Artie Shaw: In the 1930s when jazz for the masses implied an impeccably-dressed white man with a clarinet, Artie Shaw, who has died aged 94, was Benny Goodman's main rival.
Where Goodman was a child prodigy, Shaw came relatively late to music, but studied it with ferocity. He turned himself into a writer the same way.
He married - and divorced - eight times. His wives included film stars Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes, the novelist Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor and Elizabeth Kern, the daughter of Jerome.
During his swing career, from the 1920s into the 1950s, he formed and disbanded several bands, dropping out and then returning. "At a certain point," he said of being a celebrity, "it becomes a bloody bore." It also drove him to psychoanalysis.
Always willing to bypass orthodoxy, Shaw occasionally added a string section to his orchestra and never paid serious attention to the musical colour bar in the United States, which lasted into the civil rights era.
The finest of his bands, over which he claimed to have taken most pains, featured the outstanding black trumpeter Roy Eldridge.
Although his final retirement was partly the effect of the end of the swing era, his life was restless, as summed up in the title of his 1952 autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella. It is among the few books by, or about, jazz musicians that details the trouble involved in trying to keep creativity alive, while carrying along promoters and public. In it he wrote that if the audience enjoys what a performer does, "they pay to come back and he makes a living. Music is a commodity, like anything else."
There were parallels in upbringing between Shaw and Goodman: Goodman was born on the west side of Chicago a year before Shaw, who was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky on New York's lower east side - Shaw later described himself as "this strange kind of creature called Jew". Both musicians had immigrant parents; Shaw's mother was Austrian, his father Russian, both were dressmakers. The family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, when Artie was seven. He was shy, a great reader who played a ukelele at 10, a saxophone at 12 and a clarinet in his teens.
When his father deserted his mother, the boy dropped out of school at the age of 15 to earn money playing alto saxophone with a local band, changing his name to Art Shaw. His lifelong insecurity seemed to date from then.
By 1929, Shaw was playing with Irving Aaronson's Commanders in Hollywood. He toured the country with them and encountered the music of Bartok, Debussy and Stravinsky. In 1934, he dropped out, bought a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and aimed to become a writer.
He was soon back to session work in New York. In 1935, he set up his first short-lived orchestra, and also wrote Interlude In B Flat, for clarinet, string quartet and rhythm section, for the interval at a swing event in Broadway's Imperial Theatre. Enthusiastically received, it soon lead to his first band with strings.
By 1938, the conventional line-up of Artie Shaw and his Orchestra - helped by the huge hit of violinist Jerry Gray's arrangement of Cole Porter's Begin The Beguine - became one of the most feted bands when swing dominated all of western popular music. The recording, meant as a B-side, was a US number one for six weeks; Shaw's earnings reached $30,000 a week. It has all of the Shaw trademarks, the slick introduction, meticulously-timed slurs and glissandi; even today, it is clear why it contributed so much to his record sales of 50 million plus.
Success, however, did not raise Shaw's spirits. He recalled being as miserable "as a fellow could be, this side of suicide".
After the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, musicians became part of the war effort. Glenn Miller led his Army Air Force Band in Europe. Shaw became a chief petty officer in the US Navy, served on a minesweeper and volunteered for the south Pacific. There his band played for troops for over a year, often under conditions so extreme that many members, including Shaw, were later medically discharged because of physical illness or mental stress. He said nothing was ever the same after: "I saw death, face to face."
His music was often overshadowed by his private life. His politics were liberal, and in 1953 he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee; he told the committee that he had attended the postwar World Peace Congress because of his interest as a veteran in social justice and world peace. A Huac member claimed the congress had been a communist front. "Show me a Republican-front one, I'll go there," Show retorted. But he said he had been a dupe.
After playing with a new Gramercy Five - whose last recordings were not released for another three decades - he finally quit in March 1954 and spent five years in north-east Spain, writing and dabbling in film distribution.
He later moved to near Los Angeles, lectured in universities, worked as a film producer and screenwriter and acted in the 1978 disaster movie Crash.
His first two marriages were to Jane Carns, and then Margaret Allen; in 1941, he married Elizabeth Kern. He met Lana Turner while his band featured in her movie Dancing Co-ed (1939) and they married in 1943. He then married Ava Gardner in 1945 and Kathleen Winsor in 1946. His seventh wife was an actor, Doris Dowling. His eighth wife, married in 1957, was yet another actor, Evelyn Keyes and the relationship lasted until 1985; although by 1973 he was saying that, though they greatly liked each another, "we've found it almost impossible to live together".
Shaw also said: "Show me a guy who's always out with a beautiful dame and I'll show you a guy who's trying to prove something to himself." His music was the source of his attraction to women: "Looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?" One of his lectures on the college circuit was "Consecutive monogamy and ideal divorce", as given by "the ex-husband of love goddesses and an authority on divorce".
He was an expert fly-fisherman and rifleman, but it was that clarinet which brought him fame. Perhaps his true genius lay in putting sounds together.
He had a son with Elizabeth Kern and a son with Doris Dowling. But 25 years ago he told the Washington Post, that he saw neither of them: "I didn't get along with the mothers, so why should I get along with the kids?"
Artie Shaw (Arthur Jacob Arshawsky), musician and writer, born May 26th, 1910; died December 30th, 2004