ARTIE SHAW Vol.2
‘Concertos for Clarinet’ Original Recordings 1937-1940
Of all of the stars of the Big Band Era, none was
less suited for success than Artie Shaw. A rugged
individualist, idealist, and elitist, Shaw was
jettisoned into the mainstream with his 1938 hit
recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”,
which changed his life and eventually shortened
his career. The problem with Shaw was that he
had difficulty understanding that ‘music business’
contained two distinctively different words and he
spent much of his career trying to do one while
fighting off the demands of the other. The songs
in this compilation were recorded during the most
critical period in Shaw’s career, beginning in 1937
when his attempts at playing ‘symphonic swing’
(combining a jazz combo with a string section)
failed and he gave in to commercial pressures by
reluctantly forming what he called ‘the loudest
goddamn band in the world’.
By July 1937 the strings were gone and, despite
its name, Art Shaw and his New Music (held over
from his early sessions with the string ensemble)
was just another swing band. But from the outset,
the difference was the brilliance of Shaw’s clarinet
playing. After the conventional opening of Sweet
Adeline, Shaw’s horn emerges like a searchlight
out of the darkness. His interplay with vocalist
Tony Pastor shows Shaw’s facile ability to do just
about anything he wanted to on his clarinet.
Shaw’s jungle-esque composition Chant is
reminiscent of Jimmy Mundy’s arrangement for
Benny Goodman of “Sing, Sing, Sing”, highlighted
by the tom-toms of Cliff Leeman (although Shaw
had shown that he favoured the clarinet/tom-tom
combination before Goodman and Gene Krupa
made it a trademark at Goodman’s legendary
1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert).
The two-part song simply called The Blues is
in blues form as its title implies, but is really a
medium tempo boogie-woogie kicked off by John
Best’s growling trumpet intro. When Shaw comes
in two choruses later, it is with a vengeance:
virtuosic flurries of cascading notes that precedes
John Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ by two decades.
Over the years, countless comparisons have been
made between the two kings of clarinet swing:
Goodman and Shaw, but while Benny often
swung harder, Artie continually exhibited better
chops and did more imaginative things in his solos
than Benny did.
The underrated and inventive singer Leo
Watson solos on another Shaw original, Shoot
The Likker To Me, John Boy from September
1937, Shaw’s last recording made for Brunswick.
By his next session (his first for RCA Victor), Shaw
had dispensed with the name Art after a press
agent told him that ‘Art Shaw’ sounded like a
sneeze. From then on, it was Artie.
At the first Victor session, the old Rudolph
Friml operetta favourite Indian Love Call had the
misfortune of being paired with “Begin the
Beguine”, which quickly became one of the biggest
hits of the Swing Era. “Indian Love Call” proved
Shaw’s orchestra capable of swinging as hard as
that of Goodman or any other band at that time,
with Tony Pastor’s gutty vocal driving the swing
even harder.
Shaw’s first RCA session also saw the
introduction of Billie Holiday as his vocalist, a
brazen act for its time that raised eyebrows and
caused controversy wherever the band traveled.
Black performers had occasionally performed as
instrumentalists with white bands, but few had the
gumption to feature one out front as a vocalist.
But riding high on the success of “Begin the
Beguine”, Shaw now had the power to do
anything he wanted, and what he wanted was the
best singer in the business at the time. Holiday
rose to the occasion, her voice and style fully
developed by now after a stint with Count Basie in
1937. Although her time with Shaw was brief, her
vocal on Any Old Time is confident and selfassured;
her years with Shaw would lead to
greater stardom as a solo performer.
Non-Stop Flight is one of Artie Shaw’s best
original compositions and along with Softly, As In
A Morning Sunrise, shows his ability to effortlessly
play in the highest register of the clarinet. The
latter song appealed to Shaw because of its minor
key, a favorite vehicle for Shaw that stemmed from
his Jewish roots.
From 1936 to 1938, Shaw was without peer
as a musician in his own band. But toward the
end of 1938, he hired saxophonist Georgie Auld
and drummer Buddy Rich, both of whom were as
equally individualistic and irascible as their leader.
With their arrival (first Auld and then Rich),
Shaw’s rhythm became more insistent, the swing
more apparent.
Shaw’s main complaint about the Swing Era,
aside from calling jitterbugs ‘morons’, was that
bands relied too much on riff tunes and pat calland-
response arrangements. Though this is what
made for great dancing, Shaw bristled at being
called a ‘dance band leader’ and continued to
stretch the limits of what conventions were in
place during the Big Band Era. Rosalie was
another Cole Porter offering from a film of the
same name while Pastel Blue (co-written by Shaw
with the great trumpet virtuoso Charlie Shavers)
showed Shaw painting an Ellington-esque portrait
with his band; its ending culminated by Artie
climbing the scale to a stratospheric high ‘C’
(concert B-flat).
One of Shaw’s most frenetic performances
comes on Traffic Jam, which is kicked off by Shaw
glissing like an ambulance siren before shifting
into overdrive, propelled by Buddy Rich’s
supercharged drumming. Shouts from the
normally reserved band show what the
combination of Shaw’s leadership and Rich’s
driving percussion could do in creating one of the
truly exciting moments in the Swing Era.
In November 1939, Shaw, fed up with the
pressures of fame and the demands of his
audience to play his songs the same way every
time, abruptly abandoned his band and fled to
Mexico, leaving saxophonist Georgie Auld in
charge. By March 1940, a rejuvenated Shaw had
reassembled his band in Los Angeles, experimenting
once again with symphonic jazz. His group
doubled in size, with a full-blown string section
featured on a melody Shaw had brought back from
his self-induced exile in Mexico. Frenesi would
become Shaw’s second biggest hit and thrust him
reluctantly back to the top of the best seller’s lists.
An exotic arrangement of the controversial
Gloomy Sunday (made popular by Billie Holiday)
was the next number at the session. Although not
as passionate in her delivery as Holiday, Pauline
Byrne nevertheless did her best with the song,
which was adapted in 1936 from a Hungarian
melody with English words written by Tin Pan
Alley’s Sam M. Lewis. The song was banned from
many radio broadcasts in the U.S. after allegedly
causing suicides among radio listeners.
Shaw’s 1940 comeback also included an added
dimension to his orchestra, his own version of the
‘band-within-a-band’ trend that had started with
the small Benny Goodman combos in the mid-
30s. The Gramercy 5– (the name was inspired by
a New York telephone exchange) consisted of a
quintet of Goodman alumni who had been
performing at the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina
Island. Foremost among them were trumpeter
Billy Butterfield and keyboardist Johnny Guarnieri,
the latter playing harpsichord, an instrument that
evidenced Shaw’s talent for coming up with
different sounds. Summit Ridge Drive (named for
Shaw’s Beverly Hills street address) was a blues
highlighted by Butterfield’s muted trumpet solo
and a delicious Shaw clarinet chorus, one of his
most melodic. Another Gramercy 5– standout is
Dr Livingstone, I Presume, in which the group
swings into the jungle, only to emerge with Shaw
launching into a klezmer-like freilach to finish off
the number with a middle-Eastern flourish.
Shaw’s solo on his October 1940 recording of
Hoagy Carmichael’s Star Dust ranks with Louis
Armstrong’s “West End Blues”, Coleman
Hawkins’ “Body and Soul”, and Bix Beiderbecke’s
“Singin’ the Blues” as one of the most emulated
works in jazz history. It is perfect in its execution,
brilliant in its ingenuity, and so unbelievably
melodic that it almost betters its original tune. It
remains one of the most memorable sequences
played by any musician on any record at any time.
The nine-minute-plus length of the Concerto
for Clarinet had to be issued on both sides of a
12-inch 78, which gave Shaw the opportunity to
explore several themes in their entirety instead of
one in miniature. Shaw hated the three-minute
limits of 78 rpm records, which was why he
revelled in this stretched-out experiment. After an
introduction, Johnny Guarnieri beats out a
boogie-woogie, which serves as the first
‘movement’ of the work. In the second movement
(which is more like an interlude), Shaw switches to
a minor key before proceeding to another
favourite combination, the clarinet/tom-tom
chorus. The frenzied final movement features
Shaw soaring above the band before finishing the
concerto off with a cadenza that catapults him up
to another improbably high ‘C’.
Cary Ginell – a winner of the 2004 ASCAP/Deems
Taylor Award for music journalism