© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
This is part two of Gene Lees’ three part feature entitled The Anchorite which he published in his Jazzletter, June-August 2004.
By way of reminder, an anchorite is a religious recluse… a deep believer...one who holds dear to their moral and ethical principles.
Gene’s description of what Jazz was during its earliest manifestations at the beginning of the 20th century through The Swing Era is a classic account of how the music evolved during its first, three decades of existence.
His discussions with Artie about why he left the music business, sociocultural trends 20th century American culture and the trivialization of American popular music contain much food for thought, to say the very least.
The Anchorite: Part Two
“He recorded Begin the Beguine on July 24, 1938. It immediately became the number one "platter" in the United States, held that position for six weeks, and went right on selling. Shaw's income went to $30,000 per week. One reason he could earn such money was the sheer number of pavilions and ballrooms in America. He told me that at the peak of the big band era, a band could play a month of one-nighters in Pennsylvania alone.
Begin the Beguine was an unconventional long-form tune and its success amazed Shaw. In a 2002 interview with the Ventura Star (Shaw lived, as I do, in Ventura County) Shaw said that [Cole] Porter "shook hands with me and said he was happy to meet his collaborator." Shaw's response to this is revealing. For a man who affected to be uninterested in money, it is crassly materialistic, and certainly ungracious: "So I said, 'Does that go for the royalties, Mr. Porter?'" One wonders what opinion of him Porter carried thereafter. And, incidentally, Porter got only royalties from the song's publisher; Artie got all the royalties from record sales.
In addition to the RCA reissues of Shaw's 78 rpm recordings, there were five albums on the Hindsight label containing as many as nineteen tracks each, drawn from radio broadcasts. These are casual performances and some of the tracks stretch out to nearly six minutes.
I listened to test pressings of those recordings with Artie in the big, vaulted, second-floor room of his home, whose walls were covered in books. He said, "When you went into the recording studio in those days, there was no tape and you knew it was going to have to be perfect. You wouldn't take chances doing things that might go wrong. But on radio broadcasts, you could do anything. It didn't matter. You never thought of anybody recording it and forty years later releasing it! The recordings were done under better conditions. You had better balance. But you didn't get anything like the spontaneity you have here."
The Hindsight records reveal what the band played like in the late 1930s but cannot reveal what the band actually sounded like. Recording technique was too primitive. The bass lines are unclear and the guitar chords all but inaudible.
What you get, really, is the upper part of the harmony, and you cannot follow the lines in the voicings. When a local Ventura bandleader borrowed some of the charts to perform them in a concert, I attended the rehearsals with Artie.
He said, "Well, what do you think?"
I said. "Now I could hear the bottom of the orchestra." I confessed that I was not all that excited about 1930s bands that contained only four saxes, two altos and two tenors. My taste for big bands grew warmer when baritone saxophone was added, as in the Goodman band with Mel Powell that recorded for Columbia. Furthermore, you couldn't hear the bass player at all on a lot of early big-band recordings, and without the bottom of the harmony, one doesn't fully feel or understand what is going on. (There is a 1992 Bluebird CD called Artie Shaw: Personal Best, in which Orrin Keepnews remastered the music so that you can hear the bass.)
In the first flush of success, Artie made about $55,000 in one week, equivalent to $550,000 today. The superlatives were flying, including the statement that he was the best clarinetist in the world. As he was leaving a theater in Chicago, aware that he was becoming rich at an early age, a thought crossed his mind. "So what if I am the best clarinetist in the world? Even if that's true, who's the second best? Some guy in some symphony orchestra? And is there all that much difference between us? And how much did he earn this week? A hundred and fifty bucks? There's something cockeyed here, something unfair."
John Lewis used to make the point — adamantly — that jazz evolved in symbiosis with the American popular song, although it did introduce a jaunty American rhythmic quality which evolved rapidly in the next ten years with George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and, later, Cole Porter, Arthur Schwartz, and more, the best songs written for Broadway musicals. But even non-Broadway American song grew in beauty, as witness Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust. Jazz, John Lewis said, drew on this superior material for its repertoire, and the public in turn was able to follow the improvisations against the background of songs it knew. Jazz grew up on the American song; jazz in turn influenced it, as especially witness George Gershwin and Harold Arlen.
Popular legend has it that the craze for dancing began with publication of Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1911. It's not true. The music publisher Edward B. Marks said, "The public of the nineties had asked for tunes to sing. The public of the turn of the [twentieth] century had been content to whistle. But the public from 1910 demanded tunes to dance to."
Puritan constraint kept dancing polite and stuffy in the nineteenth century. But with ragtime, that changed. Black dancers supplanted the cakewalk, two-step, waltzes, schottisches, and quadrilles with the Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug, Snake, Crab Step, and Possum Trot. Soon dancing was in vogue wherever it could be done, and social reformers, "religious leaders" and others condemned these dances as "sensuous", which they were, the beginning of the end of the Edwardian or Victorian era. There were even attempts to pass legislation outlawing ragtime.
Then along came a wholesome young couple, Vernon and Irene Castle, to tone down and tame some of these dances, and as the complainers grumbled their way into silence, the Castles became the major stars of their time, imitated in everything from dance steps named for them to their clothes. Irene shed her corsets for looser clothes, and women everywhere followed her example. When because she was in hospital for appendicitis, she cut her hair short. Millions of women followed her example. Dancing became a national and even international craze. The Castles, as big in France and England as they were here, became wealthy.
With the advent in 1914 of World War I, Vernon, who was English, went home to join the Royal Flying Corps. He flew more than 150 missions over the Western Front. Ironically, when he returned to the United States to train American pilots, he was killed when a student made a landing mistake. Irene's life and career were destroyed. But the Castles' influence went on.
Before the war, their chief collaborator had been James Reese Europe, the black bandleader who in 1910 founded the Clef Club orchestra made up entirely of black musicians. They provided much of the dance music for New York society. He was such a perfect dance conductor that Irene said Jim Europe's "was the only music that completely made me forget the effort of the dance." He became their music director in 1913, and soon was composing as well as conducting for them. She found him almost uncanny in choosing the right tempos for their dances. But with the coming of war, Jim Europe was asked by the military to form what would be the finest band in the U.S. Army. When the U.S. entered the war, he went to France with "The Harlem Hellfighters Band," as it was called, with a complement of forty-four men. They ended up attached to the French army.
With the war over, he returned to New York to resume his soaring civilian career, making a few records. On May 7, 1919, he was stabbed by his drummer, Herbert Wright, and died. He was twenty-eight.
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz states that "it cannot be emphasized too much that jazz music was seen initially by the mass American audience as dance music." It was the arranger Ferde Grofe’ who (for the Art Hickman band in San Francisco) first wrote for "sections" of saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and rhythm. This permitted changes of coloration between one chorus of a song and the next. Paul Whiteman hired him and encouraged him to elaborate on what he had done for Hickman. This kind of scored dance music became known as "symphonic jazz", a term that later listeners found confusing, since it had little if anything to do with the symphony orchestra. Other bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Jean Goldkette followed his example. Whiteman has been patronized by "jazz writers" and historians for not playing jazz, which was never his intent in the first place, or for using the sobriquet "King of Jazz", coined by some press agent, and even on playing on the obvious pun of his surname. But his bands at one period had a strong jazz feeling, and had something in common with that of Jimmie Lunceford, namely very cohesive section work, tight and disciplined, which may be due to the fact that they had the same teacher in Denver, Colorado, Wilberforce Whiteman, Paul's father.
The "big bands" continued to evolve during the 1920s, settling eventually on an instrumentation of four saxophones (two altos, two tenors), trumpets, trombone, and rhythm, which instrumentation expanded in the early 1940s. A number of the early bands were part of the booking stable of Jean Goldkette, including his own band, McKinney's Cotton Pickers with Don Redman as its arranger and music director, and a band called the Orange Blossoms, which evolved into the Glen Gray Orchestra with arrangements by Gene Gifford.
The beginning of the swing era is usually dated to the sudden success of Benny Goodman in 1936, but musicians who lived through that era often give the credit to the Glen Gray band. Artie called it "the first swing band." It was the first white band to pursue a jazz policy and put its jazz instrumentals on record. Gil Evans was a fan of that band.
The fans, perhaps led by the "jazz writers" of Down Beat, liked to divide the bands into the swing and the sweet bands, showing a hipper-than-thou disdain for the latter. And there were both the "name bands" and regional bands, including the Jeter-Pillars band of St. Louis which had a high reputation in the profession though it was never nationally known. Many of the regional bands fell into the "sweet band" category, among them Mal Hallett, Russ Morgan, Dick Jergens, Ted Fio Rito, Gus Arnheim, Will Osborne. A few of them rose to national prominence, including Freddie Martin, Blue Banon, Shep Fields, Sammy Kaye, and Kay Kyser. (Guy Lombardo presented a special case. I was surprised to learn that Louis Armstrong admired that band, and so did Gerry Mulligan. Gerry gave me an insight: he said that the Guy Lombardo band was a musical museum piece, a 1920s tuba-bass dance band that had survived unchanged. Asked to do a radio interview with Lombardo I went to hear the band with an open mind, met Guy, and was impressed by both. What the band did, it did well.
The division between swing and sweet bands was never neat. All the bands, including those of Ellington and Count Basie, played ballads for dancers, no matter that the more rambunctious sidemen would have been delighted to play hot solos all night. And some of the sweet bands could play creditable jazz, including that of Kay Kyser. I liked that band — George Duning was one of its arrangers.
There were hundreds of places for dancers to hear the bands. They included hotel ballrooms, county and state fairs, amusement parks, and even roller- and ice-skating arenas. To those who listened to the late-night "remote" broadcasts from these places, their names became almost as famous as those of the bandleaders — Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook, for example. |n the mid- to late-1960s, bands were presented in movie theater between showings of the feature film. The bands were heard constantly on network radio.
With the rise of bands playing "hot" numbers, the vigorous dances of the pre-Jim Europe period came back to American popular music. The dances — and dancers — of Harlem were deplored by some of the white society as lascivious, but they were more than that. They were balletic and acrobatic to the point of being dangerous, and at the highest level, incredibly skilled. A few evenings after seeing a documentary on the dancers of Harlem, I was with Gene Kelly. I was naive enough to say, "You know, Gene, some of those people could really dance!" And Gene chuckled and said, "Nooooo shit."
These dancers were the start of the jitterbugs, and even some of the white kids got very good at this kind of dancing. In the ballrooms and arenas where the bands appeared, those who just wanted to listen crowded close to the bandstand, taking in the solos, while those who wanted only to dance remained well back of them; and a few went back and forth.
The dancers, in their millions, supported a large industry.
What is not understood by younger people, and I'm afraid at this point I must include many of those under sixty, is how big these bandleaders were, and, like rock stars of a later generation, they were brought into the movies. Paul Whiteman's was one of the first to be seen in a film. Much later, Harry James appeared in Swing Time in the Rockies (1942), Tommy Dorsey in Ship Ahoy (also 1942), which featured Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford and a spectacular drum solo by Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman in a number of forgettable films and small features. Glenn Miller made two features. Sun Valley Serenade was released in 1941. Somewhat better was Orchestra Wives in 1942, which had a backstage story to it. In both films, the Miller band was better heard than on records, because of the superior sound in films.
Shaw and his band were in a forgotten film called Dancing Coed, then in the 1941 Second Chorus, one of the sillier of its ilk. In most of these films, the bandleaders played themselves as guests in the picture. And thus too Artie. During the shooting of Second Chorus an exchange occurred between Artie and either the director or assistant director. I must interject for those under fifty or sixty that in those days to explain that to do a hot dance, one of those jitterbug performances, was called "cutting a rug." Artie had some lines to read in the picture. He was to say to the audience, "Okay, kids, now we're going to cut a rug."
Artie refused to do it, telling the director:
"Look, I'm playing a character named Artie Shaw, right? Well, I consider myself something of an authority on this guy, and I'm telling you, he wouldn't say it!"
The line was omitted.
The film starred Fred Astaire as a dancing musician. How many musicians, other than Dizzy Gillespie, have you ever encountered who could really dance? One imagines a studio meeting with assorted executives, one of whom, striding the room, says, "I've got this great idea! We'll put Fred Astaire together with Artie Shaw, who's one of the hottest things in the business. We'll have Fred play a dancing trumpet player! It's great, just great."
No it wasn't. Artie, by the way, said it was hard to play for Fred Astaire. He said that Astaire (who actually played pretty good piano and creditable drums) had lousy time. Astaire's sidekick among the musicians was Burgess Meredith. The love interest was Paulette Goddard. In real life, she married Burgess Meredith. But Artie picked her off. Or so he said. She was another of his unkept secrets, along with Betty Grable and, he intimated, every other beauty in the movie industry, aside from the ones he married.
Shaw got involved with Grable when, in 1939, she was appearing on Broadway in
Cole Porter's musical Dubarry Was a Lady. Artie went to Hollywood to make his movie, constantly writing to her. Sammy Cahn recounted:
"Every night I'd go to the 46th Street Theater to talk with Betty and listen to her read these letters from Artie, the most marvelous letters in the world. He'd met that one girl in the world, darling Betty, for whom he'd give up everything else. And so on ....
"One night I was in Betty's dressing room and she was reading another of those beautiful letters from Artie, so beautiful you couldn't stand it. When I walked out onto the street the newsboys were hawking the headline: Read all about it! Artie Shaw marries Lana Turner! Lana was in that same picture with Artie, Dancing Coed. She was a year out of high school. He married her on their first date.
"After that I couldn't go back to the 46th Street Theater to see Betty Grable."
No one suffered his disdain as much as Lana Turner. Everything I've ever heard about her from friends who knew her evokes an impression of a girl who was almost pathetically sweet, urgently anxious to please. If you happen to watch one of her movies some time, notice the voice. There is quality of heartbreak in it, no matter what the role. I can only imagine what she felt when she read his derogations of her in newspapers. His wives were all alive to read his descriptions of them, which ran to one theme: their intellectual inferiority to him.
Publisher Lyle Stuart once tried to persuade Shaw to write a book about Lana Turner. Shaw said, "Oh, I couldn't talk about Lana." Next Day Stuart showed up at his New York apartment with a tape recorder. Stuart said, "He talked about Lana for three hours. When I left, I said, 'See?' He said, 'Okay. But I could never talk about Ava.' The next day I came back and he talked about Ava for three hours."
Sammy Cahn, in his chapter on Artie, wrote: "I'm pretty much convinced that eventually what you are is what you come to look like. A miser gets to look like a miser, a cunning man like a cunning man, a saint like a saint. Artie Shaw was once one of the handsomest men who ever lived. Now he looks like what he is." At that point, Shaw was bearded and mustached.
Artie read that passage, because he mentioned it to me. "And what the hell does Sammy think he looks like?" Like Igor Stravinsky, actually. I told Sammy that at lunch one day and he said, laughing, "I know!"
Everyone got the treatment. Asked late in his life: "What are your thoughts on Benny Goodman?" Artie said:
"Benny was a superb technician, but he had a limited vocabulary. He never understood that there were more than a major, a minor and a diminished. He just couldn't get with altered chords. We worked together for years in radio, and Benny was pretty dumb. His brother Freddy managed one of my bands, and I once asked him what Benny was like as a kid. He said, 'Stupid.' I said, 'How do you account for his success?' He said, 'The clarinet was the only thing he knew.' And it's true. He was sort of an idiot savant — not quite an idiot, but on his way. He didn't quite make it to idiocy."
I hate to say it, but that seems to be just about everyone's assessment of Goodman.
Lyle Stuart was not the only victim of Shaw's prolixity. In a JazzTimes column for the April 2005 issue, the writer and music historian Nat Hentoff, who said it was Shaw's recording of Nightmare that made him a jazz lover, continued:
"Years later, when I was New York editor of Down Beat, Artie Shaw would call me from time to time to discuss not only my limitless deficiencies as a jazz critic but also all manner of things, from politics and literature to other things that came within his wide-ranging interests. As soon as he was on the line, I knew that for the next hour or so my role was to listen. It was hard to get a word or two in."
Artie would orate for hours to anyone on any subject that crossed his mind, whether he knew anything about it or not. He did not know as much about classical music as he pretended or perhaps believed he did. Once when we had just emerged from a Santa Barbara department store, I turned on the ignition and the car's radio, which I keep tuned to the classical station, came on. We heard some music that neither of us recognized. I said, "Wait a minute, Artie, I think I know what it is. I think it's Stravinsky. Most of us are familiar only with the Firebird Suite, but that's distilled from the full ballet, which you rarely hear." I could hear Stravinsky's harmonic fingerprints all over the piece, and his orchestration, and even concealed allusions to the Firebird's principal themes. "I think this is the full ballet score," I said.
He scoffed. "Do you know how well I know Stravinsky? And I certainly know the Firebird." He was adamantine in his certainty that I was wrong.
Later on in the music the Berceuse theme emerged, and we were hearing indeed the full ballet score. It wasn't so much that he didn't initially recognize the music; I didn't either. It was his obstinacy in error that stays in my memory. And I saw other instances of his faking knowledge.
A day after Shaw died, one of the newspapers carried a headline on its coverage of the obituary: Swing-era great grew tired of music business. I think he enjoyed the attention he got from disdaining fame even more than he did the fame itself— and he did enjoy it, for all his denials. For his whole life, Artie Shaw guarded and treasured the prominence he thought he deserved even while affecting to deplore
it. It was in November, 1939, while Begin the Beguine was still a best-seller, that he made the first of his serial exits from the music business. A few cynics said the real reason for the move was that Glenn Miller had surpassed Artie's record sales.
Though he referred to Miller as a friend, he said of him, "He had what you call a Republican band, kind of strait-laced, middle-of-the-road. Miller was that kind of guy, he was a businessman. He was sort of a Lawrence Welk of jazz and that's one of the reasons he was so big, people could identify with what he did. But the biggest problem [was that] his band never made a mistake. And if you never make a mistake, you're not trying, you're not playing at the edge of your ability. You're playing safely within limits . . . and it sounds after a while extremely boring."
It was at that time that he organized his first Grammercy Five, which included Johnny Guarnieri not on piano but on harpsichord — a reflection, I always thought, of his aspirations to classical respectability — and Billy Butterfield on trumpet. It was a beautiful, hip, fresh group with which he recorded his composition Summit Ridge Drive, named for the street on which he lived in Los Angeles.
Shaw's theme song — every band had a theme song — seems in view of the century we have just been through and the one on which we are now embarked, quite appropriate. A composition of his own, and he was a very good composer when he bothered to do it, Nightmare was a stark piece consisting of a four-note chromatic ostinato over a pedal point and gloomy tom-tom figure, joined by a falling major third in which the clarinet plays lead to trumpets in straight mutes. It screams a kind of shrill terror, a Dostoevskian vision of the world, a clairvoyant look into imminent horrors. "Guernica" Artie said of it, and it did indeed have something of the Picasso mural of the German bombing of that Spanish town.
Nightmare, writer and cornetist Richard Sudhalter wrote in a liner note, "is a keening, almost cantorial melody in A minor, as different musically from the theme songs of his band-leading colleagues as Shaw was different from them personally and temperamentally."
Certainly it was no promise of romance, no Moonlight Serenade or Getting Sentimental Over You. "And no Let's Dance"<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-s