Shantae Todd
Intro to Jazz History
Mrs. Lester
10 February 2014
"King of the Clarinet" Artie Shaw was a bandleader, clarinetist, composer, and writer. He was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky on May 23, 1910, in New York, New York. Sometimes referred to as the King of the Clarinet, Artie Shaw was one of the leading jazz performers and bandleaders of the swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. Born on New York’s Lower East Side, he was the only child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria. The family eventually moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Shaw spent many of his formative years. A shy child, he was deeply hurt by the anti-Semitic taunts from his schoolmates. Shaw was further wounded when his father abandoned the family.
While he learned the ukulele early on, Shaw first started getting serious about playing music when he took up the saxophone. He later moved on to the clarinet. Around the age of 15, he quit school to learn to become a better musician. Shaw listened to such jazz greats as Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong in an effort to improve his own playing. Moving to Cleveland, he eventually found work with Austin Wylie, a well-known bandleader. In addition to his music, Shaw was an avid reader and maintained literary aspirations.
In 1927 Artie heard several "race" records, the kind then being made solely for distribution in black (or "colored," as they were then known) districts. After listening entranced to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five playing Savoy Blues, West End Blues, and other now-classic Louis Armstrong records from the late 1920's, Artie made a pilgrimage to Chicago's Savoy Ballroom to hear the great trumpet player in person. Back in Cleveland, Artie, now 17, won an essay-writing contest which took him out to Hollywood in 1928, where he ran into a couple of musicians he had known back in New Haven who were now working in Irving Aaronson's band. A year later, at the age of 19, Artie moved to Hollywood to join the Aaronson band.
When the Aaronson band came to New York in 1930, Artie decided to stay there, and within the year, at age 21, he became the top lead-alto sax and clarinet player in the New York radio and recording studios. After a couple of years of commercial work, he became disillusioned with the music business and bought some acreage with an old farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He moved out there to spend the next year chopping wood for a living and trying to train himself as a writer-of books rather than music-since there seemed to be no way at that time to make a decent living playing the kind of music that interested him.
Shaw took a break from music for a time, choosing to live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and focus on his writing. Before long, he was back in New York City’s thriving music scene. Shaw invited to participate in a 1935 swing concert at the Imperial Theatre. He put together a band, consisting of a string quartet and a rhythm section, and wrote a special composition, “Interlude in B Flat,” for the event. Little known at the time, Shaw was on the same bill as Tommy Dorsey and other popular swing acts. His band, however, gave one of the night’s most memorable performances, and the audience was just wowed by their only song.
This led to Shaw starting his own band. Around this time, he became Artie Shaw. He originally used Art Shaw as a stage name, but he was told that the name sounded like a sneeze. Reworking the music of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern among others, Shaw made these standards swing. He scored his first big success in 1938 with his version of Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.” Around this time, Shaw hired up-and-coming African American jazz singer Billie Holiday as the vocalist for his band. He was one of the first big band leaders to try to integrate his group, but Holiday eventually quit after encountering racial prejudice while on the road, especially in the South. She did, however, stick around long enough to record one of Shaw’s most famous songs, “Any Old Times,” with the band.
In 1951 Shaw again quit the music business, this time moving to Duchess County, New York, where he bought a 240 acre dairy farm and wrote his first book, a semi-autobiographical work entitled The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity, sections of which have appeared in many anthologies, and which is still in print.
Throughout the early fifties, Artie Shaw assembled several big bands and small combos-as well as his own symphony orchestra, (to play a one-week engagement at the opening of a large New York jazz club called Bop City). One such combo which was formed in late 1953 and recorded in 1954, a group known as the Gramercy 5 (a name he took from the New York telephone exchange of the time), maintain an amazingly high degree of popularity to this day despite the onslaught of Rock, MTV, and other such commercial phenomena.
In 1954 Artie Shaw made his last public appearance as an instrumentalist when he put together a new Gramercy 5 made up of such superb modern musicians as pianist Hank Jones, guitarist Tal Farlow, bassist Tommy Potter, et al. The most comprehensive sampling of that group (as well as a number of others, going all the way back to 1936 and on up through this final set of records) can be heard on a four record album, now a rare item, released in 1984 by Book of the Month Records, entitled: Artie Shaw: A Legacy, which has also received rave reviews. Some of this music was re-issued on two double CD's by Music Masters as Artie Shaw: The Last Recordings, Rare and Unreleased, and Artie Shaw: More Last Recordings, The Final Sessions.
Artie Shaw packed his clarinet away once and for all in 1954. In 1960 he settled in a small town named Lakeville, in northwestern Connecticut, where he continued his writing, and in 1964 finished a second book (consisting of three novellas) entitled I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead! In 1973, he moved back to California again, finally ending up in 1978 in a small town called Newbury Park. In 2004, Shaw received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy. He died on December 30, 2004 at his Newbury Park home from complications related to diabetes. Shaw once said that his epitaph in Who’s Who should read, “He did the best he could with the material at hand.” He later revised that statement, considering “Go away” more fitting for himself—a cankerous, but unarguably brilliant musician and composer.

Work Citied
"Artie Shaw". AllMusic. Retrieved 2012-03-31
Shaw, Artie (1952). The Trouble with Cinderella. Farrar, Straus and Young. ISBN 1-56474-020-X
Jenkins, Todd. "The Last Post: Artie Shaw". 2004. http://www.jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost.php3?edit=1104549577. Accessed 2009-06-30.