A orquestra de Artie Shaw nos brindou em 1940 com um sensacional arranjo para a bela Stardust(Carmichael -Parrish). Considero o arranjo orquestrado do Artie Shaw a gravação definitiva de Stardust.
Everone is blowing his guts out. We've all been there. But what do you do?. Keep going. It's the only Band in town. Give up now & Big Bands will never come back.
I have thought it odd that Shaw totally gave up the clarinet. I saw an interview with him, maybe from the early 90's, and the interviewer handed him a horn, and Shaw wouldn't even try to play it, saying he doubted he could even get a sound out of it.
Big Artie Shaw fan here. When I read that Shaw was starting a band again I made sure I was there at the opening. It was in a wing of the Comedy Club in Hollywood (used to be Ciros). The night was windy and sadly, there were very few people in the audience. I saw Artie (didn't speak to him), he almost tripped over a bump in the floor and he sat around with some lady friends of his. Dick Johnson was playing the clarinet. As you can tell, he has a near Shaw like sound. It was a pleasant evening. I'm glad that the band has been able to make a go of it.
It’s all very good but it’s the ultimate frustration. The trumpet lead is very competent but no Billy Butterfield, Dick Johnson is an excellent Artie Shaw soundalike but on stage you have the great man himself who at the age of 45, at the peak of his powers, put down his clarinet because he’d had enough. Essentially Artie robbed the public of his wonderful talent and creativity, couldn’t understand why the public loved him and his craft and ultimately unfortunately for us all he was too intellectual to grasp any of this. He could’ve made a retrospective comeback but chose not to. The ultimate frustration is is that when this clip was shot he, like Goodman was at the time, would still have still been very near the peak of his musical powers.
🤍SO AMAZING!! VERY NEW APPRECIATOR, OF ARTIE SHAWS MUSIC. IT'S VERY EASY FOR ME TO TELL MANY TIMES, WHAT BAND LEADER, IS CONDUCTING. SO, CLEAN & PRECISE!!
Artie Shaw put the clarinet down when he was 45, and never played again. He cited he had done everything possible with that instrument to the utmost perfection. There was nothing left to do. Any other attempts would be an insult to the instrument. Remarkable man.
He lived 25 or 30 years beyond this so he must have had intuition about what was best for him regarding that he stopped playing. We don't know that he stopped playing in private or with a private group, though. He quit the shows etc, but I cannot believe he didn't play at all, after a certain year. It's a physical act though so one has to be in relatively good shape to keep it up. I listen to him every single day, and wouldn't be able to get through certain unpleasant mundane tasks without hearing his music. 🎼🎶
He stopped performing in the early 1950s because he was basically fed up with the direction popular music was headed. He was famously mercurial, even walking away from one band without warning. By the late 1960s he realized there was still enough interest in his music that he decided to try for a comeback. In 1968 he put together a group of studio musicians to record re-creations of his 1938 band's hits, which was sufficiently successful that he later decided to go on the road again - but only as the conductor rather than performing.
I met Dick Johnson at the Medina Ballroom (Medina, MN) in the late 1980's. I was near the bandstand when he was doing solos, and he was definitely 'in the Artie Shaw groove'. Very accomplished musician.
Thanks, Man. One of the only times I ever played it. Just happened to be caught on video. I bailed on the high Eb because it was late morning after a hit-and-run to get there.
