Richardcyoung.com

  • Home
  • Debbie Young
  • Jimmy Buffett
  • Key West
  • Your Survival Guy
  • How We Are Different
  • Paris
  • About Us
    • Foundation Principles
    • Contributors
  • Investing
    • You’ve Read The Last Issue of Intelligence Report, Now What?
  • The Swiss Way
  • My Rifles
  • Dividends and Compounding
  • Your Security
  • Dick Young
  • Dick’s R&B Top 100
  • Liberty & Freedom Map
  • Bank Credit & Money
  • Your Survival Guy’s Super States
  • NNT & Cholesterol
  • Your Health
  • Ron Paul
  • US Treasury Yield Curve: My Favorite Investor Tool
  • Anti-Gun Control
  • Anti-Digital Currency
  • Joel Salatin & Alfie Oakes
  • World Gold Mine Production
  • Fidelity & Wellington Since 1971
  • Hillsdale College
  • Babson College
  • Contact Us

Remembering the Life of Artie Shaw

January 5, 2024 By Richard C. Young

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.

If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.

Related Posts

  • Remembering Mike Bloomfield
  • Remembering Dr. John
  • Remembering the Beach Boys
  • Remembering the Great Lowell George
  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Richard C. Young
Richard C. Young
Richard C. Young is the editor of Young's World Money Forecast, and a contributing editor to both Richardcyoung.com and Youngresearch.com.
Richard C. Young
Latest posts by Richard C. Young (see all)
  • How Healthy Are Eggs? - July 8, 2025
  • HUD: The Damage Caused by Federal Housing Intervention - July 8, 2025
  • Can Elon Musk Break the Two Party System? - July 8, 2025

Dick Young’s Must Reads

  • YOU DESERVE FREEDOM: Your Hard Work Will Make It Happen
  • Washington Is the Systemic Risk
  • Are You Looking for Investment Counsel? 2 Questions
  • Protection While Traveling in France
  • When the Black Swan Swoops In for You
  • Rich States, Poor States this State is Dominant Once Again
  • Escape From the City: You’re Going to Like What You See
  • Your Survival Guy at Fidelity and Your RMD Compliance
  • The Breakfast of Champions
  • DIGITAL DOLLAR DOOMSDAY: The Wall Street Journal Is NOT Going to Tell You This

Our Most Popular Posts

  • What Makes America Great
  • Can Elon Musk Break the Two Party System?
  • “People Will Die”
  • Your Survival Guy: “You Wouldn’t Have Liked It”
  • How Healthy Are Eggs?
  • Just Don’t Call It “Obliterated”
  • Warthog's Last Stand: Could A-10's Have An Anti-Drone Role?
  • Survival Guy: An All-Weather Balanced Portfolio
  • Sending Capitalists to the Gulag
  • We Finally Got on the Boat

Compensation was paid to utilize rankings. Click here to read full disclosure.

RSS Youngresearch.com

  • Your Survival Guy: “You Wouldn’t Have Liked It”
  • DOE Unveils Plan to Quadruple U.S. Nuclear Power by 2050
  • How China Weaponized Rare Earths to Shift U.S. Trade Policy
  • Trump Administration Moves to Curb Foreign Ownership of U.S. Farmland
  • We Finally Got on the Boat
  • Trump Flexes Tariff Power Ahead of August 1 Deadline
  • America Remained a Net Energy Exporter as Domestic Output Soars
  • Copper Prices Surge as Global Supplies Tighten
  • Happy Independence Day!
  • Survival Guy: An All-Weather Balanced Portfolio

RSS Yoursurvivalguy.com

  • Your Survival Guy: “You Wouldn’t Have Liked It”
  • ESG Doesn’t Stand Up to Scrutiny
  • How to Dock a Boat with Helm Master EX
  • We Finally Got on the Boat
  • The Big Beautiful Bill: Good, Bad, and Ugly
  • WARNING: Your Survival Guy and Gal in the Fog
  • Happy Independence Day!
  • Survival Guy: An All-Weather Balanced Portfolio
  • A Bazooka Fired at Private Equity
  • NYC, Crypto, ESG, the Haves and the Have-Yachts

US Treasury Yield Curve: My Favorite Investor Tool

My Key West Garden Office

Your Retirement Life: Traveling the Efficient Frontier

Live a Long Life

Your Survival Guy’s Mt. Rushmore of Investing Legends

“Then One Day the Grandfather was Gone”

Copyright © 2025 | Terms & Conditions | About Us | Dick Young | Archives