Introduction: It barely seems worth a mention, but....

And in the midst of the arithmetical craziness, just as the calculators surrender, another death goes barely noticed. Artie Shaw, a name barely heard since those heady days of Okinawa and Nagasaki; I guess we have to call him a popular entertainer. Long illness. He was ninety-four. 'Bygone' doesn't cover it really, when you saw a century. 'Bygone' is a couple of Dr. Whos ago. Bolan is bygone. Artie Shaw's stardom predates rock and roll: as a recording artist he was contemporary with Robert Johnson. It predates Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters: indeed Shaw's 1930s orchestral sophistication made Miller's 'sweet' sound possible; one of the more undesirable by-products of Shaw's art. It predates bebop, predates Sinatra, predates Ellington's symphonic phase. He'd written a tell-it-all autobiography, 'The Trouble With Cinderella', while Sir Alex Ferguson was throwing his toys out of his pram. He'd recorded a jazz clarinet concerto ten years before Stravinsky did. He forsaw the crisis in the industry which killed off the big bands, and got out rather than chase rainbows for ever decreasing returns. And all this, when for fully half a century, he refused to play a note.

His work, particularly the early pre-hysteria stuff, might pall sugary to stereo ears, and critics have had their dig over the decades over the legitimacy of the word 'jazz' when talking about Shaw's playing; a subtle paradox when you consider, in his time, he lent respectability to an art famed for its illegitimacy. Yet, in the seventy years since he first came to prominence, you'd be hard pushed to name half a dozen people who tried as hard as he did, for the evolution of popular music, for his instrument, for the artistic edification of 'ordinary' folk.

Part One: In which our hero finds fame and glory

He was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, in East Manhattan, New York, in 1910. His parents spoke Yiddish at home, and he later railed at the anti-Semitism he experienced: maybe it was this that gave him his single-minded drive and acknowledged ascerbic demeanour. He took up alto saxophone aged twelve and played professionally aged about fifteen. Strictly white-school, in the era when Frankie Trumbauer's rubber-band C-melody was the order of the day. When he was about 16, as he tells it, he got a job on a boat that involved doubling up on clarinet, so he bought one for the trip, figuring he'd learn it on the way. The self-taught are like wild grasses: most of them end their days scorned and stunted, but there is such untamed variety that occasionally one outgrows all the regular plants and becomes a prized species. Quite how a white boy playing white jazz turned himself in a couple of short years into one of the greatest exponents of the clarinet, perhaps of all time, says a lot, I think, about Jewish ingenuity, the enforced adaptability of marginalised culture. By the mid-1930s, he was considered proficient enough to play some Billie Holiday sessions, (the recording studio was always a little more colour-blind than the live circuit) and he was soon in demand. As he got better, he found himself with artistic pretensions, torn between the stylistic demands of the day and his own aesthetic. He never squared the circle fully. In 1935, his first finished work, 'Interlude In B Flat' for clarinet and string quartet, generated sufficient critical acclaim for him to start his own band. His early recordings have some good personnel. The clarinet-playing is flawless. He tried different instrumental combinations, went from strings to a straight-ahead dance band; already there was a certain originality to his arrangements. But in 1937, he disbanded. He planned to write a book about Bix Beiderbecke; or maybe a ballet. He was soon back, though, and it was, for him, a fairly mundane B-side of Cole Porter's 'Begin The Beguine' of all things, in 1938, that took off. A collusion of coincidences, a classic serendipity, made him famous overnight.

For one thing, Benny Goodman had reached his height. Another poor Jewish kid, this one from Chicago, classically-trained, business-nosed, had finally hit the winning formula playing heated up versions of Fletcher Henderson. Now the press wanted a foil, an anti-Goodman, and Shaw fitted the bill perfectly. He was markedly better looking. He was slightly dangerous, unpredictable, and most unlike Goodman, something of a hit with the girls. The other key to his success sounds odd to contemporary ears, but Shaw's four-square recording of 'Begin The Beguine' had a rhythmic complexity that was welcomed as sheer novelty after two solid years of thud-thud swing. The beguine itself, one of those hip-swivelling dances from the French Caribbean, became a national craze. You can argue that this was the birth of so-called 'Latin jazz'. I wouldn't accuse Shaw of such a crime. It topped the charts for several weeks, though, and Artie's flair for the atypical had, paradoxically, given him mainstream fame.

Part Two: In which our hero finds fame and glory aren't enough by a stretch

Shaw's 'band within a band' was characteristically obtuse: mixing guitar, bass, drums, trumpet, and harpsichord on subtly experimental material, often written by himself. Some think it his best work: it's certainly the most improvised. And in its careful, studied cool it predates the sea-change of bebop, certainly more than Teddy Wilson's stride. He went back to the small groups in the 1950s, at the end of his career: but however beautifully he played, his art was never going to see chart success again. Goodman struggled on and on into the 1970s, trading tired licks with Stephane Grappelli, one missing Krupa, the other missing Django, way past either of them's bedtime.

In 1940 Artie Shaw retired, again, and took himself off to Mexico. He came back a few months later, and recorded 'Frenesi', and it all kicked off again. This time they were actively digging his penchant for the exotic on its own terms. 'Frenesi', to be musicological about it, is a lilting divertimento, containing a number of short sub-themes, combining the melodic ornamentation of a Mexican song with Shaw's own orchestrated jazz, featuring oboes, French horns, pizzicato 'cellos, the lot. It sounds almost twee now, but to the US charts it was like Claude Debussy himself had put together a popular beat combo.

Shaw was married several times. As he famously put it: "in those days you just weren't allowed to shack up". His wives included Lana Turner, the 'sweater girl': he figured a wife would cook your breakfast, but Lana wasn't up for that. As far back as 1932, he'd married a girl he'd just met, only for her parents to turn up the next morning to take her back home, with a flea in her ear for upsetting them and staying out all night. He married the woman who wrote 'Forever Amber', Kathleen Winsor, and discovered to his shock she wasn't that intellectual at all. He married Betty Kern, the daughter of Jerome, amid proposals of collaborations, but nothing came of that. He fended off teenage speed-freak Judy Garland, with a gallantry and sensitivity not noted of Hollywood lore. He married Ava Gardner, for about five minutes. The only book she'd ever read was 'Gone With The Wind', and she'd only read that in case of a screen test. He did settle for a while, with the actress Evelyn Keyes, who was actually in 'Gone With The Wind'.

He railed at critics and press-hounds, from time to time, once famously calling his fans "morons". To him stardom was a rather silly game. When asked, he said he liked the music well enough, but was "sick of the Artie Shaw business", and was thinking of quitting for good. When the war swallowed America, with Hollywood's dashing action-men dashing for the cover of any physical defect that came to hand, Shaw joined the Navy, did basic training, and then they asked him to join Glen Miller in putting a forces band together. He spent 18 months entertaining on what was pretty much the front in Asia, facing malaria and regular bombardments. He explained later that one of these sent him partly deaf. Three months in hospital, and he was back in the studio. As the Allies made those last thrusts in 1945, Shaw's obligingly straight-ahead versions of 'A Foggy Day' and 'Acc-entuate The Positive' caught the period like a photographer catching a bride's naive grin. While his haunting Eddie Sauter arrangement of 'Summertime' pointed to a future where the only real certainty was to build a different world than this. And, as he was the first to notice, the future wouldn't want big bands, or thumping fox-trots, or even clarinets, for that matter. Several years before the big bands collapsed under their own economic weight, he was off to the hills. The hackneyed tale that he broke his clarinet over his knee is complete myth, as anyone who broke their knee trying would tell you. But he jacked it all in: showbusiness, jazz, even, for a while, the USA. Somehow he'd outgrown the suit they wanted him to wear, and the games that went with it.

Part Three: Comparative liquorice stickery 101

As a composer, I suppose Shaw is a minor figure, even given that few bandleaders wrote any of their own stuff. He never studied music formally, so he never knew which rules he was breaking. He wrote of his earliest attempts at arranging, still in his teens: crawling all over his floor adding notes to twenty parts, unaware that you were supposed to put them all together on a score first. Even so, as an arranger he's been underrated. While his competitors used either rehashes of earlier black bands (Goodman) or a formulaic homogenous 'signature' style (Glen Miller and just about everyone else), Shaw was often taking risks with radical instrumentations or rakish key changes, even, as Charlie Parker would do later, quoting a completely different song with stylish wit. He considered that each individual song should have its own arranging style. This means that the Shaw 'style' is ephemeral: here is a man trying to bake every cake a different way; nearer philosophically to Lennon than to Les Brown. Shaw, unbeknownst even to himself, was an impressionist, a fox-trotting Ravel. Goodman thought in terms of a three-line rumpus; Shaw considered the big band as a modern orchestral pallette. The Dorseys took a pop song and framed it, with a certain essence of jazz; Shaw used counter-melody, polyphony and chromaticism to elevate the shallowest number to the level of miniaturist art. As a pop star, Shaw was as concerned as later pop stars in the production of the perfect single. His was an experimental laboratory attempting alchemy: the turning of base pop songs into gold.

A continual demeaning of the abilities of jazz or big band players still hangs over any appreciation of Shaw's achievements. So, firstly we'll consider him contextually, within the yardsticks of jazz. The most obvious comparison is with Goodman, within the big band style. Now, plenty of younger guys, quite justifiably, merely write off 'big band jazz' as bereft of any true significance. Fair enough. But from Ellington's earliest 'jungle-music' and Fletcher Henderson's antiphonal experiments, indeed right back to Paul Whiteman's avuncular toleration of a perma-pissed Bix, it was the bigger bands that provided favour and shelter for the best players around. Basie's band was an acceptable canvas for black musicians. Goodman, the Dorseys, Shaw, had to do if you were white. The best white bands were the ones which acknowledged the black roots of the music, absorbed the blues into their own alienated psyches. The worst white bands churned out flat, turgid dance music on the time-honoured basis that, well, the last one sold pretty well, so we'll do another just like that. For plenty of people, the obese excesses of later big band music has so palled the saccharine tastes that no appreciation of anything with blaring trumpets and regimented saxes can be made. Fair enough. But it does well to draw a firm line at the watershed of bebop (1945-7), after which the best players could return to small groups, and the brash over-opulent, invariably appallingly-recorded showbands of the '50s, which collapsed under the weight of ever-diverging styles.

The big bands of the '30s, even the white ones, were not only economically necessary (providing the most work for the most players) but provided us with much of the best jazz of the period. Many people firmly delineate between the black bands (Ellington, Basie) and the white bands, and, in a hypothesis based partly on inverted racism, they write off one of the highest achievements of Jewish culture, and one of the most successful experiments in 'multi-cultural' art. There's a more pernicious analysis: that affluent whites stole the black soul, same as Presley, same as Eric Clapton. Certainly, there was some of this over the entire century, from the 'Original' Dixieland Jazz Band through Bill Haley on up. But Goodman and Shaw, or Presley and Clapton for that matter, weren't affluent white boys. They were marginalised white boys who listened to the alienation of black music and heard themselves. In the 1930s, the American proletariat was a cultural melting-pot: white boys played the blues; black guys played Jewish popular songs. The racists have always listened to Wagner and country and western. The gradual elevation of black culture, as embodied by the white big bands, was part of the same historical process that gave us Hip-Hop and Malcolm X. Somewhere along the way, Louis Armstrong discovered he could stop rolling his eyes. Somewhere along the way, Billie Holiday's battered-wife chic became Sarah Vaughn's complex experiments in Western harmony, until nowadays we barely take an American opera singer seriously if she ain't black. And that's part of the rub. You can argue musicologically that Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, Chick Webb were technically superior to Goodman, the Dorseys, Bob Crosby or Shaw. In terms of jazz, you have an argument. The black bands often had more freedom to improvise, but even immortal greats like Coleman Hawkins' and Lester Young's stomping fox-trots (from Basie), Bigard's and Johnny 'Rabbit' Hodges' blues lyricism (from Ellington), or Chick Webb's own thunderous but eminently danceable drumming, were part of the same melting-pot. The delta blues was in there, from Africa. 'Dixieland' came from popular slang for the French-speaking region of the US where they still used ten france notes. The Russian and German Jews wrote the songs; the Italians sang them; and, since the European immigrants carried with them a nexus of Western tradition, the white big bands had a European 'classical' aesthetic to go with their boogie-woogie. The white bands were often better readers. Their ensemble tighter, enabling chromatic flights of fancy and tricky counterpoint, while the black bands often relied on a simple succession of solos. If there's less 'jazz' on a white record, there's often more of something else. Of course the commanding aesthetic was still black music, and the further the white bands diverged from it, often the more anodyne the result. I would personally delineate within different recordings and line-ups in the same band, and point to 'Satin Doll' and 'Rockin' In Rhythm' as examples of Duke Ellington at his least 'black'; while Shaw's 'Concerto For Clarinet' is more 'black' than 'white'. From historic distance one of the more significant political gestures of the period occurred in 1938, when Benny Goodman took it upon himself to play Carnegie Hall, the veritable temple to the Western classical tradition. Getting a few 'guest' musicians in, he put Count Basie and his rhythm section with the best of Ellington's horns, and together with Krupa and Goodman they jammed on Fats Waller's 'Honeysuckle Rose' for the best part of half an hour to a tepid reception from the Rachmaninoff buffs.

Still, you ask the latest in-the-knows about the greatest jazz musicians ever, they won't say Artie Shaw. Indeed, on the subject of the best white, clarinet-playing bandleaders ever, they still won't say Artie Shaw in all probability; they'd say Goodman. Of course, comparison is such a shallow art, borne of playground swapping and interminable top-ten television. Subjectively, you can only name favourites, and any consequent justifying is both hypothetical and biased. The comparison between Goodman and Shaw, though, was in its time as hot a topic as Charles versus Di or LBJ versus Ho Ho Ho Chi Min. So let's stick them both on the scales in as few sentences as possible. Benny Goodman was obsessive from a very young age, and practised 19th century dots several hours a day for decades. This reulted in a technique so supple that it scared more people off attempting the clarinet than ever it encouraged imitators. As a jazzman, though, he was firmly of his era. His improvising style, with its inherent Chicago swing, was essentially based on running arpeggios born of his exercise books, and 'riffing': hitting repeated phrases to build excitement, as old as New Orleans itself. On account of the former, he disliked simple changes like the blues, preferring the flexibility of the latest popular songs. On account of the latter, though, he never did handle the radicalism of bebop, with its implied harmonies and a required virtuosity that exceeded even his. Indeed, it was bebop as much as anything, along with its implicit reaction against people like Goodman that effectively froze the clarinet out of modern jazz for nigh on sixty years. Of the guys who did hack it since, the likes of Buddy De Franco and Eddie Daniels are curiosities in a sea of Coltraneous tenors.

But if Goodman's technique was so daunting, what of Shaw's. He hadn't rattled off scales aged six. When he wasn't mercilessly rehearsing some bunch or other, he was squabbling with Lana Turner or quaffing champagne or denying some rumour or all three. He taught himself to play, mainly, by learning every Louis Armstrong record ever made. His style came from Armstrong's clarinettists, Johnny Dodds, but more particularly Jimmy Noone, with his liquid tone and swooping style. But Shaw took this to new levels. Armstrong was famed for his high register, so Shaw perfected his own. Such is the clarinet that Shaw thus mastered a powerful top range only really matched by an electric violin or an abnormal coloratura voice, really, until Jimi Hendrix came along. Then there is tone: Shaw was probably mimicking the sound of his first instrument, the sax. What he achieved, that peculiar magical molten glow, is as captivating as it is unique. The vibrato came from Noone and possibly Bechet, but it was milder, more subtle. Finally, there was something whenever the polished, woody, mercurial tone of his clarinet got near a microphone, that captivated record-buyers and radio-listeners alike. Here was a crooner with four octaves under his belt. A balladeer who could run semiquavers in a breath. Even his black contemporaries like Ellington's Barney Bigard were in awe. And the way Shaw used the sound, with a mixture of classicist elegance, poise and contemporary harmonic daring, was quite unlike the arpeggiated riffs of Goodman, Woody Herman, Jimmy Dorsey et al. Indeed, in Shaw's rhythmic asymmetry and use of fast triplets, in his use of double-tempo, of flattened fifths and major sevenths as passing notes, in his capacity for counter-melody based on an harmonically expanded tune, he was pointing directly at the next jazz generation, the chromatic cool of bebop. This is his niche, musicologically: the bridge from Armstrong's New Orleans to the forward-thinkers of the '40s, Charlie Christian, Gillespie et al.

And yet, as a jazz-man, Shaw barely gets a seat by the toilets. Why? Well, there are at least three reasons. For one thing, his sound so typified one era that his popularity exists in a time capsule, somewhere between Bing and Vera Lynn. He gets dumped in with Glen Miller, as you might dump Heifetz in with Geraldo 'coz it reeks of that era and the record crackles just the same. For another thing, he never actively sought jazz credibility, in the way that was expected. He didn't follow the average white-boy trip of waxing lyrical about Buddy Bolden, rubbing shoulders with Armstrong, jamming with Lester Young, doing smack with the in-in-crowd. He idolised Armstrong and picked up a lot about the roots of the music early on, working for Willie 'The Lion' Smith. And yet Shaw's real bag wasn't bringing real blues to the masses, although from time to time he had a stab; he was more concerned with bringing the Western orchestral tradition into modern America, as embodied by ethnic diversity and neo-impressionist jazz. In this he had even less success over time than Gershwin's concertos or Ellington's suites, but that isn't for want of trying. Mainly, though, the sticking-point for jazz critics in acknowledging Shaw as even remotely great is a simple matter of pencil and paper. Early on in his career, he took to writing down his solos for recordings. That's why they're so consistently dazzling. For this he gets slagged by self-proclaimed 'jazz' purists. The fact remains that while a great improvised solo is intrinsically hit-and-miss, Shaw's recorded solos, almost without exception, have an inventiveness and a balance almost classical, in the strictest sense. This is still improvisation, on, at times, complex harmonic structures; it is just one step removed, and polished, just a little. In order to achieve this pre-production sleight-of-hand, Shaw merely shows us yet another dimension. Not only did he 'compose' himself a solo for every song, much in the way of Hendrix or Jimmy Page later; but, in order to do so, he had to notate very carefully all the slides, trills and tonal effects he'd taken from New Orleans jazz, and were to be the vocabulary of rock and roll. Rather than being demeaning in its lack of spontaneity, this actually puts a Shaw solo up there with any form of jazz composition, be it by Ellington/Strayhorn or anyone else. For the adamant purist, you can merely point at his small-group work, particularly later on when he shows himself right at home with bebop, and demonstrate his improvising credentials, on the blues or anything else.

Woody Herman was a fine energetic player, but not everything he did was a work of art. Jimmy Dorsey preferred sax, an effective clarinet. Ellington's Jimmy Hamilton had great flexibility, but none of Shaw's sheer presence. Buddy De Franco has always demonstrated a dazzling technique and harmonic certainty, and is perhaps closest to how Shaw might have played had he carried on past 1954. As for more modern times, Eddie Daniels can work his fingers 'til they blur, but i've never heard a chorus of his that hits the hair on my neck. I hear a brilliant technical display; I don't hear anything of Eddie in it.

So if Shaw was essentially the finest clarinettist in jazz, is it yet time for a jazz player to be compared to his 'legitimate' cousins? The clarinet has only been around since about 1750. Before that, earlier variants adorned folk and rural music, so we can't discount some musical giant forgotten to the mists of time. The first virtuosos of the instrument cropped up in Mannheim where the champions of the new orchestration like the Stamitz boys gave them plenty to do. Forty years later, Mozart wrote the first great works for clarinettist Anton Stadler, a fellow Freemason who'd lent him quite a bit of cash. For Mozart it was easier to scribble down a glorious concerto than it was to fork out on a few IOUs. Of course, the ones who truly profit from this particular transaction are us. The toast of the early 19th century was Heinrich Baermann of the Munich orchestra. But the clarinet hadn't yet taken its modern form, and the likes of Baermann would have had great difficulty with cross-fingerings and 'lipped' tunings, hence the abundance of clarinets in a variety of keys.

The first acknowledged modern master was Richard Muhlfeld (1856-1907) beloved of the ageing Brahms, in whose work the instrument sings rather than stirs, flirts rather than sweeping you off your feet. The first phonograph records perfectly illustrate the different national 'schools' of playing across Europe. The Germans liked it bald and proud, and German conductors went for a dark, full tone. The French preferred a narrower bore and a lighter, reedier tone. The English tradition called for a bright, pure sound, free from any colouring or vibrato, and the English produced arguably the best players in the 20th century. In a procession comparable with a papacy or a family of Hindu pandits, the English concert hall was graced by Charles Draper, then Frederick Thurston followed by Thea King and Colin Bradbury. But perhaps of even more interest were the players who worked contrary to the tradition: the individualists who helped to prove the rule. Among them, three have their advocates as the best of the best. Jack Brymer was principal clarinet in the RPO from 1947-63, working mostly under the hardest taskmaster of them all: Beecham. Brymer was close to the classic English sound but with more polish and just a little sparkle. His easy, flowing recording of the Mozart concerto under Beecham showed him at his best: elegant, laid-back, with just a slight melancholy. Alan Hacker overcame health problems that left him in a wheelchair to become foremost among the new virtuosos in the 1960s and '70s. As much a specialist on a vintage instrument as he is playing the arithmetical impossibilities of his pal Maxwell Davies, if Hacker can't do it, then it can't be done. But supreme in the left-field of English 'legitimate' players was Reginald Kell (1906-81). Like Shaw, Kell was unique, unmistakable. A rich vibrato tone of almost translucent beauty allied to a lilting, spontaneous sense of rhythm which, on his best recordings, brings out a mastery that makes you think you'll never hear it done that way again. Kell was considered an acquired taste in his lifetime, and barely gets a mention in death; but his sheer musicality and effortless grace still light the way.

The greatest players transcend such petty realities as the physical limitations of their instrument. The clarinet is a combination of Victorian mechanics and a sounding tube made so it deliberately blows the wrong harmonics. Generations of average players show it up for what it is, gruffly squeaking and squawking their way through 'High Society' with merry delusions of tunefulness. Artie Shaw was among the first players from outside the concert hall to demonstrate concert hall virtuosity. In his work, we hear popular music with all the technical rigour and aesthetic discipline of 'serious' music. Shaw remained too 'serious' by half.

Part Four: In which our hero finds better things to do with his time

I don't presume to know why he finally gave up; but I can venture a guess. You simply have to see it from his point of view. No audience ever considers whether the entertainer actually wants to entertain. It's generally assumed that, if you have a talent, then you'll want to use it. You'll want to perform, indeed, you'll love to perform; irrespective of who you're performing for, what they want you to play, and what you're expected to wear when you're playing it. Artie Shaw's audience was Joe Public, that land of America, with its pride in its flag and its capitalism and its American Way- and Shaw got so he really didn't like them very much.

He'd survived the hysteria and press lunacy of the late '30s. He'd survived malaria and mortar shells in the war, all the thanks he got for it. Then in 1953, this land America calls him up to speak to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The televised reincarnation of the Salem witch-trials, led by McCarthy-Finder-General. He was being set up to be a rat, and he later bemoaned his own lack of political savvy. As it was, he admitted to attending Communist rallies, but refused to name any names. They gave him a slap on the wrist. But I think the damage to him had been done.

He quit clarinet for good in 1954. He was forty-three years old. He claimed he'd done all anyone could on his instrument, that "any more would be less". For a while he lived in Spain, a deliberate recluse, in a house perched on an inaccessible cliff. A few years later he settled in Connecticut. Taught himself to farm. Turned himself into an expert fisherman and a crack shot. Foremost, he turned himself into a writer. He never became prolific: three novellas, some short stories. He was never accepted by the class-ridden literary in-crowd. He no longer fitted anybody's pigeonhole of who Artie Shaw should be. But perhaps his most significant work was unpublished at his death. A huge novel, written over seven decades, taking his early sketches on a life of Bix to become the epic tale of 'fictional' jazz-musician Albie Snow, and the twentieth century through his eyes.

No-one would have blamed him if he'd got fat, disgraceful and addicted to something or other. But he remained mercurial and voraciously intellectual. In 1983 he re-launched the Artie Shaw Orchestra, which is still touring, and is a darn sight tighter than what's left of Glen Miller or Joe Loss. In his last years he went on lecture tours, picked up doctorates, and added to his library of some 15000 books. He was once asked by some students what his epitaph should be, and after batting around a few ideas, he came up with: "go away".

Conclusion: Does the past have a future?

Maybe new, cleaned-up recordings will rekindle the magic. Maybe news of Shaw's death has sent a few more mp3s whizzing their licensed or unlicensed ways to music-loving shop-haters. But then maybe global culture is in terminal decline, in which rotting 78s just sit and rot; in which 'ability' on a conventional 'instrument' gets thrown out with the cobblers and French-polishers and food you have to peel and cook. Artie Shaw saw the history of 20th century music unfold, and, he wanted no part of any of it. Whether his music plays any part in the 21st depends on a whole host of economic and cultural forces: it has nothing to do with whether he was any good. He was the best, without much doubt.