“Frenesi” by Artie Shaw

At #1: December 21, 1940 – March 8, 1941 (12 weeks)
Still alive? No. Arthur Jacob Arshawsky died December 30, 2004



According to Dave’s Music Database, Artie Shaw recorded this song after returning from Mexico. The song is written by Alberto Dominguez, and was adapted by others before Shaw recorded his version which was arranged by William Grant Still.

More interesting to me is how Shaw ended up in Mexico in the first place. This wasn’t Shaw’s first hit, and definitely not his biggest. Shaw was just 25 or 26 when he broke through in 1936 with an arrangement called “Interlude in B-Flat”. And two years later, Shaw would arrange Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” which would lead many to conclude that his band was better than Benny Goodman’s. (The comparison was natural, as both Shaw and Goodman played the clarinet.)

Shaw’s relationship with his own fame was – troubled. He saw himself as a composer, a writer, undoubtedly as a thinker and intellectual at some level. He appeared to have a lot of contempt for the music business of the time and the prevailing groupthink of music fans. I suspect that he was very hard to get along with – he was certainly unlucky in love, having been married eight times.

By 1939, he had had it. He took a sabbatical, one of many during his career. But Shaw was at the top of his game when he walked away. He decided to go to Acapulco in Mexico and it was there where “Frenesi” came to fruition. My understanding is that he stayed in Acapulco for three months until he saved a woman from drowning, leading the press to find him again and chase him back home.

(I find Shaw’s life more fascinating that his music. I don’t “get” “Begin the Beguine”. It’s a good song – I suppose – but it doesn’t send me into fits of rapture and if I never heard it again I probably wouldn’t even notice it was gone. The same with “Frenesi”. I suspect the music of the 1940s and 1950s is going to be a long slog. Then again, a lot of instrumental music is very hard for me to take.)
So after he came back with “Frenesi”, Shaw put together another band. He formed the Gramercy Five, volunteered for service in World War II and led a military band, the fate of famous bandleaders who volunteered.

John Andrews over at wsws.orghas this about Shaw’s take on politics:

Shaw was on the executive committee of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which included Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn from the entertainment world as well as Albert Einstein and Max Weber. The organization was accused of being a front for the Communist Party, and at the July 2, 1946 meeting, a minority introduced a resolution condemning communism as tantamount to fascism. In response to a statement by Ronald Reagan in support, Shaw declared that the Soviet Union was more democratic than the United States and offered to recite the Soviet constitution to prove it. After the resolution’s defeat, Reagan resigned from the organization and became a spokesperson for red-baiters within Hollywood.

Shaw would be blacklisted, but he probably didn’t mind being out of the public eye. He finally gave up performing in 1954. If he ever performed music or played the clarinet it was in the privacy of his own home. According to Smithsonian Magazine:

He went on to become a nationally ranked marksman and expert fly fisherman. When asked recently if he still practiced on his clarinets, he said, "I haven't played them for 50 years.”

He continued to read voraciously, and worked on an autobiography and short stories. While the name of Benny Goodman might still ring a bell (didn’t they make a movie about him?), Artie Shaw seems to have escaped from the 21st century’s popular memory. I suspect he wouldn’t have minded.