Artie Shaw

I first heard clarinetist Artie Shaw when I was looking into the career of Benny Goodman a year or so ago. I more or less dismissed the music and (with complete irrational snobbery) decided to not include him in the blog. I felt the music came across as too smooth without any jazz sensibility with the exception of his recording of Stardust. I could not have been more wrong. Artie Shaw was a consummate musician with a very colouful career and life and to not at least tip my worthless jazz hat in his direction would be to render the intention of this blog meaningless.



I've been playing a greatest hits of Artie Shaw quite a lot recently. It's impossible not to when the first two songs on the collection are Begin The Beguine and the aforementioned Stardust. The former is just one of those songs that you recognise but you don't know exactly where from. The song was an absolutely massive hit when released in 1938. Shaw himself attributes it to the fact that it was a complex and challenging song but one that contained a very strong melody that was in contrast to the popular Basie style riff arrangements that were popular at the time.



What sets Artie Shaw apart from his contemporaries was his complete contempt of public life and the music industry. In his short musical career he led more than ten orchestras and disbanded them all within months (it seems that he threw in the towel more times than Little Richard!). Yet he always managed to strike gold on his comebacks working with such talents as Billie Holiday, Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge. Check out Stardust with its utterly sublime trumpet solo from Billy Butterfield on trumpet and Jack Jenney on trombone recorded in 1940. (Shaw himself hits some great high notes on this track as well).



He served in World War II in the Pacific theatre and earned a medical discharge due to almost losing his hearing after a Japanese bomb attack on his unit. His return to music in the late 40's saw him produce some of the more innovative and inventive music of his career. He tried his hand at classical clarinet and even took a liking to bebop. ("The first time I heard Charlie Parker, I thought "Very interesting." He was doing some things chordally, that hadn't been done before. I came from the same people.") Yet, like for most of the swing era guys who tried to break into this new scene, it was to prove a commercial flop. 

Shaw's legacy was his striving quest for perfection. After achieving all he felt that he could from his music he put down the clarinet for the final time in 1954 at the age of 44 - staggering considering that he lived until his mid 90s. He spent the remainder of his life focusing on his other love - literature - and wrote a number of works including a biography entitled "The Trouble With Cinderella". The book was surprising in that it hardly mentions his eight marriages including those with such stars as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. I suppose it has something in common with this blog post then!

Roy Eldridge

"Every time he's on he does the best he can, no matter what the conditions are. And Roy is so intense about everything, so that it's far more important to him to dare, to try to achieve a particular peak, even if he falls on his ass in the attempt, than it is to play safe. That's what jazz is all about." Norman Granz

While researching the life and music of Lester Young, one of the names that kept popping up was Roy Eldridge. What I knew of him was the (perhaps somewhat cliched) line that he was the musical link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Such simplifications seem to be rife in jazz history as historians try to create links between the different genres. This is certainly true in my opinion of Roy Eldridge.

Known to his peers as "Little Jazz" due to his short stature, Eldridge was to be one of the most important trumpet players in jazz in a career that spanned five decades. I first heard him on the aforementioned Lester Young recordings that were made for the Verve label in the mid-late1950's. His range was spectacular and his tone was a little raspy - yet his riffs were never tasteless. He was steeped in the swing tradition, as was Young, but his style continued to evolve so that he was never outdated by the sweeping changes that occurred in the music with the advent of bebop and beyond. 

Eldridge's trumpet playing is odd in that he was a musician who was not directly influenced by Louis Armstrong. This probably set him apart as he gained popularity playing with various swing outfits in the 1930's. Stylistically Eldridge himself stated that he was far more influenced by sax players than by trumpet players. It is argued that as Armstrong's playing became more predictable and less players were adapting to the decline of swing, Eldridge was probably the top trumpet player to come out of the 30's into the bebop 40s. His big breakthrough came with his association with Benny Goodman alumnus, drummer Gene Krupa, with whom he was to make many remarkable recordings in the early 40s. 

One such recording was "Rocking Chair", a fantastic example of Eldridge's chops, recorded in July 1941. Stylistically the song really is a connect the dots in terms of jazz lineage - a "sweet" horn section makes the song flow while the swing beat is held up by Krupa on the brushes (a sound which I personally have evolved a real like for since hearing Buddy Rich on "The Lester Young Trio" album). Eldridge goes through the entire register of the trumpet and hits some dizzying high notes - all without losing an ounce of soul that the song calls for. Apparently Eldridge was "blind drunk" during this recording. After sobering up he begged Krupa never to release it. Two months later his pal Ben Webster played the song back to him. Eldridge remarked, "Who's that? It's not Louis, it's not Diz." It blew his mind after he discovered it was actually him on the record. Check it out:

There is probably something in the theory that he was the musical link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. His style was innovative - he could play extremely fast - and Gillespie stated that "he was the messiah of our time." The song "Heckler's Hop" for example was to prove influential in directing Gillespie's style. Recorded in the late 30's with a small combo the song is fast and edgy. It's not hard to see how a song like this would have influenced many of the bebop players searching for a new musical direction in the early 40s. 

He toured with many big names throughout the 40's, including a stint leading his own band. He emerged from a crisis of confidence after a successful stop in Paris in the early 1950's and it was around this time that he teamed up with Granz and the Verve label. He was prolific for the remainder of the decade. Health issues slowed him down later in his career. He became the leader of a house band in Manhattan during the 1970s and recorded sporadically. His final recording was the majestic "Montreaux 1977", a fitting album to close a long illustrious career. 

Chu Berry

“He’s one of the fastest, most inventive and creative minds that has ever been in my band. He doesn’t set his choruses, he continually bobbing up with something he hasn’t done before.” Fletcher Henderson

Leon "Chu" Berry was one of the most prominent tenor saxophone players of the 1930's. His reputation was on a par with those swing sax players that proceeded Coleman Hawkins. Yet he possessed a very different style from Hawkins and he showed no fear in trying to push the instrument further, as jazz evolved from the New Orleans/ Chicago style in the 20's to Swing in the 30's. Berry was even present at some of the early sessions at Minton's Playhouse in New York, the time of early bebop.

He began his recording career by playing on one of the last sessions of blues legend, Mamie Smith. This more or less defined his early work, by sitting in on the sessions of Benny Carter, Spike Hughes, Teddy Wilson and Billie Holliday. The bulk of his recordings were with the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and later, Cab Calloway. He was renowned for pushing his fellow band members to new heights as he sought a way of developing his own sound and jazz music itself.

His technique was not as growling as Coleman Hawkins or Ben Webster. His sound conveyed a much smoother, mellower tone with a wonderful vibrato. While Webster could display his trademark guttural sound on a high tempo number like Cotton Tail, Berry could also show his chops but with a much softer tone on a song like "Sittin' In". While I'm not saying that one song is better than the other it does prove that this was an extremely versatile instrument and that sax players of this era could express themselves in different ways. This song was from a fantastic session recorded in late 1938 with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Check it out.

The session also included Berry and Eldridge's experimental version of Body & Soul. Recorded almost a year before Hawkins' seminal version, it showed that they were not afraid of experimentation.

Chu Berry was to sadly die just a few years later at the age of 33. While touring with the Cab Calloway Band he became involved in a fatal car accident. It's a testament to his talent that, although he died so young, the body of work he left was to ensure his place among the greats of swing tenor saxophone and as a jazz pioneer.