Word: frenesi
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...Newbury Park, Calif. Though not as popular as his rival, Big Band giant Benny Goodman, Shaw was more adventurous, rejecting formulas to experiment with instrumentation and arrangements. Between frequent retirements, he recorded with his eponymous Big Band, the Gramercy Five and other groups, producing such hits as Frenesi, Star Dust and Summit Ridge Drive. A sometimes irascible perfectionist who had eight wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner), he had little patience for the music business, which he quit for good...
...instrumental virtuosity. Why did he suddenly walk away from it all? In 1954, after two high-flying decades at the head of ensembles as popular as -- and often more innovative than -- Glenn Miller's, Tommy Dorsey's and Benny Goodman's, after a succession of hits (Begin the Beguine, Frenesi) that sold millions of records around the world, Shaw, then 44, packed up his clarinet and quit the music business...
...spot is a perfect refuge for a remnant of wilting flower children, including Zoyd Wheeler, a part-time keyboard player, handyman and marijuana farmer. Along with his teenage daughter Prairie, Zoyd still mourns the departure and later disappearance of his ex-wife Frenesi, a onetime '60s radical who was seduced into becoming a Government informer by a notoriously malevolent federal prosecutor named Brock Vond. He has apparently not finished hounding the Wheelers and others. As one observer notes, "Nobody knows just what's goin' on, except there's a nut case leading a heavily armed strike force loose in California...
...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...
...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...