With a Nail File

Even when dance fans cheered his music loudest, Bandleader Artie Shaw felt he really wanted to be a longhair. Now that he had made up his mind to do something about it, his big problem was just how long he should let it grow.

Jazz concerts, which most ambitious bandleaders now aspire to, were out, as far as he was concerned. Bebop, the newest fad in such concerts, left him cold. "Hell, Bach did more bebop in one piece than those guys have ever done." Still, he couldn't quite see his reddish-brown hair at Carnegie-Hall length either; the audiences there were "too special, too chi-chi." He settled on a middle solution: playing Carnegie-Hall stuff for a bebop public. He foresaw that it would be a little "like attacking the Great Wall of China with a nail file." Last week, nonetheless, he hustled into the experiment.

Warming Up. By 7 p.m. the sidewalk in front of Broadway's garish old Harem club, redecorated and renamed "Bop City," was jammed. Inside, the 40 musicians of Artie's new symphony orchestra were warming up, and so was the tight-packed, sweltering crowd. When the musicians were all tuned up, the master of ceremonies solemnly announced "Mr. Artie Shaw." Artie threaded his way through the orchestra with the nervous pace of a Toscanini.

Artie had plenty to worry about. "Most of these kids have never heard instruments played straight, with no straining, no hipped-up effects. These people are geared to having things souped up and dumped right in their laps."

What Artie finally hit them with was

Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev. Beating time with the warmth and expression of a railroad semaphore, he did his best, but the music floated drearily out into the happy din in a dull monochrome of sound.

Cooling Off. At first, most of his listeners strained to hear. Then some of those out of range resumed their interrupted conversations, while others, in range, stared across their food & drink in joyless apathy. When Artie picked up his clarinet for a solo, his fans perked up; but out came Nicolai Berezowsky's concerto, and interest palled. Then flashbulbs began to pop; first-night celebrities queued up to have their pictures taken with new Cinemactor Kirk (Champion) Douglas.

Moaned Artie: "I was standing up there with egg on my face trying to play and I couldn't hear a thing."

By the time the show had finally ended at 4 a.m., Ella Fitzgerald and the Kai Winding Boptet had livened things up a bit, in between Artie's three concert shows. But Artie wasn't giving up. He planned to soup up the amplifiers so he could really dump it in their laps. And he thought he would change some of his programming--he had learned enough, he said, "to lecture at Juilliard on public reaction to modern music." So he was just going to keep on attacking the Great Wall of China with his little nail file.

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