Native's Return

After four years of retirement and reflection, Clarinetist Artie Shaw was back in the music business last week, at 43. He mounted the bandstand at Manhattan's jazz-bent Embers, looked unsmilingly over the jabbering crowd and spoke into the microphone: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that it's almost axiomatic that music sounds better against silence. Not dead silence--just enough so that we can hear ourselves play." It might have been the old Artie Shaw, the one who called jitterbugs "morons" back in 1939.

The clatter continued, but Shaw turned to the group he calls the Gramercy Five (nostalgically named after his 1940 recording combo), stomped out a beat and began to play. For a while he sounded like a musical D.P., playing as if he could not decide between his old swing style and something considerably more jittery and "progressive." He mixed old Shaw favorites (Begin the Beguine, Frenesi) with such new Shaw originals as Overdrive and Lugubrious.

As the early crowd gave way to the late one, the little band began to perk up. Vibraphonist Joe Roland bent over his instrument like a chef over a hot stove. Guitarist Tal Farlow, who had gazed vaguely into space as he played, began to take an interest in the way his fingers rambled up & down the fingerboard. Clarinetist Shaw began to interpolate light-hearted musical comments on his own flights--the raised eyebrow of a grace note, the shrugging arpeggio, the delayed take, the impudent echo. His glum face relaxed into smiles, and the crowd began to hear the new Artie Shaw.

Artie is, he says, both older and wiser. With his balding head now shaved ascetically, he is far from the distraught young hero who deserted his bandstand and disappeared into Mexico 14 years ago, and far, he says, from the compulsive husband who married and divorced six times.* Part of the change, Artie thinks, came from thinking a lot of things out in a self-analytical autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella, which he wrote on his dairy farm at Pine Plains, N.Y. In the book, he described his zooming rise from Manhattan's Lower East Side to the top of what he called the musical "dung heap," and bared his confrontation of an ageless question: Where am I?

The mere writing apparently cleared the Shavian atmosphere, and now he speaks quite calmly about his early phobias. "Of course I was contemptuous of the crowds," he says. "I was so insecure I thought they were yelling for something that was beneath contempt. The same thing goes for my marriages: I felt that any woman who loved me couldn't be any good, or she wouldn't want me. Now I think I can build a real marriage, and I think I am. And now, I can play what people want me to--but I play it the way I feel it."

The well-adjusted Artie came out of his retirement last spring for a brief but money-making tour through the Southwest, and "found myself liking to play again." He liked it so much, in fact, that he is already scheming the way he did in his youth, this time to tour colleges in a double bill with the Gramercy Five and a classical string quartet. "I found I could keep up with what the kids were doing," he says. "Hell, I wasn't sure, you know. Lots of us, as we grow older, find we can't."

* Among his wives: Cinemactresses Lana Turner (No. 3), Ava Gardner (No. 5) and Novelist Kathleen Winsor (No. 6). Last year he married Cinemactress Doris (The Lost Weekend) Dowling, is the father of a six-week-old son.

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