These Foolish Things The Decca Years

Product Description This 2-CD set collects, for the first time all together and in great sound, 47 of legendary clarinetist Artie Shaw's issued recordings for Decca, made between 1949 and 1955 which include with his big band, Gramercy 5, and as accompanist to vocalists. These recordings have never been available as a collection on CD before. Truly an extraordinary set! Review The most familiar kind of tragedy in American music is that of the great artist who dies young, like Bix Beiderbecke or Charlie Parker. Then there's the artist who does all of his major work only in the early part of his career, as critics once said of Louis Armstrong (though hardly anyone would agree with that assessment anymore). Artie Shaw represents a unique kind of cultural tragedy: the major artist who gives it all up at the peak of his powers for reasons that seem baffling to everybody else. A new double CD reveals what an irreparable loss it was to music when Artie Shaw stopped playing the clarinet at age 44. (That he lived another 50 years only adds insult to injury.) ''These Foolish Things: The Decca Years'' (Sepia) collects 47 tracks recorded between 1949 and 1955, including all of his final big band sessions made before, as he later bragged, he ''made a lamp'' out of his clarinet. As Shaw later told me and many other interviewers he hated the business aspects of the music world and cringed at the thought of being forced to replay his ''Begin the Beguine'' and ''Frenesi'' every night. Yet these swan-song tracks show that the bandleader was making brilliant music right up until his last note. For most of those tracks, Shaw does what he did best: playing sumptuous arrangements of the classic songs that he helped define as standards, graced by his own passionate and moody clarinet solos, as on ''Where or When'' and ''Love Walked In.'' There are also stylishly swinging original works played by his group the Gramercy Five (actually a septet here), among them ''Crumbum'' and ''The Shekomeko Shuffle. '' Yet new ideas abound as well: While earlier tracks (like both ''Beguine'' and ''Frenesi'') had alluded to Pan-American styles, ''Orinoco'' and ''Mucho de Nada'' here are much more authentically invested in the Afro-Cuban idiom, featuring a full four-piece percussion section. ''He s Gone Away'' and ''Foggy Foggy Dew'' indicate that Shaw was paying attention to the nascent fol