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Artie Shaw began playing the ukulele at ten and took up the alto saxophone at twelve. In his teenage years, he formed his first band, the Bellevue Ramblers, performing locally. He started playing the clarinet in 1926 and spent several years refining his skills with various Florida and Ohio bands, often also arranging and playing tenor sax. Arriving in New York in 1929, he participated in many recording sessions and quickly gained a reputation for technical mastery of his instrument. In his 1952 autobiography "The Trouble with Cinderella," Shaw described himself as a mediocre talent who improved through countless hours of practice. Despite this modesty, he was a perfectionist to an almost obsessive degree. Known for being unconventional, highly literate, and often difficult, he disliked intrusive fans, avoided fame for its own sake, shunned publicity, and rarely gave encores. He was a gifted musician who produced a richer, cleaner clarinet sound than any of his contemporaries. Shaw once said, "I didn't play clarinet. I played music."
In 1936, Shaw formed his first band featuring a string quartet but was dissatisfied, disbanding it the next year to create a full-sized swing orchestra with three trumpets, two trombones, four saxophones, and four rhythm instruments. His first million-selling hit came with a Jerry Gray arrangement of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," which became a swing standard and established his band as one of the best. On October 26, 1938, Shaw's orchestra opened at the Hotel Lincoln's Blue Room in New York, broadcast coast-to-coast on radio. Hits followed, including "Yesterdays," "Out of Nowhere," "Nightmare" (his theme), "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise," and "Any Old Time," noted for a stunning Billie Holiday vocal. Shaw earned the nickname "King of the Clarinet," contrasting with his rival Benny Goodman, known as the "King of Swing." This rivalry was largely a publicist invention; the two shared no genuine animosity. Shaw remembered, "We weren't playing dance music. Our music was for listening primarily... If we had wanted to play just dance music, I could have saved myself an awful lot of money on some of the sidemen I paid." His sidemen included jazz legends like drummer Buddy Rich, whom he called the band's "spark plug," Georgie Auld, Johnny Best, Ray Conniff, and Billy Butterfield. Shaw also hired top singers such as Helen Forrest, Kitty Kallen, Peg La Centra, and Bea Wain. Unfortunately, Billie Holiday's time with the band was brief due to racial discrimination issues at various venues and on radio, which forced her departure.
True to his mercurial nature, Shaw disbanded the orchestra at its peak and abruptly left for self-imposed exile in Mexico. He stayed a few months, playing with local musicians and collecting traditional songs. Returning to the U.S. in January 1940, he worked on the musical Second Chorus (1940), which was a rare flop for Fred Astaire and Shaw himself later called the worst film he made. Positively, he recorded two hits discovered in Mexico: "Frenesi" and "Adios, Mariquita Linda." His new band featured a string section and a sextet core known as "Artie Shaw and His Gramercy Five." This group and its successor lasted only a few months each. Frustrated with fame, Shaw enlisted in the U.S. Navy in April 1942, forming the Rangers, a 17-piece band that toured the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal. They performed in jungles and aircraft hangars, enduring seventeen Japanese bombing attacks during island transfers. Shaw was medically discharged in November 1943 and hospitalized with severe nervous depression. Saxophonist Sam Donahue took over the wartime band, which remained popular with troops and recorded many successful V-discs. Shaw recuperated in Hollywood and later formed another 17-piece band featuring Barney Kessel on guitar, Dodo Marmarosa on piano, and arrangements by Ray Conniff. This ensemble scored hits with "S'Wonderful" and "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive." After switching to Musicraft records, Shaw incorporated more strings and woodwinds, recording several excellent Cole Porter tracks with Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones. However, this venture lasted only a year. Shaw explained, "The personal price was too great. I wanted to do other things. And I just didn't have the temperament to stay on the scene too long." His final attempt was a bop-style jazz band in 1949 that failed commercially, leading him to retire from music. By the mid-1950s, he had abandoned the clarinet and turned to writing, penning a novel about three failed marriages titled "I Love You. I Hate You. Drop Dead." His turbulent private life mirrored his career; he was married eight times, including to actresses Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Evelyn Keyes.
Shaw occasionally emerged from retirement, most notably at a London concert in June 1992 where Bob Wilber performed some of his music.
