ARTIE SHAW NEA Jazz Master (2005)

1 Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. ARTIE SHAW NEA Jazz Master (2005) Interviewee: Artie Shaw (May 23, 1910- December 30, 2004) Interviewer: Bruce Talbot Date: October 7 and 8, 1992 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Description: Transcript, 100 pp. Note: Expletives have been deleted from this Web version of the transcript, and are marked thus: [expletive deleted]. An unaltered transcript is available for use by researchers at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Talbot: This is October the 7th [1992], and this is day . the first of two days’ interviews with Artie Shaw. Shaw: Are we o.k.? [recording engineer:] Yeah, we got a great level. Shaw: Before we get into this, or maybe as a way of getting into it, I showed you this material on the book I’ve been working on on-and-off since about 1978. What is it now? This is . It’s been 12 years. I’ve published another book in between. I’ve done some CDs. I’ve done a lot of other stuff. But this one . I’ll tell you the point of it. I wanted to do a trilogy. I had at one time . I don’t know. You’re a reader, so you may know the book. Most people don’t even know of it. Romain Rolland wrote a book called Jean- Christophe. Did you ever read it or hear of it? For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 2 Talbot: Heard of it. Shaw: It was ten French novels, short French novels, dealing with the life of a composer, a German-born composer who gets himself in trouble, comes to France, gets involved in the intellectual and artistic and political and every other kind of life. Has a roommate, a friend named Oliver, who gets killed. He has love affairs and whatever. He finally meets an Italian countess and goes to Italy and then comes back to France and dies. When you’re through with that you know a great deal about what makes a composer, what the ingredients are that make what they call a serious composer. It occurred to me when I was . when I finished the third book I published, that no-one knows what a jazz musician is about. There’s an enormous confusion in the nomenclature. The word “jazz” in itself is a ridiculous word. Every critic has his own one inch on a spectrum from here to New York, and that’s the only “le vrai jazz.” Well, that’s not it. And no-one has yet come up with an acceptable definition, so if a man says he’s a jazz critic, he might as well say, “I’m a growl critic,” or a bark critic. It doesn’t make any sense. An ugh critic. But people use the word, and they all have their own idea what it means. Just as the word “democracy” in Russia and America and Arabia have totally different meanings. So I decided that since most people don’t know what a jazz musician’s about and have some vague idea that a guy wakes up one day and starts playing jazz, and that any classical guy can play jazz, as the movies show. In a movie called The Competition—otherwise not a bad movie—you see these two classical so- called—I hate that word too—players suddenly having some fun, and they go [Shaw sings “um-pah dum-pah” syllables] and they start playing what they call “jazz.” Well, that isn’t the way it works. No classical player worth his salt, that I know of, can play jazz. Itzhak Perlmann tries to fool around with it, but doesn’t come close. So the point is, I thought I would write what it’s about. How does . I wrote a . I’m writing a bildungsroman, a novel of education. How does a jazz musician . what are his antecedents? Where does he come from? Especially we’re talking about in the early days when the word “jazz” was not even really what it is now. We used to call it “dance music.” And then we would play a hot chorus on it. I’m convinced a large part of it was the boredom on the part of the whites. You keep playing a tune called [Shaw sings] “Mary Lou, Mary Lou,” and finally you say, “I’m so sick of this bloody thing.” It doesn’t take finally. You say, “Let’s see what I can do with the chord structure,” and you start doing something. In any case . so I wrote this book. I’ve got 90 chapters with him being Al Snow. His original name was Al Wisnowski, and he becomes Al Snow. At the end he become Albie. Somebody puts him in front of a band, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and they don’t know what they want him to do. It’s [a] shocking book. When it’s all done, this For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 3 guy’s explored everything. It’s a sort of Siddhartha, a musical Siddhartha. He explores science, painting, literature, sex. Name it. He’s curious. When it’s all done, everything adds up to what he’s doing. You know, as a reader, by the time the first book is finished—which will be subtitled Sideman—that those years are over, and now he thinks for the first time he’s free of the tyranny of radio—which is the same as television today. That kind of constriction, that you got to play this awful crap. Now for the first time he realizes he’s going to be able to do what he wants. But the reader will know, if I’m successful, that he’s not going to be able to do what he wants, because he then going to have a worse tyrant for an audience, meaning the public. And so we’re back to that old dictum, that the worst tyranny is the majority. You can kill a king. You can kill a despot. How do you kill a majority? Fifty-one percent of the people want Perot, and forty-nine don’t. We’re stuck with him, if that’s what happens. Of course it won’t, but still. So that’s what the book is about. Really it will not be so much about jazz, as jazz is how he makes his living. A lot of it is taken for granted, and I’m writing it through the mind of a 15-year-old kid when I start. Pick him up in 1927 in a lake I made up named [??] Lake, Wisconsin, which is not unlike the lakes that Bix [Beiderbecke] played at or I played at, everybody played at in summer. You take him right on up through his career until you leave him at the age . one decade later. So that’s what the book is about. A little of the material we’re going to be doing here. All right. You lead the way. What do you want to talk about? Talbot: Let’s talk about your earliest days, how you got into music in the first place. Shaw: Oh, boy. I hate doing that. The material’s all written, scrupulously, in Cinderella [his autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella]. Talbot: Just go over it very quickly. Shaw: Well, quickly, I got hold of a saxophone and learned to play saxophone. I’m the only world-class clarinet player who started on saxophone. Talbot: Why did you want to play music? Shaw: Again, I wrote about that. I used to go to vaudeville shows. I was born in . to a couple of immigrant parents. We lived in New Haven, Connecticut. I was born in New York. I was a victim of anti-Semitism in a terrible, to a terrible degree, and I had to get out of that environment and get into something that made sense. Otherwise I’d have ended up like a friend of mine I grew up with, who got killed . he died in the electric chair. I’d have been a criminal. I wasn’t going to go on the way I was. I have great sympathy for rebels, because I was one. Fortunately, my implement was a . instead of a For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 4 machine gun, or a jimmied open windows and be a burglar, break and enter artist, I became a saxophonist. I saw this guy get up and play a saxophone. I thought, “Boy, that sounds nice. That’s a good way to live. Look at the pretty girls and the lights. That’s nice. Vaudeville.” So I got a saxophone. Talbot: So from the vaudeville days, that gave you the impetus to play the saxophone. Shaw: Yeah it was 1914 . 1924 when I began. Talbot: What kind of bands did you play in? How quickly did you . Shaw: Whatever was there. It’s a joke when you look back. Whatever was there. Any regional or local or whatever band would have me. Talbot: Did anybody teach you? Shaw: No. I keep telling people I learned from the guy next to me. When I got to know more than he did, I moved on.

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