Shaw, who died on Thursday aged 94, was the last of the four great white big bandleaders of the Swing Era.
He achieved his position alongside Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller with a recording of Begin the Beguine, in which his clarinet seductively soloed over a little known Cole Porter melody; its sudden popularity prompted his publicists, if not quite the critics, to hail him as "the new King of Swing" in 1939.
But instead of enjoying his good fortune, Shaw exhibited a strong misanthropic streak by denouncing his jitterbug fans as "morons". He issued a retraction, saying that he had not meant the majority who danced to his music, but explained that he still disliked autograph hunters and "prima donna" musicians. Soon afterwards he announced that he was quitting the music business "permanently", to consider his future in Mexico.
This period of contemplation involved some excitement when he broke his leg while rescuing a drowning woman off Acapulco, but it did not last long. Shaw soon returned to fulfill a recording contract, and to pick up on his continuing popularity. Nevertheless, the bemused public gradually came to find more interest in his romantic exploits, as Shaw ran through eight marriages, two of them to the film stars Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.
As his musical career wound down, he launched himself as an author. In The Trouble with Cinderella (1952) he recorded with self-hatred the anti-semitism he had experienced as a child; but the book was written with some skill, without the aid of a publicist, and has been periodically republished.
The son of Yiddish-speaking parents, Arthur Jacob Arshawsky was born in East Manhattan on May 23 1910 and brought up at New Haven, Connecticut, where he went to Hillhouse Hill School. He took up the alto saxophone at 12, switching to the clarinet four years later while touring with Johnny Cavallaro's dance band.
He then became musical director for a band led by the violinist Austin Wylie in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also exposed to the music of Debussy and Stravinsky. His most important experience, however, was hearing Louis Armstrong play the opening cadenza of his West End Blues. On moving to New York, Shaw came under the influence of the stride pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith. He then took well-paid work with the CBS orchestra and several dance bands before deciding to write a novel about the cornet player Bix Biederbecke; at the same time he was running a 27-acre farm in Pennsylvania.
Having decided to return to New York, Shaw was asked by a club owner to form a band for the first swing concert. He came up with an unusual combination of clarinet, strings and drums, which performed his composition Interlude in B Flat. This proved such a success that he was immediately offered the financial backing to form his own band. This consisted of two trumpets, a trombone and a string section plus himself and a conventional rhythm section. Some of its recordings were uneven, though they included an agile version of Streamline and a wistful Sweet Lorraine, which showed off his clarinet to advantage.
Eventually, Shaw had to accede to the demands of popular taste and drop his strings in favour of a conventional unit of five brass, four saxophones and a rhythm section of four. But in doing his own arranging, he developed a distinct style, combining show numbers, instrumental features and occasional blues played with restraint and shading and eschewing rousing climaxes. Taking the disturbingly serpentine Nightmare as his theme tune, he hired Billie Holliday, who soon quit because of barracking from white audiences. He recorded the scat vocalist Leo Watson in a brilliant Shoot the Likker to Me, John Boy, and, against his manager's advice, insisted on recording Begin the Beguine, a number plucked from an unsuccessful Broadway show.
Shaw's angry renunication of the music business in 1939 lasted less than three months, and he returned to fulfill a recording contract by making a swing version of Frenesi, a Latin tune he had heard in Mexico, which became his second most popular recording. His soaring solo work was also shown to advantage in the classic Stardust and the awesome Gloomy Sunday, which earned valuable publicity when it was banned by the Catholic archdiocese of Boston because of its suicidal theme. His renewed success enabled him to include a string section again along with such fine musicians as the trumpeter Billy Butterfield and Johnny Guarnieri, who played harpsichord in Shaw's Grammercy Five chamber unit.
Another band, featuring the trumpeters Oran "Hot Lips" Page and Max Kaminsky, lasted seven months until Shaw enlisted in the US Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was soon leading a navy band on a long tour of the Pacific. It set off in the battleship North Carolina, and went from Guadalcanal to New Caledonia, New Zealand and Australia. By the end of the tour the instruments were held together with elastic bands, and the musicians were showing signs of even greater strain after surviving air raids and spells in damp foxholes. Shaw had been promoted only to chief petty officer, and he was not well-disposed to the fan who asked: "Can I shake the hand that held Lana Turner's tit?" On being invalided home after 18 months, he was photographed, on his knees at the dockside, kissing the ground.
After three months in a naval hospital, Shaw went on to form another civilian band, which featured the black trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who soloed on an exciting version of Little Jazz. During the rest of the decade, Shaw had a series of, usually short-lived, bands. Unlike some other leaders, he found it easy to accommodate modern jazz musicians, which give his later recordings a freshness that is absent from the many other swing organisations of that era; but then Shaw saw no reason to be restricted by the harmonic limitations of the time.
In 1949 he got a chance to play at the club Bop City with a 40-piece orchestra that featured the music of Debussy and Prokofiev. The first performance lasted more than four hours, and jazz fans protested so strongly that the management insisted on cutting Shaw's programme on subsequent dates. Yet when his jazz of this period was released on record 40 years later, it drew the admiration of both critics and musicians.
In the early 1950s he began to revert to occasional bands featuring Begin the Beguine and earlier safe numbers. But by then Shaw's reputation had been tarnished by his appearance before Congress's UnAmerican Activities Committee, which questioned him about Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry. Shaw admitted that he had criticised capitalism in the early 1930s, but could not remember whether or not he had joined the Party; he had, however, signed "some piece of paper" with a pseudonym when approached by a representative in 1946. Eventually, Shaw agreed that he had been a dupe, and facetiously declared that he would never again sign anything unless he had "the advice of seven lawyers" as well as the committee's permission.
In the latter part of his life, Shaw ran a dairy farm, lived in Spain for five years and then settled in Connecticut, where he adapted scripts for the theatre.
The first of his eight marriages was in 1932, to Jane Cairns, a typist whose parents were said to have hauled her home next day on the ground that she was too young. Two years later he married Margaret Allen, whom he long described as a "wonderful girl, a lovely girl"; she divorced him after three years.
His next bride was the starlet Lana Turner, whom he met on a film lot. Although he was engaged to Betty Grable at the time, he and Lana flew to Las Vegas to be married at 4 am on the day after they met - she sent her mother a telegram which failed to mention the bridegroom's name.
This match lasted a mere four months. Afterwards, Shaw recalled that Lana Turner was a "dumb chick", while she complained about the inordinate amount of time that he spent at the hairdresser's.
Shaw's fourth marriage was to Betty Kern, daughter of the composer Jerome Kern; she bore him a son. After their divorce in 1942, Shaw married Ava Gardner, whose literary education he undertook to expand beyond Gone with the Wind by introducing her to Dostoievsky, Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Mann. She even studied economics in the hope of saving the union. Eventually, however, "he told me to leave," Miss Gardner reported, "and I left".
Kathleen Winsor, author of the then risqué bestseller Forever Amber, was the sixth bride. She and Shaw planned to write together and "share joint pursuits". But they had not been married long before he came home belligerently drunk, boasting how he had kicked Lana Turner downstairs and how this had improved their marriage; he had also kicked Ava Gardner, who had "responded magnificently". Subsequently Shaw denied this, and claimed that he had divorced Kathleen Winsor because she refused to have children.
Shaw's seventh wife was Doris Dowling, also an actress, with whom he had a son. She was followed by Evelyn Keyes, another actress. "I am an incurable optimist," he declared. "I would be the last to decry my own skill at botch-making, but I picked myself some damn good partners when it came to gumming up the works." On being quizzed by a reporter in Spain a couple of months after his last marriage failed, he responded: "I don't want to talk about it."
In 1965 Shaw published a collection of three novellas about disintegrating marriages, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!, which attracted some praise - though one critic remarked that the book might be more interesting if the readers knew the real names of the characters. Twenty-four years later he brought out The Best of Intentions and Other Stories.
Although Shaw refused to pick up his clarinet again, he returned to a bandstand in 1983 when an Artie Shaw Orchestra was launched. In the 1980s he also conducted a full orchestra playing one of his own works.
His marital career left him with some uncharitable reflections on film star wives: "These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially if you're married to one," he said. "They all think they want a traditional marriage, but they aren't married for that sort of thing. Somebody's got to get the coffee in the morning, and an Ava Gardner is not going to do that. So you get up and get it, and then you find you're doing everything."
Although Shaw drew a line under his marital career, this did not mean an end to his love life. There continued to be a series of liaisons contracted on an informal basis. The last companion moved into his Los Angeles house, which he had crammed with books, shortly before his 80th birthday. This relationship also failed.
Even in extreme old age, Shaw did not mellow: "If anyone comes up to me and says, `Oh, I just love your Begin the Beguine'," he declared, "I want to vomit."
