NYT, Oct. 28, 1984 ARTIE SHAW RARITIES COME TO LIGHT By John Wilson
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Thirty years ago, Artie Shaw disbanded the group that he had been leading at the Embers on 52d Street - one of his Gramercy Fives - and announced that he was retiring from music. He had done this before, most notably when, at the peak of his success with his ''Begin the Beguine'' band, he walked off the stand at the Hotel Pennsylvania one night in December 1939 and disappeared.
He had gone to Mexico, it was later learned, to try to recover from the strain of too much success. He was back in a recording studio after three months, primarily to honor a recording contract on which he still owed a few records. He brought with him a big string section and some woodwinds, unusual instrumentation for a swing band in 1940, along with a song he had found in Mexico, ''Frenesi.'' The resultant record relaunched his career just as ''Begin the Beguine,'' had started him the first time, and he was on the treadmill of success once again.
From then on, there was a running battle between Mr. Shaw's annoyance with the music business and his desire to do something different. For the opening in 1949 of Bop City, a big jazz club on Broadway just off Times Square, he formed a 40-piece symphonic orchestra to play strict classical programs on a bill that included Ella Fitzgerald and Kai Winding's Sextet. It was a short- lived experiment (some of the jazz fans in the audience cried out for mercy: ''Let's Jump!'' they shouted). But, as Mr. Shaw continued on into the early 1950's, he found that he was at odds not only with the commercial aspects of the music business, but with many of his old fans as well.
Unlike his band-leading peers in the Swing Era - Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller - Mr. Shaw was stimulated by the new jazz called be-bop that cropped up in the 1940's. He began incorporating bop musicians in his band (Dodo Marmarosa was his pianist as early as 1944, and he used arrangements by Tadd Dameron and George Russell). His own clarinet playing became colored with bop ideas. His old fans, like most swing band fans, resented bebop and were not prepared to accept his new approaches. Neither were the record companies. When he felt that his 1954 Gramercy Five was so good that its work deserved to be preserved, but no record company was interested, he took the group, morning after morning, into a recording studio at 5 A.M. after a night's work at the Embers and recorded its entire ''book.''
This evidence of Artie Shaw's direction when he left music in 1954 had never been released until the Book-of-the-Month Club recently brought the records out as part of a new four-disk set, ''Artie Shaw: A Legacy'' (by mail from Book-of-the-Month Records, Camp Hill, Pa. 17012, $27.95 plus $1.75 shipping and handling; residents of New York and Pennsylvania add local sales tax). The set includes Mr. Shaw's performance with a string quartet and rhythm section at a jazz concert in 1936 that led to his debut as a band leader, as well as three appearances with classical groups and one with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, all issued now for the first time.
Thus, in one album, we have both the beginning and the end of Mr. Shaw's career as a leader. In 1936, Mr. Shaw was a busy and successful studio musician, playing as a sideman for radio and recordings, when Joe Helbock, the owner of the Onyx, a hangout for jazz musicians on 52d Street, had the then novel idea of putting on a swing concert at the Imperial Theater. Mr. Shaw, asked to join in a program that included Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra and Bob Crosby's big band as well as small combos with Bunny Berrigan, Joe Bushkin and the guitarist Carl Kress, put together a seven-piece group - a string quartet with drums, guitar and his own clarinet - for which he wrote a single piece, ''Interlude in B-flat.'' It was the hit of the concert and, as a consequence, within four months Mr. Shaw was leading his first big band at the Hotel Lexington - a swing band built around a swing quartet.
Today ''Interlude in B-flat'' is little more than a curiosity - the cushion of strings under a jazz horn has become commonplace during the ensuing 50 years. But even so, the distinctive sound of Mr. Shaw's light, glancing clarinet lines, later to be heard flowing warmly through the setting of a big band or cutting through the sharper edges of his Gramercy Five, creates an unusual conjunction with even the limited use of strings that he tried in 1936.
The bulk of the set is given over to the Gramercy Five Recordings he made in 1954 - they take up five of the eight sides. For the most part they are either small group versions of his big band arrangements - ''Begin the Beguine,'' ''Dancing in the Dark,'' ''Back Bay Shuffle,'' ''Frenesi'' - or new versions of such old small-group successes as ''Cross Your Heart,'' ''Summit Ridge Drive,'' and ''The Sad Sack.'' There is one particularly successful new piece (new in 1954), ''Sunny Side Up,'' a Shaw original which has no relationship to ''Keep Your Sunny Side Up,'' in which Mr. Shaw's tone and attack have taken much of the quality of Buddy DeFranco, the pioneer bebop clarinetist, while still retaining elements that are identifiably Shavian.
The Gramercy Five is made up of musicians with strong bebop inclinations - Tal Farlow, guitar, Joe Roland, vibes, Hank Jones, piano, Tommy Potter, bass, and Irv Kluger, drums - and their musical personalities place a new complexion on the old Gramercy Five pieces. But when they are working with the early big band tunes, the sound and character of the original arrangements still color their playing, even though only the opening and closing choruses actually follow the originals.
Listening to these 1954 Gramercy Five sides suggests that Mr. Shaw quit just a little too soon. A new kind of combo jazz was just coming into being then. The Gerry Mulligan Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet were taking their first steps. Mr. Shaw was a bridge between the Swing Era and these 1950's groups, and he might have found many of his old friends who had not adjusted to his new moves primarily because it was he who made them, waiting for him in the jazz atmosphere that Mr. Mulligan and the Modern Jazz Quartet and others created in the mid- 50's.
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