Artie Shaw, New York, NY between 1946 and 1948. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb. Courtesy of the Library of Congress via Picryl.
In The New York Sun, Mario Naves discusses the upcoming rerelease of the documentary Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got (1986), which has been restored in 4K for modern audiences. He goes on to recount Shaw’s life, from his upbringing as Arthur Jacob Arshawsky to his successful career. Naves writes:
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and came of age in the relatively genteel surroundings of New Haven, Connecticut. “Relatively” because it was in Connecticut that the young Arshawsky first encountered antisemitism. He took up the saxophone at age 13 and was on the road as a professional musician a few years later. By that time he had taken up the clarinet and gained the skills to become a session musician in New York City.
Shaw got around, listened hard, and went on to achieve a level of fame that proved increasingly untenable for a temperament as restless as his own. He caused a sensation in 1935 at Manhattan’s Imperial Theater with his own composition “Interlude in B Flat,” but later scored big with versions of “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine.” Shaw fused jazz with the trappings of classical music: He liked to swing with a string section. Audiences were more equivocal in their admiration.
The trajectory of Shaw’s career was bumpy — often because of his own decisions. At the height of his fame, he quit show business and left for Mexico in a move the New York Times described as “a beautifully incautious burning of all his bridges behind him.” Shaw detested celebrity culture. “This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies,” Shaw wrote in the Saturday Evening Post. You know the kind: “people who think I’m a longhair, impressed with my own ability.”
The thing is, Shaw was a longhair impressed by his own ability. He was a voracious reader, relentlessly inquisitive, and a musician of natural gifts. He also had an eye for talent: Among those he featured in his band were Billie Holiday, Buddy Rich, and Mel Torme.
Shaw famously quit his band during a stage performance on December 7, 1941, when the stage manager handed him a note about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At that moment, Shaw felt that playing “Begin the Beguine” for the umpteenth time seemed “fatuous.” Before the concert ended, he passed word to his band members that they had been given two weeks’ notice. Shaw joined the Navy soon thereafter.
“Time Is All You’ve Got” is an odd document largely because its subject comes across as adamantly guarded even as he tells it like it is — about love, marriage, fishing, mathematics, and his rivalry with Benny Goodman. Goodman, Shaw said, “played the clarinet. I played music.”
That bon mot, sharp but not unconsidered, gives a good idea of what to expect from Ms. Berman’s film: a peculiarly gifted musician and an unapologetic perfectionist who insisted that his toilet paper unfurl just so.
Read more here.
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