Artie Shaw, 94, the dynamic, cantankerous swing era icon who abruptly quit the music business in 1954, disappointed by the industry’s demand for dance music over the jazz innovation he championed, died Dec. 30 at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
A clarinetist and bandleader, Shaw’s music sold more than 100 million records with a stunning series of hit-making songs, including Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” His music so defined its period that Time magazine wrote that on the verge of World War II, the United States meant to the Germans “skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw.”
Still, he dismissed those popular recordings as pap, preferring to explore new sounds even if it alienated listeners and his music-company bosses.
Constantly driving for new possibilities, he was among the first white bandleaders to hire a black singer full-time, in his case Billie Holiday. He used stringed instruments to fuse classical and jazz music and delved into hard-driving bebop, “chamber jazz” groups with harpsichord and Afro-Cuban sounds. His unconventional theme song was the bluesy dirge “Nightmare.”
His penchant for musical surprise earned rapturous praise from reviewers rediscovering those works decades after he left the business. Many of those songs were on the 2001 release “Artie Shaw: Self Portrait,” which prompted Los Angeles Times jazz critic Don Heckman to write that Shaw “produced some of the most extraordinary American music of the 20th century.”
In his heyday, the darkly handsome clarinetist resembled a matinee idol and adding to his allure by marrying glamorous actresses Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, two of his eight wives. As early as 1938, he was earning $60,000 weekly from jukebox recordings and playing dances and concerts. He was a formidable rival of bandleaders Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and clarinetist Benny Goodman, his closest competitor.
On clarinet, Shaw had a fuller, more-dulcet tone than Goodman. Although Goodman was labeled the “King of Swing,” jazz enthusiasts still debate whether Shaw better deserved the sobriquet, and his fans compensated by dubbing him the “King of the Clarinet.”
To Shaw, there was no contest. Though he respected Goodman’s talent, he said he felt Goodman’s recordings were formulaic. “Benny Goodman played clarinet,” he said. “I played music.”
While many of his counterparts played long after the big-band era gave way to rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s, Shaw gave it up without much trouble and moved to Spain for five years. He credited that decision to a combination of exhaustion, boredom, Internal Revenue Service probes and a desire to spend his time writing, which he did for the rest of his life.
“I was a compulsive perfectionist, and in the world we live in, compulsive perfectionists finish last,” he once told a reporter about why he left music. “You have to be Lawrence Welk or, on another level, Irving Berlin, and write the same kind of music over and over again. I’m not able to do that. I can’t even make the same jokes twice in a row.”
Since devoting himself to writing, his output included an autobiography, “The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity” (1952), a scaldingly self-critical book that received positive notices, and two volumes of fiction, “I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!” (1965) and “The Best of Intentions and Other Stories” (1989). He also spent years on a multivolume autobiography.
His prose tapped into tales of his oft-chronicled private life. Besides Turner and Gardner, he also married actresses Doris Dowling and Evelyn Keyes as well as Elizabeth Kern, the daughter of composer Jerome Kern, and Kathleen Winsor, author of the novel “Forever Amber.” His first two marriages were to noncelebrities, Jane Carns and Margaret Allen.
He was married in most cases less than two years. He often disparaged his wives for being less than literate.
To England’s Daily Mail, he spoke of Gardner this way: “Why did I marry her? Did you ever look at Ava Gardner? She was beautiful, that’s the first thing I was attracted to. I didn’t know it was the wrong reason. I remember we were sitting around in my house talking about Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ with some writer friends when she disappeared.
“I went out looking for her and she said: ‘I got so sick of it, I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.’ I offered her the book to read but she didn’t want to. Ava wanted instant knowledge; for her it should have come in an envelope marked ‘add water.’”
His last marriage, to Keyes, lasted from 1957 to 1985.
The divorces usually centered on an aspect of Shaw’s gruff personality, on display to a Washington Post reporter in 1978 when he explained why he never saw his two sons, one by Kern, one by Dowling. “I didn’t get along with the mothers,” Shaw said, “so why should I get along with the kids?”
In the same interview, he said he never regretted the redirection from music. “I don’t care if I’m forgotten. I became a specialist in nonspecialization a long time ago. For instance, I’m an expert fly fisherman. And in 1962, I ranked fourth nationally in precision riflery.
“My music?” he added. “Well, no point in false modesty about that. I was the best. And when you look at those of us who were big then – Miller, Dorsey, Basie, Goodman – I think my life has turned out the best, too.”
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, born in New York on May 23, 1910, to an impoverished Jewish family, grew up in New Haven, Conn. According to his autobiography, he was a shy youth made more so by anti-Semitism he encountered in Connecticut. Feelings of insecurity were the “really basic reason” he changed his name, although for years he claimed brevity was the cause.
At 13, he bought a saxophone and left home three years later to play professionally. By the mid-1920s, he had switched to clarinet and was a member of territory bands in Cleveland.
In 1929 and 1930, he was with one of the top bands of the era, Irving Aaronson’s Commanders. While touring with that group, he was introduced to symphonic music of Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok and Ravel, all of which later influenced his use of classical motifs in swing.
In the early 1930s, he was in demand as a studio musician in New York. He also took literature classes at Columbia University and befriended iconic jazz trumpeter Leon “Bix” Beiderbeck, about whom Shaw tried to write a book four years after Beiderbeck died of alcohol-related symptoms in 1931.
In 1935, Shaw had a critical triumph with his composition “Interlude in B Flat” at a swing concert at New York’s Imperial Theatre. Contrasted with the blaring bands on stage, Shaw’s “hot” clarinet backed by a coolly sophisticated string quartet and a rhythm section was a sensation, and the act got Shaw a music contract.
But when the style flopped on tour, Shaw assembled a more-traditional swing band that benefited from the arrangements of Jerry Gray, including what became the definitive big-band interpretation of “Begin the Beguine.”
During World War II, Shaw led a few Navy bands, sometimes playing up to four concerts a day in battle zones and demanding top-level musicianship at each performance. His experiences resulted in a nervous breakdown.
By the mid-1950s, the rigors of touring were too stressful. He told a reporter that he could not go on that way, putting it succinctly: “I saw death approaching.”
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