Artie Shaw - Frenesi

Arthur Jacob Arshawsky (May 23, 1910 – December 30, 2004), better known as Artie Shaw, was an American jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader. One of jazz's finest clarinetists, Artie Shaw led five big bands, all of them distinctive and memorable.

At his peak in the 1930s and 40s, Shaw pulled in a five-figure salary per week and ranked with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller as the bandleaders who made music swing. But he left the music world largely behind in the mid-50s and spent much of the second half of his life devoted to writing and other pursuits.

At age 21, he became the top lead-alto sax and clarinet player in the New York radio and recording studios. He made his first public appearance as a leader in 1936, in a Swing Concert (history's first) held at Broadway's Imperial Theatre.

Breaktthrough came with the surprise success of his 1938 recording of "Begin the Beguine" which made the clarinetist into a superstar dubbed as the new "King of Swing" and his orchestra into one of the most popular in the world.

Of particular interest to the gossip columnists of the day were Artie Shaw's wives. They included actresses Lana Turner (wife No. 3, 1940), Ava Gardner (No. 5, 1945), Evelyn Keyes (No. 8, 1957) and novelist Kathleen Winsor.

A volatile and superbly intelligent man, Shaw hated the loss of privacy that stardom brought,and by mid fifties he had very little to do with music or show business and he concentrated to his other major love of his life,writing. He was the author of both fiction and non-fiction writings. For the past two decades of his life had been working on the first volume of a fictional trilogy, dealing with the life of a young jazz musician of the 1920's and 30's whose story he hoped to take on up into the 1960's.

Artie Shaw died Thursday, December 30th, 2004. He was 94. He had been in declining health for some time and apparently died of natural causes.

"Frenesi" is a musical piece originally composed by Alberto Dominguez for the marimba, and adapted as a jazz standard. A hit version recorded by Artie Shaw (with an arrangement by William Grant Still) reached number one on the Billboard pop chart on December 21, 1940.

For this recording session, he used a large studio band with woodwinds, French horns, and a full string section along with the normal dance band instrumentation -another first in big band jazz history. The word "frenesi" is the Spanish equivalent of "frenzy".