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Topic: Artie Shaw RIP Return to archive
December 30th, 2004 09:00 PM
Ten Thousand Motels Star Bandleader Artie Shaw Dies at 94
By JEFF WILSON, Associated Press Writer

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. - Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader whose recording of "Begin the Beguine" epitomized the Big Band era, died Thursday at his home. He was 94.

Shaw had been in declining health for some time and apparently died of natural causes, his attorney and longtime friend Eddie Ezor said. Shaw's caregiver was with him when he died, Ezor said.

At his peak in the 1930s and '40s, Shaw pulled in a five-figure salary per week and ranked with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller as the bandleaders who made music swing. But he left the music world largely behind in the mid-'50s and spent much of the second half of his life devoted to writing and other pursuits.

His band's recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" was intended to be the "B" side of the record. Instead, it became a huge hit, topping the charts for six weeks in 1938 and making Shaw famous at age 28.

Among his other hits, some with his big band and some with his quartet, the Gramercy Five: "Frenesi," "Dancing in the Dark," "Nightmare," "Back Bay Shuffle," "Accent-tchu-ate the Positive," "Traffic Jam," "They Say," "Moonglow," "Stardust," "Thanks for Ev'rything," "Summit Ridge Drive" and "My Little Nest of Heavenly Blue."

He composed some of his songs, such as "Interlude in B Flat," a 1935 work that featured an unusual combination of clarinet and strings.

He worked with such jazz legends as Buddy Rich, Mel Torme, Gordon Jenkins and, at a time when most white bandleaders refused to hire blacks, Billie Holiday.

Another famous roster: his wives. They included actresses Lana Turner (wife No. 3, 1940), Ava Gardner (news) (No. 5, 1945), Evelyn Keyes (No. 8, 1957) and novelist Kathleen Winsor, author of the 1944 best-seller "Forever Amber" (No. 6, 1946).

The marriage to Keyes, best known for playing the middle of the three O'Hara sisters in "Gone With the Wind," lasted the longest, until 1985, but they led separate lives for much of that time.

"I like her very much and she likes me, but we've found it about impossible to live together," he said in a 1973 interview.

Entertainment mogul Merv Griffin, a former big band crooner, praised Shaw's musical accomplishments Thursday and said his romantic exploits made him the "Howard Hughes of the clarinet."

After his first burst of stardom, his good looks made Hollywood come calling. It was while filming "Dancing Coed," 1939, that he met Turner. In 1940, he appeared in another musical, "Second Chorus," and got two Academy Award nominations for his musical contributions — for best score and best song ("Love of My Life.")

A volatile and superbly intelligent man, Shaw hated the loss of privacy that stardom brought, had little use for signing autographs and once caused an uproar by calling jitterbugging fans "morons." He later said he was just referring to the rowdy ones.

"I could never understand why people wanted to dance to my music," he once said. "I made it good enough to listen to."

He chafed at having to play "Begin the Beguine" ad nauseam, wishing audiences would be more willing to accept new material. ("I mean, it's a good tune if you are going to be associated with one tune, but I didn't want that.")

He retired from performing several times — finally putting down his clarinet for good in the mid-'50s. After that, he lived in Spain for a time, operated a farm, and turned to literature full time. He was a voracious reader since childhood, and had already produced a well-received autobiography, "The Trouble with Cinderella," in 1952.

"I did all you can do with a clarinet," he said. "Any more would have been less."

He put out two collections of short fiction, "I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!" and "The Best of Intentions." He spent years working on a voluminous autobiographical novel tracing the rise of a young jazz musician, whom he called Albie Snow.

"I've lived for a long time and I've learned a few things that I'm passing on," he said.

He was recently named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and was looking forward to getting his award on Jan. 7, Ezor said. "Someone will accept for him," Ezor said.

Shaw was born Arthur Arshawsky on May 23, 1910, in New York City; his immigrant parents struggled to earn a living in the clothing business.

He began his professional career while still in his teens, first playing saxophone, then switching to clarinet to take advantage of a job opportunity.

By the time he was in his early 20s, he was a highly paid member of a CBS radio orchestra. After the first of his many retirements from the music business, he returned to New York and began assembling his first orchestra. "Begin the Beguine" and fame followed not long afterward.

He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and wound up spending most of his time leading a band, giving shows for the troops.

An outspoken liberal, Shaw was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 when it was investigating Communist influence in entertainment. For once, Shaw was contrite, telling committee members he had attended a couple of Communist meetings after the war because of his interest in social justice and world peace — but had never joined the party or given it any money.

"I hate to admit that I was a dupe, but I guess I was," he said. Committee members responded with sympathy, one telling him to go out and use his talent "to fight for true Americanism."

His only musical activity in recent years was conducting a revival band he organized in the early 1980s, featuring arrangements Shaw's bands had used in the past. He did not play his clarinet.

Shaw was often asked about his supposed rivalry with fellow clarinetist Goodman. He said: "Benny, who was every bit as dedicated as I was, wanted to be an instrumentalist — he was a superb technician — while I wanted to be a musician. I think my mind was more complex than his."

Associated Press Writers Polly Anderson in New York and Gary Gentile in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels]
December 30th, 2004 09:19 PM
gustavobala i think charlie is sad...

wow, a jazzman fucks Lana Turner and Ava Gardner...great!

8 wives? WOW
December 30th, 2004 10:06 PM
glencar He had lotsa fun!
December 31st, 2004 03:04 AM
thejuf yes, charlie must be sad, but so is the juf!

his recording of Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine is fab!


the juf
December 31st, 2004 05:30 AM
Gazza What a cool-sounding guy. Amazing that he basically walked away from it all while in his 40's because he'd done all there was to do with a clarinet.

Mind you, if I'd been married to Ava Gardner or Lana Turner, I doubt I'd have felt the need to get out of bed much either..!

His life story sounds fascinating. Wonder if there's any good biographies on him.
December 31st, 2004 05:39 AM
F505 Although a jazz lover I don't have any records of him.
Will listen to some of them soon.
December 31st, 2004 08:45 AM
Lil Brian
quote:
gustavobala wrote:
wow, a jazzman fucks Lana Turner and Ava Gardner...great!



Gustavo-
When I was working in the record store years ago, I remember a regular jazz customer telling me Artie told him Lana Turner would only do it "doggie style".
December 31st, 2004 09:52 AM
telecaster
quote:
Lil Brian wrote:


Gustavo-
When I was working in the record store years ago, I remember a regular jazz customer telling me Artie told him Lana Turner would only do it "doggie style".



Perfect for joey
December 31st, 2004 10:17 AM
gustavobala
quote:
Lil Brian wrote:


Gustavo-
When I was working in the record store years ago, I remember a regular jazz customer telling me Artie told him Lana Turner would only do it "doggie style".



lol...lol....lol

hahahahaheheheheehhe

great artie!
December 31st, 2004 10:21 AM
jb RIP
December 31st, 2004 10:35 AM
Lil Brian
quote:
jb wrote:
RIP



Quite right! He was a fine musician and bandleader. Later from Dallas, Texas I believe...
January 1st, 2005 03:47 AM
Ten Thousand Motels A Reluctant Prince of Swing
Artie Shaw Abhorred the Limelight Even as He Blazed a Jazz Trail

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 1, 2005;

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."

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.

January 1st, 2005 04:37 AM
thejuf thanks for posting these obituaries.
I have been listening to Shaw all morning, it is so good.

505, can I be of any assistance? do you want me to send you a cd?


the juf
January 1st, 2005 08:24 AM
F505 Hello juf, I've send you a message Thanks.
January 1st, 2005 06:40 PM
Mr Hess Shaw grew up here in New Haven.
RIP Artie!!
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