Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After four years of retirement and reflection, Clarinetist Artie Shaw was back in the music business last week, at 43. He mounted the bandstand at Manhattan's jazz-bent Embers, looked unsmilingly over the jabbering crowd and spoke into the microphone: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that it's almost axiomatic that music sounds better against silence. Not dead silence-just enough so that we can hear ourselves play." It might have been the old Artie Shaw, the one who called jitterbugs "morons" back...
...clatter continued, but Shaw turned to the group he calls the Gramercy Five (nostalgically named 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...
...little band began to perk up. Vibraphonist Joe Roland bent over his instrument like a chef over a hot stove. Guitarist Tal Farlow, who had gazed vaguely into space as he played, began to take an interest in the way his fingers rambled up & down the fingerboard. Clarinetist Shaw began to interpolate light-hearted musical comments on his own flights-the raised eyebrow of a grace note, the shrugging arpeggio, the delayed take, the impudent echo. His glum face relaxed into smiles, and the crowd began to hear the new Artie Shaw...
While Mr. Cotten and Miss Sullavan are up-braiding the producer for tricking them into Sabrina Fair, the two stars might have a word with author Samuel Taylor. Taylor has provided them with a parody of Shavian comedy. Shaw's good-natured snobbery, his interminable stretches of dialogue, his predictable surprise ending are all belabored here. Lacking only is Shaw's sincerity and wit: In the part forced on Cotten, the "superman" seems barely capable of running his own life. And any clever lines are spare indeed, while almost-clever lines pop up again and again to mar the play...
Offensively, Lowell did poorly except for that one deep penetration. But the defense, bulwarked by tackle Sam Shaw, held the Bellboys well, the only lapse being on Hall...