Talk:Artie Shaw

USO, no

I'm not sure that I would say that Shaw worked for the USO. Many bands volunteered to play USO shows during WWII (eg: Benny Goodman). Shaw actually served in the Navy (albeit in a band unit). They spent almost 18 months touring the south pacific playing for troops (sometimes as many as four shows a day). They apparently also saw some combat in Guadacanal (sp). Shaw was given a medical discharge (probably due to physical and emotional exhaustion).

Some good information is here: http://www.artieshaw.com/bio.html

Edited great hits

Removed "Temptation" from a list of Artie Shaw hits. It doesn't rise to the same level as Beguine, Frenesi, etc. Good song tho. (Listening to it now). --SeanO 03:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Band remotes?

The article says, "Shaw did many band remotes." I presume this means the band played in some location and was listened to by radio at some other particular venue, but I'm not sure. Can someone spell it out a bit more clearly for the uninitiated, or link appropriately? —Christian Campbell 11:21, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Good suggestion. Okay, to respond to this, I created a page on Big band remote, inserted link on Artie Shaw page and will add to the new page in the future. Pepso2 (talk) 15:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Citations & References

See Wikipedia:Footnotes for an explanation of how to generate footnotes using the <ref(erences/)> tags Nhl4hamilton (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Summit Ridge Drive

This was not, as stated here, a big band number but a Gramercy Five number from c. 1940. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.214.62.215 (talk) 22:10, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Rosalie

Who sings Rosalie? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.241.114.24 (talk) 22:21, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Tony Pastor. - Tim, 14 July, 2009. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.68.57.211 (talk) 03:02, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Can someone edit his wives in his biography section? It is not showing properly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ExtraBreze (talk • contribs) 17:36, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Sources

Hi Karst I'm not sure if I'm doing this correctly but I'm answering your request that you left on my own talk page re: my contribution to the Artie Shaw article. I apologise for not getting back to you sooner but I am more of a Wikipedia consumer than editor so I do not actually take the time to log in to the site very often. Hence I did not get your note until now (19 January 2015).

I began writing a reply about 5 hours ago and my fingers took over. I just cut and pasted it to a notepad file to save because it got going in a direction it never should have. The short answer to your question is no, my post is not based on Nolan's book.

A condensed answer of what I did begin to write as a response to your question is this> in perhaps open defiance of Wiki guidelines, I posted what some might consider "original research". Actually it's not "research" of any kind in the sense of burrowing through what others have already written. Shortly after Artie Shaw formed his last band in December, 1983 I became involved with it. Artie built the band around local (Boston, MA) clarinetist, Dick Johnson. At the time I was a student in music school at Berklee in Boston, and already knew Dick because of his reputation and the fact that he could be seen playing just about anywhere in the area on any given night in groups he led or were led by others. By late 1984 I was getting involved with the band and from then on, until after Artie's death in 2004, I worked mostly behind the scenes as a music librarian, copyist, and "forensic" orchestrator, (re-orchestrating arrangements whose scores are lost and whose sets of parts are also incomplete). I was also a saxophone player in the band, when my own professional calendar permitted my performing with it. On musical matters I was something of a "right hand man" for Dick Johnson who turned out to be something of a second "father" to me and needless to say very close friend. I first met Artie in 1985 when he came back to Boston a second time to put the band through a full week of rehearsals (from 9-6, Monday through Friday) prior to the beginning of an extended tour and series of recording sessions. It was my last semester in school and I actually skipped a full week of classes to go to those rehearsals to witness Artie thrashing out those arrangements one by one to "get them right". It was a closed environment, no press; just Artie, Dick and the musicians. Given that the rehearsals were in the rooftop restaurant of a hotel the only others who might wander in and out might be an occasional hotel employee or someone from the band management office. I knew just about everyone in the band from school and many were also vets from the Buddy Rich band. So by mid-week Artie was used to seeing me there and our first extended face to face meeting and conversation happened downstairs in the hotel lobby after one of those grueling 9- hour rehearsals ended. (I will also add that Artie was 74 years old at the time too.) The last day of that week, Artie and I had dinner together and we did not adjourn until after 10:00PM. Given the role I assumed later on, Artie and I struck up a professional as well as personal relationship that began that week. It grew out of my enthusiasm for the band and Dick Johnson's assessment of my intentions and my sincere desire to help quantify, establish and preserve Artie's legacy in popular music and jazz. From 1987-1996 I spent a lot of that time working on the road as a musician myself with various Broadway shows, but was still part of the "inner circle" of the Shaw band and its management and whenever I was in LA while on tour I would call Artie and he invited me to his home on a few occasions. Over the years from 1985 until his death then, I had what some may consider unparalleled access to the great musician. In the process I also had total access to the 700+ surviving compositions and arrangements that made up the libraries of the various Shaw orchestras of the past and was able to consult directly with Artie on many questions I had that pertained to all that music and the creation of it. I also was fortunate to gain insight to particular conceptual notions of what Artie had in mind when he formed his various bands and orchestras from 1936-1955. It was a life experience that at the time I largely took for granted that today I look back on and realize more and more as time passes how special that time was, and that I was fortunate to spend such a large chunk of my life wrapped up in something so musically rich.

So what I wrote is not based on Nolan's book. It's based on my life as a working professional musician, contact with hundreds of older, now long gone musicians of that era. On the one hand it's not any sort of research and on another it's a lifetime of research given that I've never stopped reading about it and trying to get as complete as grasp as possible on the entire period. And my own music library that I've collected, bought, transcribed and written myself is now well over 6,000 big band arrangements filling 110 boxes that encompass the entire swing era and beyond to the present. After getting to know Artie and working so close to the band and being in the center of that music library for so long, I am usually not interested in what other contemporary writers have to say and have written about Shaw. Many writers can't get past revisionist nonsense about the swing era and the bands it was made up of and many use the big bands and that era to make blatantly false categorical statements about the entire idiom before they even get to adequately assess Shaw and his role in the music of that time and genre. I've done enough research and read enough on my own to recognize mis-quoted text from other books and criticism of quotes taken completely out of the context in which they were uttered, without taking into consideration the larger picture of what was going on at the time in Artie's musical and personal world. Needless to say I am at the very least skeptical or suspicious about what pretty much every contemporary writer has written about Shaw, with one exception, namely Richard Sudhalter in his book: "Lost Chords". It was a relief for me to read the two chapters Sudhalter wrote about Shaw, in that it was the first time I ever saw in print something that resembled the Artie Shaw I got to know. George T. Simon's writing in "The Big Bands" is a probably the most reliable first hand account of Shaw's work in it's day and Leo Walker's "Big Band Almanac" also provides some interesting perspectives. My only problem with Walker's BBA is that it is factually incorrect on a lot of details pertaining to many bands as well as Shaw's but he at least seems to present the most honest assessment of what it must have been like for a music-business insider to deal with Artie from that perspective when Shaw was performing regularly and at the height of his career.

So in the end I'll stand on what I wrote in the Shaw article on WikiP. And I am prepared to shoot down supposedly "respectable" resources on Artie and his music, including what is somewhat regretfully becoming the "go-to" book as a "supposedly" reliable and complete discography. Without getting down to the many basic erroneous factual mistakes it contains, the book is written with the literary style of an over-zealous fan who can't control their worship for a pop artist than a work to be taken seriously as a reference book that is supposed to be a respectable definitive assessment of its subject. And yes, I am talking about Vladimir Simosko's abhorrent book on Shaw. My own personal opinions of and writing on Artie Shaw is the result of my own personal involvement with the man and the operation of his last band for close to 25 years, that some people have the nerve to call a "ghost band". When I hear that, right off the bat it tells me they don't even know what a ghost band is. But for the 25 years that Dick Johnson was fronting it one thing is certain: It was Artie Shaw's last band. Dick was firmly in control of just about everything it did but it was Artie's band. For one thing, if Artie didn't like what he heard, he would not have allowed it to exist. He assembled it, gave it a musical direction, charted it's course, demanded the best and toured with it for three years to make sure it got off on the right foot. When he wasn't officially appearing with it as its frontman, he was known to show up unexpectedly in the audience to see and hear what it was doing in his name. He gradually receded into the background because of his advancing age (he was getting close to 80 years old after all) but even that was not all because of his own basic desire. It was because of the typical stunts promoters and bookers would try to pull that Artie was well aware of could happen and did. In short, what I am referring to did happen on numerous occasions and all it did was once again justify Artie's life-long disdain for the parasites of the music business and how it operates. If I spelled out what exactly happened here too would see why he had utter contempt for "the business" and was fed up with it LONG ago.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bblegacy (talk • contribs) 08:47, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Writing career

There's very little about his writing, and what there is is very difficult to find. Would be great if that could be expanded. Johnny "ThunderPeel2001" Walker (talk) 17:45, 27 May 2019 (UTC)