January 06, 2005
Artie Shaw remembered
Power Line notes the recent passing of iconoclastic jazz titan Artie Shaw and guides us to several useful links. Insightful Terry Teachout wrote a fine piece in 2000 for Shaw's 90th birthday. I'm no expert on Shaw's music, but Teachout's fine writing has the desired effect: it makes me want to go to the back catalog and listen right away. Artie Shaw was one-of-a-kind.
H.L. Mencken once suggested that in a well-run universe, everybody would have two lives, "one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it." This is more or less the way that the clarinetist Artie Shaw, who turns 90 on Tuesday, has contrived to arrange things. In the first half of his long, spectacularly eventful life, he played jazz with Bix Beiderbecke and Mozart with Leonard Bernstein; married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner; made a movie with Fred Astaire; and was interrogated about his left-wing ties by Joe McCarthy. Then, at the age of 44, he stopped playing music and started writing fiction...Mr. Shaw's first big band was an ensemble of unorthodox instrumentation (it included a string quartet) whose failure inspired him to change musical directions and organize what he called "the loudest goddamn band in the world." He then struck it rich in 1938 with a crisp, incisive recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" that made him a superstar virtually overnight. For all his oft-expressed contempt of commercialism, he had a knack for making good music that pleased the public—a knack with which he would never come to terms—and the "Beguine" band, which featured the superlative singing of Billie Holiday and Helen Forrest, the fiery drumming of the 21-year-old Buddy Rich and a saxophone section that played with breathtaking fluidity and grace, was an incomparable dance band, by turns lyrical and galvanizingly hot.
Mr. Shaw himself wrote many of the band's lucid, transparent arrangements, whose simplicity was deliberately intended to appeal to a mass audience, but which had the paradoxical effect of providing an ideal background for his richly elaborate improvisations. His intense, saxophone-like tone was sharply focused but never shrill, even when he was cavorting in the instrument's highest register, and his blues solos were tinged with an exotic modal color suggestive of synagogue chant.
Related:
• NPR - Artie Shaw: The Reluctant 'King of Swing' Looks Back on Life on the Throne (2002)
• PBS - Jazz A Film by Ken Burns Artist Biography - Artie Shaw
Recommended: Self Portrait boxed set.
