Artie Shaw

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Artie Shaw, around 1947.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

Artie Shaw (* 23. May 1910 in New York City , New York; † thirtieth December 2004 in Thousand Oaks , California; actually Arthur Jacob Arshawsky ) was an American jazz - clarinetist , arranger , composer , bandleader and author.

Life

Growing up in New Haven , Connecticut , he originally started his career as a saxophonist in the local high school band and began his professional career in the early 1930s, with Johnny Cavallaro, Roger Wolfe Kahn and 1927-1929 with Austin Wylie in Cleveland , among others from 1929 to 1931 with Irving Aaronson . After working as a freelance musician with Red Nichols , Red Norvo , Vincent Lopez , Teddy Wilson and others for a few years , he temporarily retired from the music scene in 1934/35. Together with a string quartet , he appeared in the New York Imperial Theater in the summer of 1935, which attracted a great deal of attention due to the unusual use of string instruments in swing and enabled him to found a dance orchestra with brass, strings, a rhythm section and just one saxophonist ( Tony Pastor ). This first formation Shaws with Peg LaCentra as band vocalist was short lived.

In 1936 he made recordings with Billie Holiday ("Billie's Blues"), Frankie Trumbauer and Bunny Berigan ; At the end of 1936 he founded a new big band that was to be one of the most successful orchestras of the swing era. This consisted of five brass players (including Buddy Morrow and Lee Castle ), four saxophonists (such as Georgie Auld ) and four musicians in the rhythm section, including Buddy Rich . Recordings were made for RCA Victor and also for its sub-label Bluebird Records . At the end of the year he had the first of a total of 54 hits in his career with the song There's Frost on the Moon . Noteworthy were the strings Shaw used for his first bluebird session. His biggest hit was finally Begin the Beguine (1938), which made him known nationwide; The band singer was Helen Forrest in 1939 .

In December 1939 he retired to Mexico for a few months, and then returned to the musical stage with an extended ensemble; In 1940 he had another hit with Frenesi . In addition to the big band, which experienced several new editions in the 1940s, he worked with the smaller formation Gramercy Five , which included Billy Butterfield , Roy Eldridge , Johnny Guarnieri on the celesta and Nick Fatool , among others . The arrangements for the big bands Shaws were written by Jerry Gray , Lennie Hayton , Fred Norman , Bill Challis , Ray Conniff , Margie Gibson , Paul Jordan and Shaw himself. In the 1940s, his orchestra included famous musicians such as Vernon Brown , Red Allen and JC Higginbotham , Benny Carter or Dave Tough .

During the Second World War he led a big band of the Kriegsmarine , with which he toured the Pacific area in 1943 and 1944 for the purpose of troop support. In 1944 he put together a new big band including the Gramercy Five , this time with Roy Eldridge , Dodo Marmarosa and Barney Kessel as the most important soloists. During this time, recordings with Mel Tormé and his Mel-Tones ( They Can't Convince Me ) were made. With strings and as a soloist in a classical context, he performed in New York's Carnegie Hall in 1949 . At the end of this year he also tried his hand at the cool jazz context and played in a session with Al Cohn , Zoot Sims , Jimmy Raney and Frank Socolow . In 1950 he accompanied Mary Ann McCall , Connee Boswell and Dick Haymes with his small ensemble . After he dissolved his big band in 1950 and made his last recordings with the Gramercy Five (with Tal Farlow , Joe Roland and Hank Jones among others ) in 1954 , he retired as an active musician and gave up playing the clarinet entirely.

In the later years he lived in Newbury Park, California, worked as a writer and devoted himself to his second career as a film producer or president of a distribution company. His autobiography The Trouble with Cinderella and several volumes of short stories ( Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead ) are among his publications. In 1983 he again organized a big band, whose leader and leading clarinetist was Dick Johnson; Shaw himself rarely performed with this group. Shaw was married eight times, including Ava Gardner (married 1945), Evelyn Keyes (married 1957) and Lana Turner .

Artie Shaw died in 2004 at the age of 94. He was buried in Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village , California .

Work and appreciation

Artie Shaw, along with Benny Goodman and Woody Herman, was one of the outstanding clarinetists of the swing era. Some of his records from the 1940s, such as his version of Stardust , are among the greatest recordings in jazz. He also deserves the honor of discovering Buddy Rich and hiring him for his band. Furthermore, he often integrated African American musicians into his respective bands, such as Billie Holiday, Lena Horne , Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge.

Stylistically, Shaw differs from his “rival” Goodman in the different treatment of the clarinet in that “they had developed distinctly different areas of expression: Goodman extroverted, full of tension, above all brilliant; Shaw, on the other hand, lyrical, full of warmth and with a characteristic, inimitably full tone, sometimes overcast, sometimes razor-sharp, not accidentally admired by Barney Bigard , who called Shaw his absolute favorite clarinetist. "

In contrast to Goodman, who saw his orchestra "as part of his solo performance," Shaw "has always viewed the big band from a symphonic point of view;" "Shaws (band played) with a penchant for refinement," which is what critics believe " Impressionist " trademark brought in. “The use of expanded harmony , new types of instrument combinations and the occasional inclusion of strings or the celesta as the clarinet's interplay partner in the Gramercy Five (...), plus the chamber music keynote and Shaw's proverbial variability in the choice of tempo are unmistakable elements of his Language."

Shaw was considered the intellectual among the big band leaders throughout his life and also tried his hand at writing. In 2004 he received the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for his life's work and was awarded the 2005 NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship .

Works

Shaw composed, among other things, a jazz clarinet concerto for Bb clarinet. This was featured in the movie Swing Romance , with Artie Shaw as the soloist and conductor.

Discographic notes

Artie Shaw - Begin The Beguine

Artie Shaw's work from 1936 to 1954 is published in chronological order by the Classics label. Shaw himself obtained a five-CD edition of his recordings from 1938 to 1954 on Bluebird ( Self Portrait ). Further CD releases include recordings of his concerts in Los Angeles in 1940/41 ( Hollywood Palladium 1941 and In Hollywood 1940–1941 ) on Hep Records . In the Beginning appeared on Hep with recordings of his first string quartet and the ensemble players Lee Castle , Tony Pastor and Joe Lipman . The RCA album The Complete Gramercy Five Sessions contains the records of the small Shaw ensemble from 1940 to 1945, including his hit Summit Ridge Drive / Special Delivery Stomp with Billy Butterfield, Roy Eldridge and Johnny Guarnieri. The RCA Bluebird album Blues in the Night contains further recordings from 1941-1945, among others with Eldridge and Hot Lips Page as singers of Blues in the Night , St. James Infirmary and Take Your Shoes Off, Baby . Shaw's last recordings with Hank Jones and Tal Farlow include the album The Last Recordings (Musicmasters).

collection

Fonts

  • Artie Shaw: The Trouble with Cinderella (An Outline of Identity) . Farrar, Straus and Young, New York 1952, Da Capo 1978

literature

  • John White: Artie Shaw- his life and music . Continuum Books, 2004
  • Ian Carr , Digby Fairweather , Brian Priestley : Rough Guide Jazz. The ultimate guide to jazz. 1800 bands and artists from the beginning until today. 2nd, expanded and updated edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-01892-X .
  1. ↑ Quoted from Fairweather, p. 577.
  2. ^ Notes after D. Fairweather, p. 578.
  1. ↑ Quoted from Kunzler, p. 1053.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Kunzler, p. 1053.
  • Tom Nolan: Three chords for beauty's sake: the life of Artie Shaw . WW Norton, New York [u. a.] 2010, ISBN 978-0-393-06201-4

Web links

Commons : Artie Shaw  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary. In: The Independent
  2. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Artie Shaw
personal data
SURNAME Shaw, Artie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arshawsky, Arthur Jacob (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician and band leader
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2004
Place of death Thousand Oaks , California