"Let's Face It"

Bandleader Artie Shaw had tried feeding long-hair music to shorthair audiences (in Manhattan's Bop City--TIME, April 25) and wound up, at least figuratively, "with egg on my face." But he had learned a lot: "Let's face it, I was being pretty rigid."

Artie had discovered that "it's necessary to give an audience some familiar points of reference before you can expect it to go along on new things." He thought a band made up just about like the one that had first won him fame & fortune ten years ago (eight brasses, five saxophones and a rhythm section), playing old Shaw specials like Begin the Beguine, Frenesi and Dancing in the Dark, might lure his strayed followers back into the tent. Once they were in, perhaps he could give them Prokofiev, Ravel, Berezowsky et al. in small doses.

Last week, on the opening night of a nationwide tour, the first part of Artie's experiment worked. A record-breaking crowd, including a good many of the jammy jitterbug type which apparently hides under logs in the daytime, was lured into Boston's huge Symphony Ballroom. The Shaw faithful, plus a few horn-rimmed jazz intellectuals, clustered around the bandstand, stood through it all without moving much but their gum-chewing muscles. Right there, any resemblance to success stopped.

When Artie's boys began unraveling Ravel's Piece en Forme de Habanera, the crowd around the bandstand applauded politely, but even the most ardent jitterers had to stop dancing. Cried one in petulant exasperation: "Artie, you stink!"

Others attempted more precise analysis: "It's all right to play Ravel, but not with this band and not in a place where people want to dance. Artie is O.K. when he plays the Shaw stuff that everyone likes--like Stardust. But most of the time he's too kittenish, too much cat." Said another: "His orchestrations are awful, he's imitating too many other bands." Actually, Artie had been using a good many of his original ten-year-old dance orchestrations.

No one was unhappier than Artie himself. "This place is awful," he moaned. "The noise bounces back from the walls and ceiling until I can't hear what's going on. The musicians get nervous and play louder than ever, and that makes things even worse. We spend weeks rehearsing every little nuance and all we produce is noise.

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