For more than a year now, the Selmer clarinet Artie Shaw played on his classic 1938 recording of "Begin the Beguine" has been preserved in the National Museum of American History, a gift made when Shaw was honored with the James Smithson Bicentennial medal for his lifetime achievement and contributions to American culture and music. Earlier this year the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave Shaw a Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was due to receive an NEA Jazz Masters Award next week.
One hopes Artie Shaw, who died Thursday at 94, took some pleasure in such recognition because his life and career, full of innovation and acclaim, both popular and critical, always seemed a curious confluence of opposites underscored by serial rejection of opportunities. As often as he achieved success, Shaw walked away from it, most dramatically in 1954, when he packed away his clarinet for good, abandoning the music business at 44 and at what might have been the peak of his creative potential.
"I could never understand why people wanted to dance to my music," Artie Shaw said. "I made it good enough to listen to."
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A mercurial, crusty and proudly contentious man, as well as an avowed perfectionist, Shaw seemed temperamentally unsuited to both professional and personal commitments. During the swing era, when his popularity rivaled that of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, Shaw put together a half-dozen great orchestras, only to disband them within months, often out of frustration at public reaction, which, oddly, was almost always positive.
"I could never understand why people wanted to dance to my music," he once complained. "I made it good enough to listen to."
Shaw managed to have more wives than orchestras, eight in all. He hated the spotlight and attendant celebrity -- for Shaw, it was first and foremost about music -- but his matinee idol good looks made him a favorite with the media gossips, particularly after he married two of the era's most fabulous movie stars, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.
Shaw also hated the entertainment industry (he groused that "popular music in America is 10 percent art and 90 percent business") and didn't hide his disdain for fans. At the height of his popularity in 1939, Shaw griped to the New York Post that "jitterbugs are morons [and] autograph hunters won't give you a chance to breathe." When the tobacco company Old Gold took offense and dropped its sponsorship of Shaw's live radio show, he literally walked off the bandstand and moved to Mexico. The New York Times expressed admiration for "the Shakespearean sweep of [Shaw's] exodus" and the "beautiful incautious burning of all his bridges behind him."
But while the erudite Shaw probably appreciated the literary allusion, he never really burned all of his bridges. While in Mexico he heard a mariachi tune called "Frenesi." When he returned to Los Angeles a few months later, he recorded it with a big band augmented with strings, woodwinds and French horns. "Frenesi" became a huge hit and he resumed touring.
That pattern of creative ebb and flow was a constant in Shaw's life and career, which he'd probably rather have spent as a writer. It was the winning of an essay contest at 17 that took Shaw to California in 1928, where his skills as an alto saxophonist and clarinetist later led to Shaw's being drafted by several bands. After moving to New York in 1930, those skills created demand for him at recording sessions. Yet even before he'd had personal success in the music business, Shaw grew to despise the industry and quit it to move to the countryside, where he made a living chopping wood and where he tried to write a book.
But that paid even worse than being a musician, and in 1934 Shaw returned to New York; two years later he was afforded an opportunity to set himself apart from the burgeoning swing scene. A jazz fan, Shaw was also familiar with such classical modernists as Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, being particularly impressed with their compositions for strings. Asked to do a filler performance at the first important swing concert (at the Imperial Theater), he augmented his clarinet with a string quartet and three rhythm instruments and called it Arthur Shaw's String Swing Ensemble. The group's hastily thrown together chamber jazz composition, "Interlude in B-flat," announced not only a substantial new voice but the kind of unorthodox, experimental approach that would be a constant in Shaw's career. Even then, his sound was unmistakable, with a silky tone, expressive vibrato and remarkable control of his instrument's top register. Shaw could play hot and he could play cool; he always played beautifully.
Shaw's career skyrocketed in 1938 when he recorded "Begin the Beguine," until then, a minor Cole Porter song. Shaw's arranger, Jerry Gray, altered the original, languidly exotic, beguine rhythm to a modified 4/4 that proved even more lilting and romantic. Its huge success made Shaw an immediate rival to the King of Swing, Goodman, as well as Miller, Dorsey and other stars of the swing era, though Shaw proved a reluctant star, wary of celebrity long before he, ironically, began marrying movie stars.
For the next decade and a half, he would put together scintillating big bands and adventurous smaller ensembles, notably the Gramercy Five, and have huge hits with lush orchestral versions of "Moonglow" and particularly "Star Dust." Around his 90th birthday, Shaw told Sam Litzinger of CBS Radio that "if I had to say something was perfect musically, the solo I did on 'Star Dust' is as close to being perfect as I would have wanted." It was a rare admission of contentment.
But Shaw's last working orchestra, a modernist ensemble in 1949, didn't catch on. By then, jazz and popular music, having melded briefly in the swing era, had separated again to their disparate fan bases. Shaw entered psychoanalysis, looking for motivation and direction in his life and work. In 1951 he started writing "The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity," an intelligent and introspective autobiography that came out a year later to glowing reviews. "I didn't stop playing," Shaw explained. "I started writing. There's no room for both." In the '60s, he wrote three short novels about marital strife, collected as "I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!" ("I guess you always write about what you know best," Shaw joked).
Over the decades, he was a lecturer (the music business and pop culture were favorite targets) but otherwise lived outside the limelight. The last surviving popular band leader from the swing era, Shaw was also one of the last to sanction a ghost band: In 1983, he approved the creation of the Artie Shaw Orchestra, playing classic arrangements and fronted by Boston clarinetist Dick Johnson. Shaw occasionally traveled with the band, conducting the band's signature opening number, "Nightmare" (his original theme). But he never played. That decision had been final, and as immutable as Artie Shaw himself.
