Artie Shaw: Perfectionist at Work

When Artie Shaw put down his clarinet in the mid-’50s, saying he would play no more, most of his fans viewed the announcement with some skepticism. After all, the much admired clarinetist-bandleader had retired before--several times, actually. The first was as early as age 24, when he left the music business in a soon abandoned effort to become a novelist.

His 1954 departure, however, was the real deal. Unlike Michael Jordan, Shaw not only gave up his playing career while he was still at the height of his powers, he did so permanently. (He briefly led a reorganized Artie Shaw band in the ‘80s, but the clarinet solos were performed by Dick Johnson.)

“I’d already done everything I wanted to do with the clarinet,” Shaw told me a few years ago. “And I had other things I wanted to do”--like writing, which he did with considerable panache, producing well-crafted novels and short stories. And he was a prolific reader, feeding an omnivorous appetite for information, filling his home near Thousand Oaks with thousands of books.

Fortunately, the music from his two-plus decades of music remains--an impressive testimony to an artist whose work was as intelligently crafted as it was emotionally expressive. “Artie Shaw: Self Portrait” (* * * * RCA Victor/Bluebird) displays the length and breadth of his celebrated career in a superb five-CD boxed set of pieces selected by Shaw.

In the past, he has often repudiated the collections of his greatest hits that have been released at various times. They were, he believed, incomplete, inaccurate, lacking in perspective (as well as numerous other, similarly dismissive descriptions). This time out, however, he’s had complete control, and the results are impressive, indeed.

“I’ve chosen only those performances that come reasonably close to what I had in mind when I did them, which is also why this package includes examples from all my different bands,” Shaw says in the interview-essay that accompanies the album. “Let’s call it a summing-up, a retrospective of what I consider my best work regardless of label, an overview of my entire career as clarinetist-bandleader.”

As a result of that qualitative selection, there are opportunities to hear Shaw’s approach to classics such as “Begin the Beguine” and “Stardust” at different points in his career. There are other classics, as well--tunes such as “Frenesi,” as well-known to teenagers of the era as Beatles hits were to the emerging young boomers of the ‘60s. There are selections from several editions of his small-group Gramercy Five recordings (including “Summit Ridge Drive” and his inimitable “Concerto for Clarinet”). There are a few intriguing vocal outings (including an early rendering of “Gloomy Sunday”) as well as--and, in some respects, most illuminating of all--a few tracks from the distinctly bop-oriented band (his last large ensemble) he led in 1949.

More than many artists who worked during an era--the ‘30s and ‘40s--when the creative goals of performers and the listening desires of audiences were in remarkably close synchronization, Shaw insisted upon stretching the envelope. Adding string sections, encouraging vocal adventurousness from singers such as Billie Holiday and Mel Torme, he produced an impressively consistent collection of musically rewarding efforts.

Listen, for example, to such musically audacious efforts as “Suite #8” or “The Maid With the Flaccid Air,” or the polyharmonies of George Russell’s “Similau.” Experiencing the cutting-edge open-mindedness present in works such as these makes one wonder what Shaw might have accomplished had he possessed the patience (and the money) to maintain the sort of regular ensemble that Duke Ellington did.

Beyond all the other attributes of these recordings, soaring above everything--almost always the centerpiece--was Shaw’s clarinet. Fans of the swing era vigorously took sides, some supporting Shaw, others advocating Benny Goodman--and there’s plenty to be said for both. But in retrospect, Shaw’s playing has a far more timeless quality. Continually working to invest his sound with emotional warmth, he rendered his lines with a floating sense of swing that could have adapted as easily to the phrasing of bebop and post-bebop as it did to the swing rhythms of the period.

How good was he? Shaw’s playing on the early recordings is familiar--and much loved--by most jazz fans. But the full extent of his talent, and of what he elected to leave behind, is best revealed in some of the later efforts. His playing on “‘S Wonderful,” for example, with the 1949 band, makes clear how easily and creatively he could have functioned within the musical framework of the bop era. And the solo he delivers in an early ‘50s small-group version of “Don’t Take Your Love From Me” is a sheer classic, reminiscent of Picasso in the way it pares matters down to their essential emotional core.

Shaw adds, in his liner note comments: “The big problem for some people--and unfortunately I’m one of them--is that you eventually reach a point where you’re never satisfied with what you’re doing....You finally get to where good enough ain’t good enough. It’s as if someone laid a curse on you. I was never satisfied.”

It’s understandable that Shaw feels that way. But the other side of the coin is that as the result of his dissatisfaction--which is, after all, intrinsic to the creative process--he produced some of the most extraordinary American music of the 20th century. And it’s hard, for a listener and a fan, not to be hungry for more, not to wonder what might have been. *