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Text File | 1992-09-10 | 4KB | 80 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 76

MUSIC

The Man Who Walked Away


By CHRISTOPHER PORTERFIELD

    PERFORMER: Artie Shaw
    ALBUM: The Last Recordings
    LABEL: Musicmasters

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Shaw's truncated jazz career was a great
one. Would a longer one have been greater?


    Nobody will ever figure it out. Artie Shaw had achieved
everything that success as a bandleader in his era could bestow:
pop-idol celebrity, money, movie-star wives, near veneration for
his instrumental virtuosity. Why did he suddenly walk away
from it all? In 1954, after two high-flying decades at the head
of ensembles as popular as -- and often more innovative than --
Glenn Miller's, Tommy Dorsey's and Benny Goodman's, after a
succession of hits (Begin the Beguine, Frenesi) that sold
millions of records around the world, Shaw, then 44, packed up
his clarinet and quit the music business.

    To say he has explained his action would be to both
understate and overstate the case. He has made virtually a
second career of explaining it, in countless interviews right
down to the present, which finds him, at 81, having divorced
his eighth wife, living in cheer fully cantankerous solitude 40
miles outside Los Angeles. He was revulsed by all the crassness,
goes the litany. He felt imprisoned by his fame, condemned to
repeat old hits instead of being free to grow and explore. He
wanted to go out at the top. He wanted to write (he has
published an autobiography and two volumes of fiction). But none
of these reasons has dislodged the conviction, still held by
many fans, critics and fellow musicians, that a gift like Shaw's
is something you just don't abandon.

    The Last Recordings can only deepen the mystery, for the
new two-CD set displays Shaw at the peak of his powers.
Recorded with the Gramercy Five, as Shaw called the combo he
occasionally assembled around him, these 20 tracks were laid
down only months before he retired. Some were fleetingly
available on LP years ago; the rest were never released. They
are sublime chamber jazz -- close-knit yet relaxed, subtle,
pulsing with the interplay of brilliant sidemen like pianist
Hank Jones and guitarist Tal Farlow.

    Shaw contributes one revelatory solo after another. His
tone is crystalline, his lines distinctively long and sinuous,
full of witty, sometimes startling interjections and exuberant
flurries into his laserlike top register, but always settling
back into a sleekly lyrical groove. He probes the recesses of
ballads like Yesterdays and Imagination with a risky intimacy.
On middle-tempo numbers like Rough Ridin' and his own
composition Mysterioso, he twists and flashes through the beat
with a finger-snapping insouciance.

    Most intriguingly, the album shows Shaw crossing the
shadow line that divided swing from bop and the other modernist
idioms that took over after 1950. In the hands of most other
players, including Shaw's great rival Goodman, the clarinet did
not make this transition -- at least not without sacrificing its
warmth and lyricism -- which is why it soon was eclipsed by the
saxophone as a primary jazz voice. But here Shaw effortlessly
absorbs some of bop's angular chromaticism, and his
out-of-rhythm codas, all fluttery murmurings or boiling surges
of notes, seem to anticipate the free-form jazz of the '60s and
'70s. These last recordings, like so much in his career, raise
the essential Shaw perplexity: the richness of what was, the
wistfulness of what might have been.