Artie Shaw on Rehearsing a Band - Part 1

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“Artie Shaw - CLARINET born 23 May 1910; died 30 December 2004

A high-profile success which he would have preferred to have had buried in obscurity, aspirations to great art thwarted by commercial popularity, a theme tune called 'Nightmare', eight marriages and a retirement which lasted three times as long as his bandleading career: Artie Shaw's world was as unconventional as jazz could provide. He was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in New York but grew up in Connecticut, where he played sax from the age of 12 and began working in dance bands three years later. His career was nothing special until he returned to New York around 1930, where he began working mainly as a studio-session musician, finally forming his own group in 1936, This set out his stall from the start: rather than playing conventional dance material, he hired an eight-piece group and they played an original work of chamber music. Shaw then tried a more conventional band, but it didn't last long and Shaw disbanded, only to regroup later in 1937 with a new book. Within a year he had his breakthrough hit, an irresistible Jerry Gray arrangement of 'Begin The Beguine', and within weeks the Shaw band was a sensational rival to Benny Goodman's supremacy, with the leader's clarinet similarly prominent to Goodman's. 

But success didn't so much spoil Shaw as leave him aghast: he wanted listening audiences rather than jitterbugging kids, and he went as far as leaving his own band to the leadership of sideman Georgic Auld at the end of 1939. A year later, he recorded a hit version of 'Frenesi' with a studio band, which sparked off a new touring outfit, this time augmented by the string section Shaw had always hankered after, and there was a small group, Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five, which -as with Goodman - spotlit the leader's clarinet in a smaller setting, though Shaw went the unusual route of having Johnny Guarnieri play harpsichord rather than piano. It was another successful venture, but again the dissatisfied Shaw disbanded it, only for a third band to emerge at the end of 1941. This time America's entry to the war intervened, and in the Navy Shaw toured a forces band which was greeted with wild acclaim in the Pacific. After the war the same cycle of dispersal and regroupment continued, until Shaw led his final Gramercy Five for record dates in 1954. By now he was turning more to writing, having completed his autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella, the previous year, and at this point he abandoned the music business altogether.”

- Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia 

To say that the late Swing Era bandleader Artie Shaw [1910-2004] didn’t suffer fools gladly would be an understatement of the first order. For proof of this assertion, one only need turn to any chapter in his autobiography The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity [1992] to listen to him rant and rage about the music business during his tenure as a big band leader, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s.

And yet, he makes many instructive observations about this era in Jazz from his vantage point as the leader of one of the era’s most successful orchestras 

An informed and thinking human being, both of which, in Artie’s case and in the context of the entertainment industry, could be considered a blessing AND a curse!

Oftentimes it’s the way Artie says things and not what he has to say that some people find objectionable. 

Judge for yourself in this first of a two-part posting about who, what, when, where and why is involved with rehearsing a band.

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."

- SAMUEL BUTLER THE YOUNGER

Chapter Forty

“FOR THE NEXT FEW YEARS I ran what amounted to a peripatetic music school. I suppose that must sound rather peculiar, so I'll explain. In fact, right here is about as good a place as any to explain a number of things about the operational details of the band business.

The whole process of building a group of assorted musicians and welding this group into one unified stylistic ensemble is a complicated affair; and in order to accomplish this job, everybody connected with it has to learn a good deal about a number of things connected with it. Furthermore, all the time the job is being learned, there is the practical business of keeping the band together, working and getting paid from week to week, while the polishing job is going on. For intrinsically, even though the overall problem of making a functioning unit out of a heterogeneous collection of inexperienced jazz musicians is to some extent a musical problem, the basic, fundamental problem is economic.

There have been a great many changes since the time I started out with that first band of mine; and as one change took place there were corresponding changes in the whole picture—musically and every other way. But that is far too involved to go into here.

So let's have a look at some of the problems as they existed and had to be met and solved at that time.

Top-notch jazz musicians are highly skilled men, and as a rule they get good pay. Now at the time I was starting out, I obviously couldn't command a very high price for my unknown outfit. Long before I could afford the kind of musicians I'd have liked to get, I would have to build up a "name" in my business.

So I had to start with relatively inexperienced youngsters, musicians who weren't good enough to demand high salaries, and who were willing to work for [musician] union scale. Nevertheless, since we had to compete with the top bands of that day, some way had to be devised to make these men sound good in spite of their inexperience.

This could be done only through constant rehearsing, through careful arranging, so the music would not make demands on the men which they couldn't meet; and, above all, through time. Time on the job itself. For no matter how much rehearsal a band gets, no matter how skillfully and carefully the arrangements are tailored to the abilities of the men playing them, there is still nothing that can take the place of appearing night after night after night in front of audiences. The very tension that results from being aware of an audience is one of the biggest single factors in smoothing out the rough edges and polishing the surface of a band.

There are no big successful bands that haven't undergone this process. Somehow the public senses this surface polish and reacts to it favorably, I can't think of a single band that has ever achieved and maintained success, where this surface polish has been lacking. In other words, in popular music, mass acceptance can't be achieved without at least a surface flawlessness.

This seems to me normal enough under the circumstances. We are on the whole a nation of craftsmen, artisans, engineers, rather than artists. So it isn't surprising that in all our popular art forms we demand this engine-turned, slick, flawless, shiny surface perfection. Look at the average Hollywood movie for example — look at the high degree of technical skill and craftsmanship involved in the making of even the worst piece of junk. And this is even more understandable in music. The mass American public is by and large musically illiterate; and as is the case with any uneducated group when confronted with a highly specialized, technically involved form of activity, there is always this engrossment with surface detail rather than intrinsic merit.

As for other examples of this sort of thing — well, take a good look at the average commercial illustration. Whether it is a story illustration or part of an advertising layout — either way it must have one quality, that same quality of slickness. If it hasn't that — with startlingly few exceptions — it isn't good commercial art.

Now I am by no means trying to say that slickness is the only thing needed. Far from it. There are all sorts of degrees in craftsmanship, any number of levels of actual creative work, up to the point of real artistry. However, when the criteria are those involved in interesting a mass audience — meaning a relatively uninformed group of people with little or no knowledge of the art forms used in these various commercial media — it is clear that the end sought is going to have to be a sort of lowest common denominator.

Aside from slickness, though, there are various other factors. Even under a slick surface, there is room for at least a certain amount of honest, straightforward, even "artistic" expression.

Which is why there are occasional honest and worthwhile movies made, even in Hollywood, even in spite of these slick-surface requirements; why there are also occasional damn good illustrations and paintings done, even for commercial purposes; and why some of the best American jazz bands have produced from time to time some of the most interesting indigenous

American music ever made, even in spite of having to maintain close contact with relatively uneducated audiences.

All this was something else I had to learn through personal experience. There was no other way I could acquire any real knowledge of what had to be done in this new realm of the music business in which I was now operating.

The next thing I learned was that this outfit of mine, this little band-built-around-a-string-quartet, was not going to work out the way I had originally thought it would. It was too far out of line with what was going on at that time.

There was no room for the sort of musical subtleties I was trying to create with this atypical little band. Those were the days of the tousled-haired, eye-rolling, gum-chewing drummers —those boys who hit everything in sight except the customers, and who would no doubt have hit the customers too if they could have got at them. A new fad had swept the nation. If a band couldn't play good music, it could always call itself a "swing band" and play loud music instead.

This fact was brought home to me forcefully during an engagement at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas. We were supposed to go from there to New Orleans to play in another hotel in the Hitz hotel chain, of which this Dallas spot was one. However, although I had been promised the New Orleans hotel job immediately after this first one, business was so bad that the Hitz management decided not to go through with the promise. I had no contract, and the kind of band mine was couldn't make the amount of noise needed to fill the big barns you have to play in on one-night stands, so I had to transport the band all the way back from Dallas to New York City at my own expense. Which left me about as stony broke as I ever expect to be.

When we got back, we got a job at a spot in New Jersey, called The Meadowbrook, and that gave the band four more weeks to live. The manager of this spot (Frank Dailey, who had been a bandleader himself at one time) was crazy about the band from a musical standpoint — which, as I learned, was the only reason he'd booked me into his place to begin with — but the public made its indifference only too plain. So I saw, read, and accepted the handwriting on the wall — and at the end of that job broke up the band once and for all.

However, I was scarcely what you could have called "resigned" to the handwriting on the wall. I was a pretty angry young fellow. I was so disgusted that I made up my mind to give the public what it evidently wanted — which was, as I put it to myself at that time, "the loudest band in the whole goddamn world!"

It may sound crazy, but that's precisely what I did. I got together a group of fourteen young musicians, scuffled around and picked up a batch of assorted arrangements. Some of them I got on credit, some had been pirated from the libraries of various bands around the country and peddled to me by a guy who used to hang around bands and make himself a buck that way. Then I started rehearsing that "loudest band in the whole goddamn world." And believe me, it was loud!

This band was called Art Shaw and his New Music, since the Brunswick Recording Company, for whom I was still making occasional records, wanted to make a distinction between this and the original string-quartet outfit I had started out with.

Our first job was at a little beat up joint in Boston, called the Raymor Ballroom. Some of the facts and figures about this job may give you an idea of the economics of the band business at the time.

This new band had, besides the fourteen musicians I just mentioned, a singer, a band manager, a band boy to handle the gear, and an arranger—a young fiddle player named Jerry Gray, who had stayed on after the bust-up of the old band, in which he had played first violin and helped out with some of the arranging. Even this wasn't help enough for the job that had to be done now. We had to build up a whole new library to supplant those "pirated" arrangements we started out with. In other words, we had to build up a style which might eventually distinguish this "loudest band" of mine from some of the other loud enough bands which were also around on the scene.

So that made eighteen people who had to be paid, besides myself. Also, there was commission to be paid to an agent for getting us the job in the first place. And in the band business, by the way, commission does not come off the amount the bandleader earns, but "off the top," meaning off the amount paid for the whole band.

Now then. What was the amount I got, out of which I had to meet my payroll for this whole aggregation, plus agent's commission, and still manage to find something for myself to live on while trying to make a band out of this new outfit?

One thousand dollars a week.

Well, a thousand dollars a week may sound like a lot to you. But just try putting together even the worst band in the world, let alone any group of that size through which you can even distantly hope to get to the top of the band business, Try to go on operating from week to week, improving your band, constantly bettering the quality of the arrangements you'll have to have in order to improve the band itself. Then try to pay off nineteen people out of nine hundred dollars a week, which is what you're going to have left after you've paid an agent ten per cent of the thousand for getting you the thousand to begin with.

If you want to save yourself a whole lot of trouble, just take my word for it — it was tough enough to do in those days; today it couldn't be done at all.

We managed to keep going, after some fashion or other — and during the following two and a half to three years the process of transforming this Art Shaw and his New Music outfit into the high-priced, slick-surfaced, smoothly-functioning musical machine called Artie Shaw and his Orchestra — the metamorphosis of clarinet-playing bandleader into Cinderella Boy — was finally accomplished.

The whole story of what happened, how it happened, and even why it happened, is far too long for me to tell. However, I'll try to give you some idea, without going into all the endless details. Suppose we start by fading back to one of the thousand-and-fifty-eight rehearsals that were always going on in those days — in the cellar of some dance hall, or in the barn where we had played that night, wherever we could find a spot big enough to hold a bunch of inexperienced kids who had to learn their jobs as they went along. . . .” - To be continued in Part 2.