Jay Maynes/Juan Oskar
Member
"I would say if a piece of popular music lasts fifty years, it's got a good shot at what we laughingly call immortality." Artie Shaw
Hey amigos...and interesting article. Later........Jay
The Atlantic Monthly | March 2005
>
> Pursuits & Retreats
> Post Mortem
> Ex-Husband of Love Goddesses
> Artie Shaw (1910-2004)
>
> by Mark Steyn
>
> Artie Shaw was the last of the big bandleaders of the Swing Era. We
> think of them as musicians now, and a few of them‹very few, according
> to Shaw‹were great artists. But for anyone under a certain age it's
> hard to comprehend the scale of their celebrity‹instrumentalists in
> tuxes fronting orchestras, and yet they were as big as the biggest
> movie stars. Imagine Britney if she could play a clarinet. >
Brilliantly.
>
> On the eve of World War II, Time reported that to Germans America
> meant "skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw." And Shaw lived more
> like a movie star than Gable did. In the ranks of legendary
> heterosexuals he's rivaled only by Sinatra when it comes to the
number
> of A-list Hollywood babes he got to see in non-Hays Code situations.
> He was engaged to Betty Grable when he ran off with Lana Turner. He
> married Ava Gardner and had an affair with Rita Hayworth. Among his
> eight wives were Evelyn Keyes, who played Mrs. Jolson in The Jolson
> Story, and Kathleen Winsor, the best-selling naughty novelist
(Forever
> Amber), and Betty Kern, daughter of Jerome.
>
> Most fans of P. G. Wodehouse regard his literary landscape as a
> timeless playground sealed off from reality. "Mr Wodehouse's world
can
> never stale," wrote Evelyn Waugh. "He has made a world for us to live
> in and delight in." But Artie Shaw loomed so large at the height of
> his fame that he has the distinction of being one of the few real,
> live, flesh-and-blood contemporaries to invade the Wodehouse canon.
In
> The Mating Season a Hollywood starlet recounts to Bertie Wooster her
> encounter with an elderly English spinster who turned out to be
> something of a movie fan.
>
> "She knows exactly how many times everybody's been divorced and why,
> how much every picture for the last twenty years has grossed, and how
> many Warner brothers there are. She even knows how many times Artie
> Shaw has been married, which I'll bet he couldn't tell you himself.
> She asked if I had ever married Artie Shaw, and when I said no,
seemed
> to think I was pulling her leg or must have done it without noticing.
> I tried to explain that when a girl goes to Hollywood she doesn't
have
> to marry Artie Shaw, it's optional, but I don't think I convinced >
her."
>
> When he stopped marrying, he started lecturing on it at colleges:
> "Consecutive Monogamy & Ideal Divorce," by an "ex-husband of love
> goddesses." "These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially
> if you're married to one," he explained. "They all think they want a
> traditional marriage, but they aren't made for that sort of thing.
> Somebody's got to get the coffee in the morning, and an Ava Gardner
is
> not going to do that. So you get up and get it, and then you find
> you're doing everything. And why? Because she's the love goddess, and
> that's all she has to be." He had children with a couple of 'em, but
> didn't care much for them either. "I didn't get along with the
> mothers," he said. "So why should I get along with the kids?"
>
> Still, celebrity broads were a rare compensation in a world where
> everything else was a pain in the neck. He was a swing bandleader,
but
> he hated the word "swing," and he was a jazz musician, but he hated
> the word "jazz." He resented singers, and despised dancers, and
> loathed fans; the audience was a bunch of "morons," and the musicians
> were "prima donnas," and the ones who weren't were hacks who did that
> cheesy synchronized swaying with the saxes and the trombones that the
> morons were dumb enough to go crazy for. Glenn Miller? "It would have
> been better if he'd lived and his music had died." Well, okay, lots
of
> jazz guys have a problem with Miller; how about Benny Goodman?
> "Musically, he had a limited vocabulary," sniffed Shaw.
>
> Gene Lees has described the big bands of the late thirties and early
> forties as the sound "that will not go away." For Shaw‹restless and
> obsessive‹that was the problem. So he went away instead. He started
> quitting the music business "permanently" a few months after his
first
> hit, and kept on quitting it. But every time he came back, the fans
> were still there, demanding "Star Dust" and "Frenesi." He found out
it
> was one thing to "Begin the Beguine," quite another to try and stop
> it. He told me, "Every time someone comes up to me and says, 'Oh, Mr.
> Shaw, I love "Begin the Beguine,"' I want to vomit."
>
> "Sorry," I said, "but I do love 'Begin the Beguine.'"
>
> "Well, then, you make me want to vomit," he replied. "I did
'Beguine.'
> It's over. If you want it, get the record. People say, 'Why did you
> give up music?' I say, 'Have you got every record I ever made?' They
> say, 'Well, no.' Well, get 'em all and then come back and complain."
>
> He made "Beguine" a hit, all 108 bars of it‹the longest standard in
> the standard repertoire, thanks to Shaw. Cole Porter wrote it as a
> piece of faux exotica‹"Down by the shore an orchestra's playing / And
> even the palms seem to be swaying"‹but Shaw threw out the lyric and
> made the tune jump. It may have made him vomit, but people love that
> record because, two thirds of a century on, the double thwack of
those
> opening bars is as wild and exciting and unmistakable as anything in
> American music. It's nothing to do with Porter, just a little figure
> Shaw and his arranger Jerry Gray cooked up, and then his clarinet
> comes in riding the rhythm section. You don't have to do it like
that,
> you can play it a thousand different ways, but Shaw's recording
opened
> the way for all the others. Cole Porter understood. On being
> introduced to the bandleader, he said, "Happy to meet my >
collaborator."
>
> hree of the best bandleaders of the period were clarinetists‹Shaw,
> Benny Goodman, Woody Herman‹and it seems to me that's the core sound
> of the era, so seductive, so insinuating. Artie, naturally, had no
> time for that kind of talk. According to him, the executives liked
the
> clarinet because, in those days of primitive recording, its higher
> pitch made it cut through the band more clearly than the sax.
> Whatever. Digitally remastered and cleaned up, the arrangements still
> sound good. On his smash 1940 recording of "Star Dust," Shaw's solo
> manages, in just sixteen marvelous bars, to sum up the broad legato
> sweep of Hoagy Carmichael's tune and yet get giddily away from it in
> those lovely triplets. There's so much going on in those early
> hits‹joyous, explosive vamps that for many listeners became part of
> the song. You can find later recordings of "'Swonderful" and "My Blue
> Heaven" that aren't performances of the numbers so much as of the
Shaw
> band's arrangements of them.
>
> As much as he reviled the music biz, he had little time for the
> pomposity of post‹big-band jazz. "It doesn't have to sound like
broken
> crockery to be jazz," he sighed. "It's solemn rather than serious. I
> told Clint Eastwood that Dirty Harry was the closest to art he ever
> got. That picture's America as it really is. Whereas a picture like
> Bird, which was meant to be a serious thing, was solemn and boring.
If
> you're going to pick an artist who's at odds with his time, you don't
> pick Charlie Parker. He was worshipped in his lifetime. He just
> screwed up."
>
> Shaw went into music just to make enough money to finish his
> education. He sold 100 million records and found out it wasn't about
> the money. For most of its practitioners, the point of jazz is that
> it's not fixed, it's never the same, it's improvisational. For Shaw,
> that's what made music frustrating. "The trouble with composing is
> that when it's done, it doesn't exist. It's just notes on a piece of
> paper. Until it's performed. And each performer will stick his own
> thumbprint on it and change it. Whereas in a book there it is, you
> can't change it. If you read Thomas Mann, you're reading Thomas Mann.
> Nobody improvises around his sentences. The two most honest and pure
> media are painting and literature. Van Gogh's Starry Night remains
the
> same wherever you hang it. You can achieve your perfection. In music,
> you can only approximate it."
>
> So he gave up the clarinet, and became a novelist, and a dairy
farmer,
> and a film producer, and the fourth-ranked precision rifleman in
> America. A decade back he made his only visit to Britain, for a
> one-night stand conducting Prokofiev, Mozart, and some of his old
hits
> at the Royal Festival Hall. He'd been a hero to a colleague of mine
> for decades, and was supposed to be interviewed by him for the BBC.
> But my friend fell ill, and I got the call to come in at the last
> minute. Listening from his sickbed, my pal scribbled me a note saying
> he'd been "horrified" by Shaw, but I loved that interview. Cole
Porter
> said of the Duchess of Windsor's conversational style that "she
always
> returned the ball." Shaw couldn't wait that long. He leaned over your
> side of the net and whacked it down your throat while you were still
> serving. I mentioned his version of "These Foolish Things" because it
> was co-written by a BBC producer, Eric Maschwitz. "So what?" snapped
> Shaw. "The song doesn't mean anything. What I did had nothing to do
> with the tune. The last eleven, twelve bars I did that cadenza‹that's
> as close to perfection as I'll ever get." It was one of his last
> records. In 1954 he put his clarinet away, never got it out again,
and
> never wanted to. "I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more
would
> have been less."
>
> As for Artie's fellow bandleaders, the sound may not have "gone
away,"
> but a lot of the business did, and Dorsey and Goodman found
themselves
> like most celebrities, clinging to a moment as it recedes into the
> past. When Shaw decided to pack it in, Duke Ellington told him, "Man,
> you got more guts than any of us."
>
> "I can say truthfully what very few people can say‹that I did
> something better than anyone else in the world." And he did: he was
> the best clarinetist, the one with the fullest tone and the slyest
> shadings. And then he stopped, and did other things, and outlived
> every other bandleader. "My life turned out the best, too."
>
> To his "dimwit" wives, he was a deranged obsessive. To his estranged
> sons, he was a miserable, lonely man. But he was chasing different
> priorities. "The Mozart Clarinet Concerto, we know that's a good
piece
> of work. Here it is a couple hundred years later. Here's some of my
> work fifty years later. I would say if a piece of popular music lasts
> fifty years, it's got a good shot at what we laughingly call
> immortality. We're aiming to transcend this short lifetime. You hope
> to put a footprint where it will last a little while."
>
> He certainly left his mark on Evelyn Keyes. If he went into a
bathroom
> and saw the toilet roll hung up to unwind from the back rather than
> the front, it drove him nuts. Years after their divorce she said,
> "Every time I change a toilet roll, I think of Artie Shaw."
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, the Chicago
> Sun-Times, and other publications.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Copyright © 2005 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
> The Atlantic Monthly; March 2005; Ex-Husband of Love Goddesses;
Volume
> 295, No. 2; 138-139
Hey amigos...and interesting article. Later........Jay
The Atlantic Monthly | March 2005
>
> Pursuits & Retreats
> Post Mortem
> Ex-Husband of Love Goddesses
> Artie Shaw (1910-2004)
>
> by Mark Steyn
>
> Artie Shaw was the last of the big bandleaders of the Swing Era. We
> think of them as musicians now, and a few of them‹very few, according
> to Shaw‹were great artists. But for anyone under a certain age it's
> hard to comprehend the scale of their celebrity‹instrumentalists in
> tuxes fronting orchestras, and yet they were as big as the biggest
> movie stars. Imagine Britney if she could play a clarinet. >
Brilliantly.
>
> On the eve of World War II, Time reported that to Germans America
> meant "skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw." And Shaw lived more
> like a movie star than Gable did. In the ranks of legendary
> heterosexuals he's rivaled only by Sinatra when it comes to the
number
> of A-list Hollywood babes he got to see in non-Hays Code situations.
> He was engaged to Betty Grable when he ran off with Lana Turner. He
> married Ava Gardner and had an affair with Rita Hayworth. Among his
> eight wives were Evelyn Keyes, who played Mrs. Jolson in The Jolson
> Story, and Kathleen Winsor, the best-selling naughty novelist
(Forever
> Amber), and Betty Kern, daughter of Jerome.
>
> Most fans of P. G. Wodehouse regard his literary landscape as a
> timeless playground sealed off from reality. "Mr Wodehouse's world
can
> never stale," wrote Evelyn Waugh. "He has made a world for us to live
> in and delight in." But Artie Shaw loomed so large at the height of
> his fame that he has the distinction of being one of the few real,
> live, flesh-and-blood contemporaries to invade the Wodehouse canon.
In
> The Mating Season a Hollywood starlet recounts to Bertie Wooster her
> encounter with an elderly English spinster who turned out to be
> something of a movie fan.
>
> "She knows exactly how many times everybody's been divorced and why,
> how much every picture for the last twenty years has grossed, and how
> many Warner brothers there are. She even knows how many times Artie
> Shaw has been married, which I'll bet he couldn't tell you himself.
> She asked if I had ever married Artie Shaw, and when I said no,
seemed
> to think I was pulling her leg or must have done it without noticing.
> I tried to explain that when a girl goes to Hollywood she doesn't
have
> to marry Artie Shaw, it's optional, but I don't think I convinced >
her."
>
> When he stopped marrying, he started lecturing on it at colleges:
> "Consecutive Monogamy & Ideal Divorce," by an "ex-husband of love
> goddesses." "These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially
> if you're married to one," he explained. "They all think they want a
> traditional marriage, but they aren't made for that sort of thing.
> Somebody's got to get the coffee in the morning, and an Ava Gardner
is
> not going to do that. So you get up and get it, and then you find
> you're doing everything. And why? Because she's the love goddess, and
> that's all she has to be." He had children with a couple of 'em, but
> didn't care much for them either. "I didn't get along with the
> mothers," he said. "So why should I get along with the kids?"
>
> Still, celebrity broads were a rare compensation in a world where
> everything else was a pain in the neck. He was a swing bandleader,
but
> he hated the word "swing," and he was a jazz musician, but he hated
> the word "jazz." He resented singers, and despised dancers, and
> loathed fans; the audience was a bunch of "morons," and the musicians
> were "prima donnas," and the ones who weren't were hacks who did that
> cheesy synchronized swaying with the saxes and the trombones that the
> morons were dumb enough to go crazy for. Glenn Miller? "It would have
> been better if he'd lived and his music had died." Well, okay, lots
of
> jazz guys have a problem with Miller; how about Benny Goodman?
> "Musically, he had a limited vocabulary," sniffed Shaw.
>
> Gene Lees has described the big bands of the late thirties and early
> forties as the sound "that will not go away." For Shaw‹restless and
> obsessive‹that was the problem. So he went away instead. He started
> quitting the music business "permanently" a few months after his
first
> hit, and kept on quitting it. But every time he came back, the fans
> were still there, demanding "Star Dust" and "Frenesi." He found out
it
> was one thing to "Begin the Beguine," quite another to try and stop
> it. He told me, "Every time someone comes up to me and says, 'Oh, Mr.
> Shaw, I love "Begin the Beguine,"' I want to vomit."
>
> "Sorry," I said, "but I do love 'Begin the Beguine.'"
>
> "Well, then, you make me want to vomit," he replied. "I did
'Beguine.'
> It's over. If you want it, get the record. People say, 'Why did you
> give up music?' I say, 'Have you got every record I ever made?' They
> say, 'Well, no.' Well, get 'em all and then come back and complain."
>
> He made "Beguine" a hit, all 108 bars of it‹the longest standard in
> the standard repertoire, thanks to Shaw. Cole Porter wrote it as a
> piece of faux exotica‹"Down by the shore an orchestra's playing / And
> even the palms seem to be swaying"‹but Shaw threw out the lyric and
> made the tune jump. It may have made him vomit, but people love that
> record because, two thirds of a century on, the double thwack of
those
> opening bars is as wild and exciting and unmistakable as anything in
> American music. It's nothing to do with Porter, just a little figure
> Shaw and his arranger Jerry Gray cooked up, and then his clarinet
> comes in riding the rhythm section. You don't have to do it like
that,
> you can play it a thousand different ways, but Shaw's recording
opened
> the way for all the others. Cole Porter understood. On being
> introduced to the bandleader, he said, "Happy to meet my >
collaborator."
>
> hree of the best bandleaders of the period were clarinetists‹Shaw,
> Benny Goodman, Woody Herman‹and it seems to me that's the core sound
> of the era, so seductive, so insinuating. Artie, naturally, had no
> time for that kind of talk. According to him, the executives liked
the
> clarinet because, in those days of primitive recording, its higher
> pitch made it cut through the band more clearly than the sax.
> Whatever. Digitally remastered and cleaned up, the arrangements still
> sound good. On his smash 1940 recording of "Star Dust," Shaw's solo
> manages, in just sixteen marvelous bars, to sum up the broad legato
> sweep of Hoagy Carmichael's tune and yet get giddily away from it in
> those lovely triplets. There's so much going on in those early
> hits‹joyous, explosive vamps that for many listeners became part of
> the song. You can find later recordings of "'Swonderful" and "My Blue
> Heaven" that aren't performances of the numbers so much as of the
Shaw
> band's arrangements of them.
>
> As much as he reviled the music biz, he had little time for the
> pomposity of post‹big-band jazz. "It doesn't have to sound like
broken
> crockery to be jazz," he sighed. "It's solemn rather than serious. I
> told Clint Eastwood that Dirty Harry was the closest to art he ever
> got. That picture's America as it really is. Whereas a picture like
> Bird, which was meant to be a serious thing, was solemn and boring.
If
> you're going to pick an artist who's at odds with his time, you don't
> pick Charlie Parker. He was worshipped in his lifetime. He just
> screwed up."
>
> Shaw went into music just to make enough money to finish his
> education. He sold 100 million records and found out it wasn't about
> the money. For most of its practitioners, the point of jazz is that
> it's not fixed, it's never the same, it's improvisational. For Shaw,
> that's what made music frustrating. "The trouble with composing is
> that when it's done, it doesn't exist. It's just notes on a piece of
> paper. Until it's performed. And each performer will stick his own
> thumbprint on it and change it. Whereas in a book there it is, you
> can't change it. If you read Thomas Mann, you're reading Thomas Mann.
> Nobody improvises around his sentences. The two most honest and pure
> media are painting and literature. Van Gogh's Starry Night remains
the
> same wherever you hang it. You can achieve your perfection. In music,
> you can only approximate it."
>
> So he gave up the clarinet, and became a novelist, and a dairy
farmer,
> and a film producer, and the fourth-ranked precision rifleman in
> America. A decade back he made his only visit to Britain, for a
> one-night stand conducting Prokofiev, Mozart, and some of his old
hits
> at the Royal Festival Hall. He'd been a hero to a colleague of mine
> for decades, and was supposed to be interviewed by him for the BBC.
> But my friend fell ill, and I got the call to come in at the last
> minute. Listening from his sickbed, my pal scribbled me a note saying
> he'd been "horrified" by Shaw, but I loved that interview. Cole
Porter
> said of the Duchess of Windsor's conversational style that "she
always
> returned the ball." Shaw couldn't wait that long. He leaned over your
> side of the net and whacked it down your throat while you were still
> serving. I mentioned his version of "These Foolish Things" because it
> was co-written by a BBC producer, Eric Maschwitz. "So what?" snapped
> Shaw. "The song doesn't mean anything. What I did had nothing to do
> with the tune. The last eleven, twelve bars I did that cadenza‹that's
> as close to perfection as I'll ever get." It was one of his last
> records. In 1954 he put his clarinet away, never got it out again,
and
> never wanted to. "I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more
would
> have been less."
>
> As for Artie's fellow bandleaders, the sound may not have "gone
away,"
> but a lot of the business did, and Dorsey and Goodman found
themselves
> like most celebrities, clinging to a moment as it recedes into the
> past. When Shaw decided to pack it in, Duke Ellington told him, "Man,
> you got more guts than any of us."
>
> "I can say truthfully what very few people can say‹that I did
> something better than anyone else in the world." And he did: he was
> the best clarinetist, the one with the fullest tone and the slyest
> shadings. And then he stopped, and did other things, and outlived
> every other bandleader. "My life turned out the best, too."
>
> To his "dimwit" wives, he was a deranged obsessive. To his estranged
> sons, he was a miserable, lonely man. But he was chasing different
> priorities. "The Mozart Clarinet Concerto, we know that's a good
piece
> of work. Here it is a couple hundred years later. Here's some of my
> work fifty years later. I would say if a piece of popular music lasts
> fifty years, it's got a good shot at what we laughingly call
> immortality. We're aiming to transcend this short lifetime. You hope
> to put a footprint where it will last a little while."
>
> He certainly left his mark on Evelyn Keyes. If he went into a
bathroom
> and saw the toilet roll hung up to unwind from the back rather than
> the front, it drove him nuts. Years after their divorce she said,
> "Every time I change a toilet roll, I think of Artie Shaw."
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, the Chicago
> Sun-Times, and other publications.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Copyright © 2005 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
> The Atlantic Monthly; March 2005; Ex-Husband of Love Goddesses;
Volume
> 295, No. 2; 138-139
These TJB albums are fresh and interesting even after more than 40 years, and my Juan Oskar CDz lasted at least a good 30 minutes. 
Later amigos...................Jay
