It seemed an era had ended: Swingthat lovely kissing cousin of America's musical genius, jazzwas really gone. The grand, rambunctious beauty had increasingly seemed passé and now she was. Everybody fashionable said so.
The year everybody said that was 1937.
In January 1938 Benny Goodman gave the first swing concert ever held in august Carnegie Hall, where you felt the hovering ghosts of Chaliapin and Tchaikovsky. At one point, Gene Krupa, who had been insistently thwacking his drums on a thunderous number called Sing, Sing, Sing, erupted in pure, demonic, measured dictatorship, cornering the very air. At other moments, Jess Stacy went through his piano keyboard like a benign Attila, making a joy of rampage. Throughout, Goodman, the leader, tilted his head back and gave the hallowed hall something new to remember: the sound of a clarinet set free. And when they were done, the swing era, far from dead, had been reborn.
He had begun it, with Fletcher Henderson's arrangements, at the Palo-mar Ballroom in Hollywood in 1935, just when he figured he was through. The key moment came when Bunny Berigan rose and blew his trumpet as though sounding a last divine call. Benny said the audience's roar of approvalnot Berigan's noteswas "one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard." Most said it wouldn't last. But after Carnegie Hall, swing dominated pop music until the end of World War II.
And then it didn't. In the '50s, Goodman would stand in a Manhattan club, announce his great Air Mail Special, hear silence before the applause, turn, smile and say, "That's all right. We almost didn't remember it ourselves."
Other styles, other voices intervened; Benny stayed. In 1964 his quartet was briefly reunited after a 26-year layoff. It sounded ill at ease until, midway through China Boy, Krupa and Lionel Hampton, on the vibes, started laughing together musically. Their old leader doubled over in delight, aimed his horn at the sky, and it was old times again. In 1958 he killed them at the Brussels World's Fair, in 1962 in Leningrad. In 1982 he got the Kennedy Center Honors award from President Reagan. Early in 1986 he made a recording for Music masters, which will be released soon; this month he was working on a tour that was booked through November. Everybody agreed, and they were right for once, that he still had the purityit was like a bird's or maybe the sound of a streamthat had awakened them 51 years earlier.
He made both fans and enemies, often of the same musicians. He was demanding, perfectionist, often rude and jealous of his slot: The King of Swing knew his title well. The turnover in his bands was heavy. Jess Stacy once said, "He's so damned wrapped up in that clarinet. All the time I was with Goodman, he was never satisfied." Last week Artie Shaw, the only man whose clarinet was as good and may have been better, said, "Benny was so immersed in the clarinet there was very little left over." A week earlier a TV interviewer asked why he was still playing the instrument. "That's all I have," Benny Goodman said, seemingly sad. Even if that were so, he died on June 13, 1986 a rich man.
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Big Band Era Giant Artie Shaw Dies at 94
By Stephen M. Silverman
Originally posted Thursday December 30, 2004 06:00 PM EST
Bandleader Artie Shaw Photo by: APBandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, as famed for his music as he was for his intellect and his many marriages, died Thursday. He was 94.
Shaw's manager Will Curtis tells Reuters that Shaw had been in declining health since Thanksgiving.
Except for a brief appearance in the Ken Burns Jazz series for PBS, Shaw had been something of a recluse in the past few years. Yet during the swing era he was a giant, thanks to his version of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine." The success of the song pitted him against Benny Goodman for the title of the period's greatest clarinetist, though Shaw was never shy about voicing his opinion that Goodman was his intellectual inferior.
A tireless perfectionist, Shaw put down his clarinet in the early '50s, saying he'd gone as far as he could with the instrument and complaining that audiences only wanted to hear "Begin the Beguine."
In a 1985 interview with Reuters, Shaw said he gave up playing when he decided he was aiming for a perfection that could kill him.
"I am compulsive. I sought perfection. I was constantly miserable. I was seeking a constantly receding horizon. So I quit," he told the news service
Born into poverty as Arthur Jacob Arshawsky on New York's Lower East Side, Shaw fought long and hard to escape his humble roots without ever quite losing his irascibility.
Shaw had tumultuous relationships with women, especially his eight wives, who included such voluptuous Hollywood glamour girls as Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Doris Dowling and Gone with the Wind costar Evelyn Keys.
Judy Garland was said to be suicidal when Shaw dropped her in order to marry Turner, while Gardner considered being married to Shaw like going to college. Once asked by a reporter why her marriage to Shaw failed, the brunette beauty quipped: "I flunked."
Shaw was also married to author Kathleen Windsor, herself a superstar in the 1940s with her bestselling romance novel, Forever Amber.
But it was music that made Artie Shaw a household name and a sex symbol, thanks to his strong resemblance to Tyrone Power. He was also a groundbreaker and a civil rights advocate, integrating his band by hiring Billie Holiday as its singer.
Once he put away his licorice stick, the world sounded a little less lively. Shaw spent his new free time producing movies and writing books, including one on love, marriage and divorce, titled, with self-awareness, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead. He even worked on his fly-fishing. But no matter how hard he tried over the next half a century, there was one thing Artie Shaw could never escape: being a legend.
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Albert