Artist: Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw was an American clarinetist, composer, bandleader, actor and author of both fiction and non-fiction
Widely regarded as "one of jazz's finest clarinetists", Shaw led one of the United States' most popular big bands in the late 1930s through the early 1940s. Though he had numerous hit records, he was perhaps best known for his 1938 recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine."
Shaw also recorded with small jazz groups drawn from within the ranks of the big bands he led. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1944, during which time he led a morale-building band that toured the South Pacific. Following his discharge in 1944, he returned to lead a band through 1945.
In 1935, he first gained attention with his "Interlude in B-flat" at a swing concert at the Imperial Theater in New York. During the swing era, his big bands were popular with hits like "Begin the Beguine" (1938), "Stardust" (with a trumpet solo by Billy Butterfield), "Back Bay Shuffle", "Moonglow", "Rosalie", and "Frenesi".
In addition to hiring Buddy Rich, he signed Billie Holiday as his band's vocalist in 1938, becoming the first white band leader to hire a full-time black female singer to tour the segregated Southern U.S. However, after recording "Any Old Time", Holiday left the band due to hostility from audiences in the South, as well as from music company executives who wanted a more "mainstream" singer.
Like his main rival, Benny Goodman, and other leaders of big bands, Shaw fashioned a smaller "band within the band" in 1940. He named it Artie Shaw and the Gramercy Five after his home telephone exchange. Band pianist Johnny Guarnieri played harpsichord on the quintet recordings, and Al Hendrickson played electric guitar. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge became part of the group, succeeding Billy Butterfield.
The long series of musical groups Shaw subsequently formed included Lena Horne, Helen Forrest, Mel Tormé, Buddy Rich, Dave Tough, Barney Kessel, Jimmy Raney, Tal Farlow, Dodo Marmarosa, and Ray Conniff.
Shaw became increasingly disillusioned with not having time to develop new arrangements, and having to play the same pop tunes over and over. In an interview, he explained, "'Begin the Beguine' is a pretty nice tune. But not when you have to play it 500 nights in a row." Finally, in frustration, he walked off the Café Rouge bandstand while on the air, and quit the band two days later. He departed for Mexico, and the band continued without him into January but eventually broke up.
After Shaw returned from Mexico in 1940, and still under contract to RCA Victor, he experimented with a group of session musicians in Hollywood, trying to combine strings and woodwinds with a jazz band. The result was the hit "Frenesi".
He was hired as bandleader for the Burns and Allen Show broadcast from Hollywood. He organized a band that was modeled after his swing band concept of the late-1930s with the addition of six violins, two violas, and one cello. The addition of a string section to a big band was not novel, as it had been done by Paul Whiteman and others since the 1920s. Shaw updated the idea with the music trends of the 1940s. Strings gave him a wider tonal palette and allowed him to concentrate on ballads rather than the fast dance songs of the swing era. Shaw was at or near the top of the list of virtuoso jazz bandleaders. The band was showcased on the Burns and Allen program every week.
In the late 1940s Shaw commissioned Norman Dello Joio to compose a solo work; Shaw premiered the resultant Concertante for Clarinet and Orchestra with the Chautauqua (NY) Symphony on 23 July 1949, Franco Autori conducting. Shaw again performed the work in Town Hall on 20 February 1950 with Thomas Scherman and the Little Orchestra Society.
In July 1954, Shaw undertook a brief Australian tour for promoter Lee Gordon on which he shared the bill with drummer Buddy Rich and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.
In 1983, after years of prodding by Williard Alexander, the 73-year-old Shaw organized a band and selected clarinetist Dick Johnson as bandleader and soloist. The 58-year-old Johnson, an accomplished woodwind and saxophonist and native of Brockton, Massachusetts, was no stranger to jazz having recorded numerous albums of his own and had idolized Shaw's playing throughout his life. Shaw's music library, which was the product of his almost 20 years of activity in the music business, contained numerous arrangements of monumental status of popular music in addition to many original big band jazz compositions of the era.
It was a collection of music arranged by some of the foremost composer/arrangers of the period, much of which was sketched out by Shaw himself and filled in and completed by his orchestrator/arranger collaborators, among them Jerry Gray, William Grant Still, Lennie Hayton, Ray Conniff, Eddie Sauter, and Jimmy Mundy, among others. Shaw rehearsed his new band, (based out of Boston, Massachusetts), and the band made its official debut on New Year's Eve 1984 at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York, the same launching pad for many bands of the swing era decades earlier, when Shaw and his bands were in their prime.
Further information about Artie Shaw is found at here and Artie Shaw.
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article,Artie Shaw - Wikipedia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
Artie Shaw & His Orchestra: Live At The Hotel Lincoln (November 29, 1938)
Artie Shaw: Videos
Stardust - Artie Shaw And His Orchestra
1941 HITS ARCHIVE: Dancing In The Dark - Artie Shaw (instrumental)