H.L. Mencken once suggested that in a well-run universe, everybody would have two lives: "one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it."
This is more or less the way the clarinetist Artie Shaw, who turned 90 on Tuesday, has contrived to arrange things.In the first half of his long, spectacularly eventful life, he played jazz with Bix Beiderbecke and Mozart with Leonard Bernstein; married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner; made a movie with Fred Astaire; and was interrogated about his left-wing ties by Joe McCarthy. Then, at the age of 44, he stopped playing music and started writing fiction, eventually producing a monstrously long autobiographical novel called "The Education of Albie Snow."
Though only a single chapter has seen print, Shaw's magnum opus really does exist. (Robert Altman says he wants to turn it into a movie, with Johnny Depp in the title role.) Still, it is unlikely that his second career as a writer will overshadow his previous career as a musician. In part because he became a pop-culture icon at the age of 28, he has never been properly acknowledged as a giant of jazz -- except by his fellow musicians. Yet his recordings leave no possible doubt of his immense stature, as both virtuoso soloist and nonpareil bandleader.
Alas, much of Shaw's achievement must now be taken on faith, for most of his records are out of print, and no label, incredibly, has gone to the trouble of commemorating his 90th birthday. BMG, which owns the 78s he made between 1938 and 1945, has no plans to release a retrospective boxed set, and the only tribute thus far has been the publication of Vladimir Simosko's "Artie Shaw: A Musical Biography and Discography" (Scarecrow Press), a dry but thorough survey of his musical career. Shaw can hardly be surprised by this lack of interest in a legendary veteran of the swing era, since he has spent much of his life decrying the commercialism of the pop-music industry -- even though he also spent the better part of three decades playing "commercial" music, and profiting handsomely by it.
Shaw's first big band was an ensemble of unorthodox instrumentation (it included a string quartet) whose failure inspired him to change musical directions and organize what he called "the loudest . . . band in the world."
He then struck it rich in 1938 with a crisp, incisive recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" that made him a superstar virtually overnight.
Shaw himself wrote many of the band's lucid, transparent arrangements. Their simplicity was intended to appeal to a mass audience, but it had the paradoxical effect of providing an ideal background for Shaw's richly elaborate improvisations. His intense, saxophone-like tone was sharply focused but never shrill, even when he was cavorting in the instrument's highest register, and his blues solos were tinged with an exotic modal color suggestive of synagogue chant.
A self-made intellectual manque, he loathed the adoring teen-age fans who had made him rich, telling one reporter they were "a bunch of morons." In 1939, he walked off a New York bandstand in the middle of a set and never came back; within a matter of months, though, he had moved to Hollywood and started another band, this one equipped with nine string players and a pianist, Johnny Guarnieri, who doubled on harpsichord with Shaw's in-house jazz combo, the Gramercy Five. The new group became as popular as its predecessor, turning out an elegantly poised version of "Star Dust" that remains to this day one of the best-remembered recordings of Hoagy Carmichael's most famous song.
In 1941, the "Star Dust" band gave way to a 32-piece orchestra with 15 strings, billed as "Artie Shaw and His Symphonic Swing." Shaw, who had been studying with the classical composer David Diamond, now sought to meld jazz and classical music in a manner reminiscent of the Paul Whiteman band of the late '20s, using the bluesy trumpeter-vocalist Oran (Hot Lips) Page in much the same way Whiteman had featured Beiderbecke, an early Shaw idol. The erratic but brilliant drummer Dave Tough drove the potentially unwieldy group with consummate subtlety, and Paul Jordan contributed original compositions like "Suite No. 8," in which the string section was not tacked on as an afterthought but integrated into the ensemble with deceptive ease.
In 1942, Shaw broke up his Symphonic Swing, enlisted in the Navy and toured the Pacific with a band that performed under fire at Guadalcanal. Combat fatigue forced him stateside in 1944, and he started a stringless civilian band featuring the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge and an unusually diverse library of arrangements that ranged from the Basie-style charts of Buster Harding to such wryly witty Eddie Sauter compositions as "The Maid with the Flaccid Air." Though it was known as an "arranger's band," Shaw was, as always, firmly in control, and its performances reflected his lifelong liking for versatility -- and accessibility. Woody Herman's contemporaneous, bop-flavored First Herd was far looser, which may explain why highbrow critics have always preferred it to Shaw's postwar band, despite the latter's undeniably progressive tilt.
Like the First Herd, the Shaw band had players interested in bebop, including the guitarist Barney Kessel and the pianist Dodo Marmarosa, and the ever-curious clarinetist began to explore the new style alongside them in an updated Gramercy Five. After a hiatus during which he played only classical music, he returned yet again to the bandstand in 1949, this time with a full-fledged bop group; by then, he had assimilated the musical dialect of bebop, and his solos were every bit as contemporary-sounding as those of his younger side men, among them the tenor saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.
The big bands were dying off fast, though, and Shaw's bop band broke up after just five months. Thereafter, he shuttled in and out of music, taking a year off to write "The Trouble With Cinderella" (1952), a self-conscious but compelling memoir in which he cataloged the destructive effects of what he called "$ucce$$."
Two years later, he put together one last Gramercy Five that teamed him with the guitarist Tal Farlow and the pianist Hank Jones. Stimulated by their playing, he rose to new heights of musical sophistication, and it seemed he was finally ready to give up on $ucce$$ and settle for being a distinctive jazz soloist. Instead, he quit music in the fall of 1954, and never played clarinet again. Giving up the clarinet, he has said, was like cutting off "a gangrenous right arm . . . to save your life."
At 90, Shaw is by all accounts the same garrulous, curious, contentious man who put down his instrument 46 years ago, longing to free himself from the seductive lures of superstardom but never quite capable of turning his back on fame. He has a Web site, artieshaw.com, on which is posted a third-person autobiographical statement so self-aggrandizing as to be endearing: "Shaw is regarded by many as the finest and most innovative of all jazz clarinetists, a leader of some of the greatest musical aggregations ever assembled, and one of the most adventurous and accomplished figures in American music." You'd have to laugh at such braggadocio, except for one thing -- it's all true.