Artie Shaw, 94, Giant of Jazz Who Quit Performing in 1954

Artie Shaw, who died yesterday at age 94 at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., was a clarinetist and bandleader who swiped Downbeat magazine’s “King of Swing” moniker from Benny Goodman in 1938.Innovative, ambitious, moody, and somewhat misanthropic, Shaw released cutting-edge jazz records as well as smash hits like “Begin the Beguine” and “Star Dust” that became classics and earned him a fortune, which he mainly dissipated. He lived in splendor, married a series of movie stars and celebrities, and repeatedly dropped out of music – to recuperate, to write, or just because he was irate. Finally, in 1954, when he was 44, he stopped playing altogether.Shaw’s death was announced by his attorney, Eddie Ezor, who said Shaw had been in declining health for some time. The cause of death was not given.During Shaw’s most productive years, starting in 1936, he helped launch swing, created new forms of musical assemblage, played with and directed symphony orchestras, and brought classical influences into jazz. In 1938, he became among the first bandleaders to hire a black singer, Billie Holiday.According to Gunther Schuller, author of “The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945,” the mystery of Shaw was “how the rather mediocre clarinet player that Shaw was” when he was young became “one of the two or three most outstanding clarinetists in all of jazz – some would say the greatest of them all.”Shaw was born Arthur Arshawsky on the Lower East Side, and his upbringing contained nothing in it to portend his future as a musician. His father was a photographer and his mother a seamstress. When he was 7, the family moved to New Haven, Conn., where young Artie taught himself to play the ukulele and the piano.Shaw purchased a saxophone when he was 13 and learned to play with a book of lessons included with the instrument – his only formal musical training. He later said he had to unlearn everything in the book when he learned to play the “hot” jazz popularized by Louis Armstrong and others he admired.By the age of 15, Shaw was earning a living on barnstorming tours with big bands. He told various stories about why he switched to the clarinet – to get a job in Florida, just because it was lighter – but whatever the reason, it gave his career a serious boost. He moved to Cleveland and worked with bandleader Austin Wylie, eventually taking responsibility for the band’s rehearsals and arrangements.At one point in the late 1920s, Shaw made a special trip to Cleveland to hear Louis Armstrong play. Drummer Chick Webb and guitarist Bix Beiderbecke, who had been Shaw’s roommate on the road, also influenced Shaw’s playing.In 1929, Shaw won an essay contest sponsored by the Cleveland Plain Dealer that featured a prize of a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. Shaw took the outward-bound leg of the flight and joined Irving Aaronson’s Commanders, a touring big band based in Los Angeles. While touring with the group, Shaw was introduced to the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok, Ravel, and other classical masters. In the process he “discovered a whole new world,” as he later wrote in a semi-autobiographical novel, “The Trouble With Cinderella.” Shaw quit the Aaronson band when it visited New York in 1930 and became a session musician, playing clarinet and saxophone on records and at radio stations. He was already earning as much as $500 a week, a tidy income during Depression years.In New York, Shaw took up the “hot” style jazz he heard at clubs in Harlem, but after a couple of years became disillusioned with the music business. He moved to rural Bucks County, where he attempted to write a novel based on Beiderbecke, who had died in 1931. “It took a year for me to discover that a typewriter isn’t a clarinet,” Shaw later said. Accounts of his year away from music generally stress the large amount of wood he chopped. He sometimes trucked it to Greenwich Village to sell on street corners.Moving back to New York in 1934, Shaw resumed session work and also began taking literature classes at Columbia University. In May 1936 he appeared for the first time as a bandleader, fronting a string quartet combined with a rhythm section in a performance of Shaw’s “Interlude in B Flat.”The performance, at the Imperial Theater, caused an immediate sensation, and the following day Shaw was offered three recording contracts. A subsequent tour flopped. Shaw reorganized a more conventional band and recorded and toured, hauling equipment in a truck that had once been Tommy Dorsey’s.With his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” which was originally the B-side of his version of “Indian Love Call,” the Artie Shaw Orchestra started receiving significant play on radio. By 1939, it was raking in as much as $60,000 a week, an astonishing sum at the time. In later years, Shaw came to resent being known for a single tune. “I mean, it’s a good tune if you are going to be associated with one tune, but I didn’t want that,” he once said.As handsome as he was famous, Shaw went to Hollywood and in 1939 appeared in his first film, “Dancing Co-Ed,” starring Lana Turner. He and Turner later were briefly married – his third, her first. The cerebral Shaw “was my entire college education,” Turner later said. In all, Shaw was married and divorced eight times, including to actresses Ava Gardner, Evelyn Keyes, and Doris Dowling; the daughter of Jerome Kern, Elizabeth Kern, and the author of the novel “Forever Amber,” Kathleen Winsor. Through romance or gossip, Shaw was connected to any number of other women, including Betty Grable and Judy Garland.At the height of his success, Shaw again dropped out, this time supposedly due to agranulocytopenia, a blood disease. Typical of his periodic bouts of consternation, he also made various comments in the press intimating that fans who liked jitterbug music were “morons.” He went to Mexico for rest and rehabilitation, and the Times praised him for the “beautifully incautious burning of all his bridges behind him.”In Mexico, Shaw was injured falling off a horse and broke his knee rescuing a Connecticut debutante from the Pacific undertow. He burst back onto the music scene in 1940 with a new, 23-piece orchestra and a hit record, “Frenesi.” The recording innovated by featuring full horn and string sections in addition to the normal big band jazz instrumentation. Later in 1940, Shaw’s band recorded “Star Dust,” “Moonglow,” and “Concerto for Clarinet.”World War II had broken out, and Time magazine declared that to the Germans, America meant “skyscrapers, Clark Gable, and Artie Shaw. “Soon after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Shaw enlisted in the Navy and formed a new band to entertain troops in the Pacific theater. At times he played four concerts a day, and the stress of playing under battlefield conditions eventually caused him to have a nervous breakdown. He was granted a medical discharge in 1943.Shortly before the war ended, Shaw formed a new band and began recording again. Within a few years, he was introducing more and more non-jazz elements into his music. In 1949, he played with symphony orchestras across the country and recorded the album “Modern Music for Clarinet,” featuring short works by Shostakovich, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc, as well as Cole Porter and George Gershwin. He performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, at a benefit for the Israel Philharmonic at Ebbetts Field.In 1951, Shaw again quit the music business and moved to a 240-acre dairy farm in Duchess County, N.Y., where he wrote “The Trouble With Cinderella.” He later wrote a collection of novellas titled “I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead.” He returned once more to New York City, where he recorded and played with several combos, notably Grammercy 5, named for a phone exchange. He finally dropped out of music altogether in 1954, after a gig at the Embers Club on 52nd Street.In later interviews, Shaw sometimes suggested that it was disgust with the music business that led to his retirement, but more often, in recent years, he said he was overstressed and didn’t have the right temperament for fame. “I’d led nine different orchestras by then,” Shaw told a reporter in 1994. “I had to stop and find out who I was.”He underwent psychoanalysis and announced that he was moving to Spain because he was disgusted with the Mc-Carthy hearings. Shaw had gone before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, appearing contrite for having attended a few communist meetings. “I hate to admit that I was a dupe, but I guess I was,” he said at the time.In 1960, Shaw returned to America, moving to northwestern Connecticut. He later moved to California and ended up living in a nondescript tract housing development near Los Angeles.In the 1980s, Shaw formed a new Artie Shaw Orchestra, but he never played in it himself. He selected and helped in the remastering of a five-CD boxed set of his finest work, released in 2001. In the liner notes he disclosed what was probably the most important driving force behind his life: “The big problem for some people – and unfortunately I’m one of them – is that you eventually reach a point where you’re never satisfied with what you’re doing. … You finally get to where good enough ain’t good enough. It’s as if someone laid a curse on you. I was never satisfied.”In 2003, Shaw addressed fans at a ceremony at the Smithsonian, which had just accepted two of his clarinets into its collection.“People ask, ‘What’s the difference between Benny Goodman and me?’ Well, I’m alive,” Shaw cracked. As for the value of the instruments he was donating, Shaw said, “It’s not the clarinet. It’s me.”

Artie Shaw, 94, Giant of Jazz Who Quit Performing in 1954

More from the New York Sun

Pam Bondi Plows Past ‘Paperwork Mistake’ To Revive Criminal Prosecutions Against Letitia James and James Comey

How Margot Robbie Made Girlboss Cinema a Brand

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Cutting Funds to California for Not Disclosing Students’ Gender Transitions to Parents

‘Wuthering Heights’ Is a Mad, Bad, and Sexy Romp That Makes Brontë ‘Brat’

Pro-Hamas Activist Provokes Outrage — by Insisting Dogs Should Be Homeless

The Democrats Beyond the Water’s Edge

Student Sues University of Michigan, Claiming It Mistook Her Anxiety-Ridden Writing Style for AI

Bipartisan Group in Congress Warns of ‘Serious Safety Risk’ From Illegal Biolabs