The Man Who Walked Away

By Christopher Porterfield

PERFORMER: ARTIE SHAW

ALBUM: THE LAST RECORDINGS

LABEL: MUSICMASTERS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Shaw's truncated jazz career was a great one. Would a longer one have been greater?

NOBODY WILL EVER FIGURE IT out. Artie Shaw had achieved everything that success as a bandleader in his era could bestow: pop-idol celebrity, money, movie-star wives, near veneration for his 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.

To say he has explained his action would be to both understate and overstate the case. He has made virtually a second career of explaining it, in countless interviews right down to the present, which finds him, at 81, having divorced his eighth wife, living in cheerfully cantankerous solitude 40 miles outside Los Angeles. He was revulsed by all the crassness, goes the litany. He felt imprisoned by his fame, condemned to repeat old hits instead of being free to grow and explore. He wanted to go out at the top. He wanted to write (he has published an autobiography and two volumes of fiction). But none of these reasons has dislodged the conviction, still held by many fans, critics and fellow musicians, that a gift like Shaw's is something you just don't abandon.

The Last Recordings can only deepen the mystery, for the new two-CD set displays Shaw at the peak of his powers. Recorded with the Gramercy Five, as Shaw called the combo he occasionally assembled around him, these 20 tracks were laid down only months before he retired. Some were fleetingly available on LP years ago; the rest were never released. They are sublime chamber jazz -- close-knit yet relaxed, subtle, pulsing with the interplay of brilliant sidemen like pianist Hank Jones and guitarist Tal Farlow.

Shaw contributes one revelatory solo after another. His tone is crystalline, his lines distinctively long and sinuous, full of witty, sometimes startling interjections and exuberant flurries into his laserlike top register, but always settling back into a sleekly lyrical groove. He probes the recesses of ballads like Yesterdays and Imagination with a risky intimacy. On middle-tempo numbers like Rough Ridin' and his own composition Mysterioso, he twists and flashes through the beat with a finger-snapping insouciance.

Most intriguingly, the album shows Shaw crossing the shadow line that divided swing from bop and the other modernist idioms that took over after 1950. In the hands of most other players, including Shaw's great rival Goodman, the clarinet did not make this transition -- at least not without sacrificing its warmth and lyricism -- which is why it soon was eclipsed by the saxophone as a primary jazz voice. But here Shaw effortlessly absorbs some of bop's angular chromaticism, and his out-of-rhythm codas, all fluttery murmurings or boiling surges of notes, seem to anticipate the free-form jazz of the '60s and '70s. These last recordings, like so much in his career, raise the essential Shaw perplexity: the richness of what was, the wistfulness of what might have been.