The tortured life of Artie Shaw

We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. --T.S. Eliot

I was never able to dispel the original loneliness and lose myself in the crowds for whom I performed.--Artie Shaw in The Trouble with Cinderella

In the waning days of 2004 as the tsunami disaster in south Asia riveted the world's attention, one of the most fascinating cultural figures of the twentieth century slipped away, almost unnoticed. Artie Shaw died on Dec. 30 at 94-years-of-age. His story surely is one of the most extraordinary tales of a pop music icon whose very success almost drove him to suicide and certainly to periodic bouts of insanity. Yet despite Shaw's eight marriages ("extended affairs" he called them) and his bitter love affair with his musician's life, there is something admirable, one might even say endearing about the man many considered a tragic misanthrope and cynic.

At his peak in the late 1930s, Artie Shaw was the biggest star in the entertainment firmament, a bandleader with matinee-idol looks whom the public wanted to enthrone. The only problem was he hated virtually every minute of it. Hobbled by a tortured childhood which ill-equipped him for life on the public stage, this essentially private man consistently struggled with inner demons which incapacitated him at the peak of his popularity when he was only twenty-eight tears old. His inability to cope ultimately drove him from the music business for good at the age of 43 in 1954. He never picked up his clarinet again despite being acknowledged as one of the most supremely gifted and technically adept practitioners of the 20th century. Duke Ellington's master clarinetist Barney Bigard regarded Shaw as the greatest clarinetist ever. In 1983, Franklin Cohen principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Symphony, expressed disbelief when he listened to Shaw's Concerto for Clarinet which he was about to tackle. His conclusion? "Shaw is the greatest clarinetist I ever heard. Those incredible shadings are simply unbelievable. Most jazz aficionados ranked him higher than the "King of Swing," fellow clarinetist Benny Goodman.

Why was Shaw so alienated, incapable of handling stardom?

Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, an only child of Russian Jewish emigres, was born on May 23, 1910 in New York's lower East side. When he was seven the family moved to New Haven Connecticut. Thrown into a sea of Anglos, Shaw, an incredibly shy and quiet kid, was devastated and permanently

affected by the age-old anti-semitic virus. In his 1952 autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella, he described the pain and isolation as classmates roared with laughter at his strange-sounding name. He was told not to say the Our Father with his class mates who did not want "no goddam Christ-killers doing that around here." The savage treatment "left a deep and lasting scar ... I felt there must be something about me that was different, alien, strange and undesirable. I had no idea what "kike" or "sheeny" meant. I became somewhat introverted, withdrawn ... Inside I tried to conceal my feelings .... This one lesson shaped the course and direction of my entire life. I had learned what it meant to be a Jew."

Already abandoned by his father, Arshawsky realized one thing by age thirteen. His life was unbearable and somehow he had to get away. "There were four things I had fixed my sights on a) money b) success c) fame and d) that old bluebird happiness." But how was he to do this. At the Poli's Palace Theatre in New Haven he found his passport--the saxophone. Buying one on time, he dropped everything and practised seven hours a day. By age 15, he was on the road as a professional musician and Arthur Arshawsky, "ashamed of his name," became Art Shaw.

Bouncing from band to band, Shaw left each when he felt he could learn nothing more. In 1929, he was good enough to get a job with one of America's biggest dance bands, Irving Aaronson and His Commanders. Appalled when he was expected to also play the buffoon on stage, he emerged a year later a better player and the possessor of a new reading list courtesy of the erudite band arranger Chummy McGregor. As well, in the band's extended stay in Chicago, Shaw was introduced to some of the rising jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Bix Beiderbecke.

Driven to learn

By 1930 with the Depression in full swing, Shaw was good enough to find full time work in the CBS Orchestra in New York City. After a year of this repetitive grind he took his first "sabbatical." He purchased a small farm outside New York, taught himself French to read Proust and Flaubert and for a whole year read and tried to write. At year's end he wrote, "I was disgusted by my own abysmal ignorance. I knew nothing and needed more formal education."

Back in New York, he enrolled in a tutoring school and took his clarinet to after-hours spots in Harlem, in order to 'gig' with players like legendary pianist Willie "the Lion" Smith. It was here, Shaw maintained he picked up "a Negro feel for music." His big break came on May 24, 1936 when, barely known to a broader public, he was asked to play at a jazz concert at the Imperial Theatre. Playing between the better known (and much louder) bands of the era, Shaw staggered the assembled crowd by playing his own composition "Interlude in B Flat," a daring piece which included a classical string quartet with the clarinetist's own jazz instrumentation. He was immediately engaged to put a band together to capitalize on his new fame. The band flopped as the public was not ready to hear his adventurous offerings. Shaw's reply? "O.K., if that's what they want I'll give them the loudest goddam band in the world." This he did and took his young band on the road.