Artie Shaw - Self-Portrait

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Overall, it's my belief that performers have a right to be judged by their best work. Roger Bannister must have run lots of miles in more than four minutes, but he's remembered as the man who broke the four-minute record. Such home run kings as Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron struck out I don't know how many times. Perfectly understandable, of course: anybody who's really trying is bound to make mistakes. But why include my own strikeouts? In the end, then, I've chosen only those performances that come reasonably close to what I had in mind when I did them-which is also why this package includes examples from all my different bands. Let's call it a summing-up, a retrospective of what I consider my best work regardless of label, an overview of my entire career as a clarinetist-band leader.” 

- Artie Shaw

Something not afforded through streaming is this exquisite and unprecedented retrospective that contains the best performances from the entire career of one of the most exciting artists in music history. Selected by Artie Shaw himself, it includes music from every band  he ever led. including his most popular hits and his greatest  artistic achievements.

*   95 tracks remastered from the best available sources

*   Complete discography

*   Extensive liner notes by Artie Shaw himself and historian Richard Sudhalter in a 47 page booklet

*   Produced by Grammy-winning jazz legend Orrin Keepnews

*   Rare photos of Artie Shaw and his musicians

I realize that multi-disc sets can be expensive, but when one considered the number of subscription services fees we sometimes engage in that can put us at the mercy of impersonal, algorithmic programming, the occasional investment in a collection of CDs devoted to the music of a particular artist can often be a bargain in the long run, especially when one considers the old adage that “possessions is 9/10ths of the law.” [A euphemism for if you own it you control it.]

" Self Portrait 9/1938-6/1954

Bluebird 09026-63808-2 5CD Selected by Shaw himself, and discussed by the leader in conversation with Richard Sudhalter, this is an impressive shot at the defining Shaw collection - even if some of it might be thought subject to its maker's own caprices. He sometimes chooses broadcast versions of tunes over their studio originals, and the notes are boastful and self-deprecating at the same moment -inimitable Shaw. His choices reflect his ambitions, though fortunately that seems to have allowed the inclusion of his greatest hits along the way, and it does take the story up to the final sessions of 1954 ….” - Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

From the producer Orrin Keepnews in the insert booklet that accompanies the set:

“This compilation is probably the most unusual jazz reissue project I have ever been involved with. It is, for that matter, possibly the most unusual such project ever attempted. It is not at all surprising, then, that Artie Shaw, the focal point of this set, is an entirely remarkable man and musician, still thoroughly intense and alert although he happens to be in his nineties.

Since I am not particularly young either. I have no problem admitting that I first became aware of Artie Shaw back in his early days as a giant of the Swing Era. As a New York teenager, who first heard this wonderfully rhythmic music on the radio, then skipped a class or two to catch a matinee "stage show" at a Broadway movie palace, I was particularly intrigued by one of the major rivalries of the day. 

As I recalled to Artie not long ago, if you were at all serious about the music, you had to make a choice. It was just not possible to equivocate — you were either for Artie Shaw or for Benny Goodman. Under the circumstances that now find me working on this in-depth look at his full career, I'm glad I can honestly report that I have always been a Shaw enthusiast. (His own current view of the subject is a little detached and analytical: "Benny was a better clarinet player," Artie told me. "but I was a better musician.").

Shaw never fit the stereotype of either pop music star nor big band leader. Emerging from a youthful period as a highly skilled and sought after lead alto player in the New York studio bands of the early 1930s, Artie's view of himself as a musician clearly influenced the way he handled sudden stardom. (Begin the Beguine, his overwhelmingly popular initial hit, was a product of his very first day of recording for RCA Victor, but he has consistently denied liking the record.) He used strings to a far greater and more adventurous extent than any of his colleagues; he was noted for his intolerance of the intrusiveness of his fans; and it seems quite likely that if he had not decided to leave the music business completely, he would have been comfortable with many developments in jazz during the second half of the twentieth century. He was proud of the fact that Al Cohn and Zoot Sims joined his 1949 orchestra — known to insiders as his "bebop band" — right after leaving Woody Herman. And his very last recordings, heard on the final disc in this collection, involved outstanding young players like pianist Hank Jones and guitarist Tal Farlow. as well as Tommy Potter, one of Charlie Parker's favorite bassists. Quite apart from music., he has for many years paid serious attention to writing, both fiction and autobiography. Critics have rated his published work as professional and richly talented, and I think you'll find some strong supporting evidence further along in this booklet.

There are specific reasons for considering this a most unusual reissue. Obviously the most intriguing and important one is that the artist himself has been deeply involved in assembling this retrospective, which covers his work between 1936 and 1954 — which is not exactly yesterday. I have compiled a great many reissue collections over the years, and have become accustomed to the fact that the music predating the advent of tape recording in 1950 is in a different category from anything more recent. That difference involves not merely technology, but the almost-universal truth that pre-tape artists are no longer with us. One of my favorite clichés is to describe reissue work as: "I spent all day in the studio with Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, or Benny Goodman — and he didn't give me the slightest bit of trouble." In this case: not true! Shaw did not actually join me at the BMG Studios in New York, but between telephone discussions and extensive e-mail exchanges and visits to his home north of Los Angeles, the legendary central figure in this collection had no trouble making his presence felt.”

INTRODUCTION by Richard Sudhalter -

“To identify Artie Shaw as an exceptional figure in the world of popular music is to state the obvious. Peerless clarinetist, successful bandleader, proprietor of a restless, ever-questing imagination, he remains a thoughtful and articulate man in a field not always notable for such qualities. Since putting away his clarinet half a century ago he has continued to read and inquire, emerging meanwhile as a writer of formidable, if occasionally idiosyncratic, strengths. Shaw's records as a bandleader, made over a period of just eighteen years between 1936 and !954 remain as varied and challenging as the man who brought them into being.

In the spring of 2001, when he was asked to select and comment on the nearly one hundred performances in this boxed set, Artie Shaw had just passed his ninety-first birthday. But his remarks spring from a mind still clear and incisive, and from the same iron will that conceived, shaped, and realized his numerous bands. "Artie," a veteran fellow-musician remarked recently with no little awe, "has an opinion about everything, and most of the time has a way of being right. Even when he's wrong, he's right."

Here, then, is Artie Shaw, both in choosing his finest moments on record and in offering often trenchant observations on them, on-himself, and on his extraordinary life in music.

-R.M.S.”

And in conclusion, one more from Artie Shaw - 

Now and then people ask me: how do you feel to have lived so long, to have seen and achieved so much?              

My best answer is that I feel spiritually and mentally better than ever. And I've come to realize that what I did had in its own way a lot of importance.

These records are a case in point. Various people have issued "Complete Artie Shaw'' record packages, and though some may have contained my entire output on one record label, none have been really complete. Also, too many "Best-of-Artie-Shaw" compilations have included stuff I never did much care for, pop material I'd been pressured or coerced into recording. I never had much respect for most pop tunes, and none of that material is here. But I used my own judgment when it came to recording music I liked, mostly standards — and occasionally a new tune that sounded as though it might eventually become a standard. Some of those songs, like Summertime and Blues In the Night, are in this collection.

I've omitted most vocals because they were usually on banal trifles that I felt would probably have a life-span of ten to twelve minutes. However, there are a few vocals here, where the orchestral material is also interesting. Like the ones that Hot Lips Page sang, which had first-rate arrangements, and two by Tony Pastor, where the band really swings.”

The Sound of Jazz by Whitney Balliett [From the Archives]

  © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Until the publication of Whitney Balliett’s essay “The Sound of Jazz” in the New Yorker [1983], very little of the background information was known by the general public about what is arguably the best program on Jazz in performance ever produced for TV as well as Whitney’s role in its development.

It’s a fascinating story from so many perspectives that I thought I’d share it with you as a remembrance of times gone by for some of the original makers of the music.

MP3 files of the program are available for download and used CD copies can still be found through various online sellers.

“The confusion about the soundtrack of "The Sound of Jazz," the celebrated hour-long program broadcast live on CBS television on December 8, 1957, began a minute or so before the program ended, when an announcer said, "Columbia Records has cut a long-playing record of today's program, which will be called The Sound of Jazz. It'll be released early next year." 

A Columbia recording by that name and bearing the CBS television logotype was issued early in 1958, but it was not the soundtrack of the show. It was a recording made on December 4th in Columbia's Thirtieth Street studio as a kind of rehearsal for the television production. It included many of the musicians who did appear on December 8th, and except for one number the materials were the same. Columbia probably made the recording as a precaution: a live jazz television program lasting a full hour (then, as it is now, the basic unit of television time was the minute) and built around thirty-odd (unpredictable) jazz musicians might easily turn into a shambles. It didn't. The soundtrack, which is at last available in its entirety — as The Real Sound of Jazz, on Pumpkin Records — is superior to the Columbia record in almost every way, sound included.

The Sound of Jazz has long been an underground classic, and a lot of cotton wool has accumulated around it. So here, allowing for vagaries of memory, is how the program came to be. In the spring of 1957, Robert Goldman asked me if I would be interested in helping put together a show on jazz for John Houseman's new "Seven Lively Arts" series, scheduled to be broadcast on CBS in the winter of 1957-58. I submitted an outline, and it was accepted. I invited Nat Hentoff to join me as co-advisor, and we began discussing personnel and what should be played. Our wish was to offer the best jazz there was in the simplest and most direct way — no history, no apologetics, no furbelows. But John Crosby, the television columnist of the Herald Tribune, had been hired as master of ceremonies for the "Seven Lively Arts," and we feared that he would do just what we wanted to avoid — talk about the music. We suggested listing the musicians and the tunes on tel-ops (now common practice), but Crosby was under contract for the whole series, and that was that. Crosby, it turned out, pretty much agreed with us, and what he did say was to the point. For the brilliant visual side of the show, CBS chose the late Robert Herridge as the producer and Jack Smight as the director. The excitement of the camerawork and of Smight's picture selection — he had five cameramen — has never been equaled on any program of this kind.

Here is the form the program finally took: A big band, built around the nucleus of the old Count Basie band, was the first group to be heard, and it included Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Joe Newman, Joe Wilder, and Emmett Berry on trumpets; Earle Warren, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Gerry Mulligan on reeds,- Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, and Dicky Wells on trombones; and a rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Eddie Jones, and Jo Jones. This Utopian band, which Basie seemed immensely pleased to front, played a fast blues, "Open All Night," written and arranged by Nat Pierce, who did all the arranging on the show. Then a smaller band, made up of Red Allen and Rex Stewart on trumpet and cornet, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, Hawkins, Dickenson, Pierce, Danny Barker on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Jo Jones, did the old Jelly Roll Morton-Louis Armstrong "Wild Man Blues" and Earl Hines' "Rosetta." The group was a distillation of the various historic associations, on recordings, of Allen and Russell, of Allen and Hawkins, and of Stewart and Hawkins, with Dickenson's adaptability holding everything together. 

The rhythm section was all-purpose and somewhat in the Basie mode. Thelonious Monk, accompanied by Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Osie Johnson on drums, did his "Blue Monk." The big band returned for a slow blues, "I Left My Baby," with Jimmy Rushing on the vocal, and for a fast thirty-two-bar number by Lester Young called "Dickie's Dream." Billie Holiday sang her blues "Fine and Mellow," accompanied by Mal Waldron on piano and by Eldridge, Cheatham, Young, Hawkins, Webster, Mulligan, Dickenson, Barker, Hinton, and Osie Johnson. The Jimmy Giuffre Three, with Giuffre on reeds, Jim Hall on guitar, and Jim Atlas on bass, did Giuffre's "The Train and the River," and the show was closed by a slow blues, in which Giuffre and Pee Wee Russell played a duet, accompanied by Barker, Hinton, and Jo Jones. Crosby introduced each group, and there were pre-recorded statements about the blues from Red Allen, Rushing, Billie Holiday, and Guiffre. (I found these intrusive, but Hentoff and Herridge liked them.) 

The show was held in a big, bare two-story studio at Ninth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, and the musicians were told to wear what they wanted. Many wore hats, as jazz musicians are wont to do at recording sessions. Some had on suits and ties, some were in sports shirts and tweed jackets. Monk wore a cap and dark glasses with bamboo side pieces. Billie Holiday arrived with an evening gown she had got specially for the show, and was upset when she found that we wanted her in what she was wearing—a pony tail, a short-sleeved white sweater, and plaid pants. There was cigarette smoke in the air, and there were cables on the floor. A ladder leaned against a wall. Television cameras moved like skaters, sometimes photographing each other. The musicians were allowed to move around: Basie ended up watching Monk, and later Billie Holiday went over and stood beside Basie.

The atmosphere at the Columbia recording session was similar. Many of the musicians had not been together in a long time, and a rare early-December blizzard, which began just before the session and left as much as a foot of snow on the ground, intensified everything. It also caused problems. Our plan had been to reunite the All-American rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page on bass, and Jo Jones, but Page called and said that he was sick and that, anyway, he couldn't find a cab. (He didn't make the television show, either, and he died two weeks later.) Eddie Jones, Basie's current bassist, replaced him. Thelonious Monk didn't turn up, and that is why Mal Waldron recorded a four-minute piano solo, aptly titled "Nervous." 

There were various other differences between the recording and the show. Frank Rehak took Benny Morton's place on the recording, because Morton was busy. Harry Carney, a man of infinite graciousness, filled in for Gerry Mulligan, a man of infinite ego, because Mulligan insisted he be paid double scale, and was refused. Doc Cheatham solos on the Columbia session but only plays obbligatos behind Billie Holiday on the television show; he had asked to be excused from all soloing, claiming that it would ruin his lip for his regular gig with a Latin band. Lester Young provides obbligatos behind Jimmy Rushing on "I Left My Baby" on the Columbia record, and he also solos twice. He was particularly ethereal that day, walking on his toes and talking incomprehensibly, and most of the musicians avoided him. But he was intractable on Sunday during the first of the two run-throughs that preceded the television show. He refused to read his parts, and he soloed poorly. He was removed from the big-band reed section and was replaced by Ben Webster, and his only solo is his famous twelve bars on "Fine and Mellow"—famous because this sequence had been used so many times on other television shows and because of Billie Holiday's expression as she listens to her old friend, an expression somewhere between laughter and tears. Billie Holiday came close to not being on the show. A week or so before, word of her difficulties with drugs and the law had reached the upper levels at CBS, and it was suggested that she be replaced by someone wholesome, like Ella Fitzgerald. We refused, and were backed by Herridge, and she stayed.

It is astonishing how good the music is on "The Real Sound of Jazz." Billie Holiday and Red Allen and Jimmy Rushing are in fine voice. The big-band ensembles are generally dazzling. The solos are almost always first-rate. (Giuffre is dull, and Roy Eldridge is overexcited.) Listen to Dickenson's boiling, shouting statement on "Dickie's Dream," wisely taken at a slightly slower tempo than on the Columbia record, and to his easy, rocking solo on "Wild Man Blues." And listen to Rex Stewart, sly and cool, on "Wild Man" (he had recently emerged from a long semi-retirement) and to the way Jo Jones frames its breaks—suspending time, shaping melody, italicizing emotion. Some of the music on the show has not weathered well. Monk, surprisingly, sounds hurried and the Giuffre trio, which was extremely popular at the time, is thin and synthetic. And Pee Wee Russell swallows Giuffre in their duet. CBS never ran the program again, but it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the sixties, and there is now a copy at the Museum of Broadcasting.”