ARTIE SHAW, LEGEND AND FREE SPIRIT

Wednesday night the Hollywood Bowl’s summer calendar included an appearance by the legendary Artie Shaw with the reconstituted Artie Shaw Orchestra, put together in Boston a couple of years ago by clarinetist Dick Johnson.

Coincidentally, Brigitte Berman’s documentary about Shaw’s eventful life, “Time Is All You’ve Got,” plays Saturday--only--at the Nuart in West Los Angeles.

The welcome but abbreviated showing of Berman’s film proves again that making documentaries is a way to get wealthy--providing you also pick nine horses of an afternoon or inherit millions from a forgotten uncle in Tasmania. Documentaries remain labors of love that enrich the world without being enriched by it.

George Stevens Jr.’s recent biography of his father broke the pattern by having a lengthy run at the Cineplex, and has been doing well in other cities. The elder Stevens’ wartime footage, never seen before, and the clips from “Shane” and his other films gave the documentary an uncommon richness. Still, it was encouraging to find there is a potential theatrical audience for the reality film.

The Shaw documentary, a hit at this year’s Filmex, has the double interest of the days and nights of the big bands and of the leader’s own vivid and idiosyncratic personality, and Berman’s film includes a collage of the glamorous stills, the crowd shots, the posters, placards, billboards and ads that in themselves trace the rising fame of the Shaw band.

What is evoked is the particular excitement of his orchestra, with its crisp and swinging precision and its memorable hits (“Frenesi” and “Begin the Beguine” were inescapable at a certain beat in American life), and of the whole band phenomenon: those late-night remote radio broadcasts, the one-night stands, the gold dinner jackets, the captive vocalists sitting like wedding-cake dolls at side stage, the histrionic drummers.

Shaw’s bass player, Sid Weiss, took a home movie camera along on some of the gigs and Berman borrowed his footage--glimpses during a plane ride when the band was really riding high, and of Shaw and some of the sidemen clowning on a park bench in the earlier days.

Shaw, who was 75 in May, continues to appear but not perform with the new orchestra, as at the Bowl last night. Mel Torme, who was on the bill, is an old friend who talks eloquently about Shaw in the documentary. Shaw’s dream is to update the music with new charts, but the crowds (heavily but not exclusively silver-haired) are obviously in search of “Back Bay Shuffle” and the other classic anthems they recognize after two beats.

The big band sounds can be heard historically as the inevitable evolution of popular music, dividing into two streams. One picked up on the jazz strain and orchestrated it, preserving the propulsion and the flavor and leaving plenty of room between ensembles for the improvising soloists.

The other stream, the sweet bands, essentially (or so I thought as a young purist) added a slight syncopated tinge to what had been the polite palm court tea-dance sound of earlier days. It might have swayed but it seldom swang.

Yet the timing of the big bands was just right. Those big sounds, ricky-tick sweet or exhilaratingly jazzy, were partly a relief from the gray realities of the Depression, but they also became a kind of upbeat underscoring that said the times would get better. After Pearl Harbor, the bands and their leaders, Shaw included, went literally to war in an unprecedented way: The marches had a jazz beat, and the ballads were a big morale boost.

What has made Artie Shaw unique, as “Time Is All You’ve Got” demonstrates well, is his short attention span, his restlessness and the range of his intellectual curiosity. He kept walking away from success, often at considerable losses to himself, because he was bored with the kind of repetition that fame imposes. (He has had similar problems with marriage, clearly, having had and been sundered from eight wives.)

He really has been obsessed by time (the title quote is his) and has found that there was too much writing to be done, too many books to be read and thought about. He even tried distributing films for a while, an impossible pastime, you’d have rightly said, for an impatient and idealistic fellow.

You watch “Time Is All You’ve Got” with a certain melancholy, aware of all the vacant places on the bandstand. Woody Herman and Shaw’s rival, Benny Goodman, seem virtually the last of the performing survivors of an era. Other ghost bands, Miller to Ellington, still tour and find grateful and appreciative audiences.

But Shaw himself, it is clear, revisits his past with mixed emotions, glad of the friendly acclaim but unwilling to dwell there for long. Time does march on, to changing beats, and if Shaw is less restless than he was, he is not less curious about the world before him.