The Cinderella So Few Got to Hear: Late Artie Shaw is the Best Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw will always be a bit of a puzzle to his fans—"morons, " as he once characterized some of us. The best band he ever fronted, and said so more than once, was his 1949-50 "bop" band. Benny Goodman had a similar outfit around the same time, which, like Shaw's, featured excellent young musicians who were comfortable with the bop idiom. But as for the clarinet playing, Goodman's remained more swing than bop, while Shaw's was arguably the other way around. Temperament, perhaps? Goodman had one wife, Alice Hammond Duckworth, with whom he was together for over thirty years. Shaw, by contrast, had eight wives, and one of them, to Lana Turner, might as well have lasted thirty minutes (actually it was seven months). Buddy DeFranco, who admired both Shaw and Goodman, figured Goodman was always basically a diatonic player, which limited him in approaching bop. Even Shaw, said de Franco, was a little intimidated by the new idiom, not that Shaw would have ever admitted to being intimidated by anything. Far from it, unless it was some aspect of the music business, or what he termed "The Artie Shaw Business," the public persona that required him to utter inane dialogue in his movie appearances ("Hey Swing Cats I'll dig you and plant you" is one imperishable line). So maybe Goodman was a hedgehog, but then Shaw could have only been a fox.

In 1939, Shaw went on record in the Saturday Evening Post as being on a pace to earn a quarter of a million dollars. According to the authoritative website MeasuringWorth.com, the value of that sum as household income in 2023 was nearly 13 million dollars. That may not be much by Taylor Swift's standards, but in 1939, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 17 percent of the United States labor force was out of work. So think about it. Artie was earning a quarter of a million. In round numbers, about 7.5 million of his fellow Americans earned, well, nothing. You can complain about inequality in contemporary America all you want, but (1 Shaw=7.5 million morons) does lead even an admirer to think, "Dude, what was your problem? Perfectionism apart?"

Ok, so Shaw did not do so well every year, and probably nowhere near that in 1949-50. When Shaw died in 2006, he left an estate that court records suggest was near 3 million dollars. He was not exactly destitute after basically leaving the labor force some 50 years earlier. Even if the 1949-50 band was not commercially successful—and it probably was not—could he have afforded to carry it for a bit for the sake of making music, good music? Probably. But he did not want to. And it is safe to say, nobody could make Shaw do something he did not want to do for long. And, too bad, because listening to the music he was doing then, at the very least, leaves a listener with a sense of a lost opportunity. Shaw saved his best for last.

There are any number of recordings in which someone can sample where Shaw was heading, although not all of them are readily available. His series of "Last Recordings" is a bit like Count Basie's "one more time." Last, but not last. Again. And Again. There are several of them on CD, collector's items, obviously, but not unaffordable. The Last Recordings of Artie Shaw: Rare and Unreleased (Jazz Heritage, 1991). There is a Nimbus release of this item too. Shaw's playing is, well, little short of sensational. Hank Jones (piano), Irv Kluger (drums), Tommy Potter (bass) Tal Farlow and Joe Puma (guitar) and Joe Roland (vibes) show very clearly that Shaw may have ultimately stopped playing, but that he never stopped listening. Shaw's solos are uniformly excellent, and some, as on "Love of My Life" are hardly inferior to anything he recorded in the late 1930s, and harmonically far more challenging.

Another characteristic of later Shaw: he really stretches out, so normally there is more than one chorus to hear. The second and even third choruses give a listener a chance to appreciate how relaxed and creative Shaw was, almost offhandedly. There are occasional new technical wrinkles as well. All of which packs a substantial emotional punch. If Shaw was capable of playing more expressively in his earlier work, he certainly never really had the space, or the sidemen—like Hank Jones—to do it. Another very good set of later recordings is The Complete Grammercy Five Session (RCA, 1989), the last eight tracks. This was not the harpsichord version of the group from the early 1940s, but from 1944 and 1945. And here, the booklet by John P. Callanan is very helpful in sorting personnel, dates, and the sort of discography that Shaw lovers would value.

If you really must have a big band, The Artistry of Artie Shaw and His Bop Band 1949 (Fresh Sound, 2005) puts Shaw squarely in the midst of players like Don Fagerquist, Sonny Russo, Al Cohn andZoot Sims. Does it matter that Harry James once called lead trumpet Don Paladino, who was struck down by a brain tumor at a young age, the best he ever heard? And arrangers like Tadd Dameron, Johnny Mandel, George Russell and Ray Conniff give a listener all the modern atmosphere desirable. Some of the same ground is covered in The Complete Thesaurus Transcriptions 1949 (HEP Records, 2010).

So here is the takeaway. If you think you know Artie Shaw from the days of the pre-World War II bands, think again. Arguably, some of Shaw's best playing may have been some that his "Greatest Generation" fans really never heard. Ironic no? And somehow, very Shavian. As usual, the joke was on the public, who made Shaw, and which he seemingly detested.

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