What infectious song, gives me goosebumps every time i hear it, so romantic. Love to get hold of the sheet music for this, seems to be quite rare even Pyramid is difficult as well.
Of course, all the reed men doubled on clarinet. But they're on their saxes for this particular passage. Check out (here on RUclips) Shaw's "Man I Love" for a stunning example of the sax section at work. (Shaw himself was an excellent lead alto man, although he confined himself to clarinet after his free-lance studio days.)
How did these band leaders ever make any money? After paying all band members, lodging, transportation, singers & all the myriad other costs both legal, publicity & band related? I love them all even though I grew up as a Boomer.
They were the rock stars of their generation during an era when media was summed up as newspapers, magazines, radio and movies. The amount of money that Goodman (1935-1939), Shaw (1938-1945), Tommy Dorsey (1935-1947) and Miller (1939-1942) made for RCA Victor records alone during those years they were under contract to RCA Victor was enormous. TD was Victor's highest money-maker until Elvis came along. When Artie put this band together in 1940 there was no guarantee that it would succeed, so he cut his brass section from his previously having used six men (3 Trumpets and 3 Trombones) back to five (using only 2 Trombones), in order to save as much money as possible and have a minimally small yet still "full" band (13-pieces) for the time; so that the 9 horns in it (4 saxes and 5 brass) was offset by having 9 strings just to sound "balanced" out in front - during the age when everything was almost entirely acoustic and the entire band might only have one microphone to work with wherever they worked. At any rate you're correct about the enormous cost by the time you factor in also having to pay at least one arranger to write arrangements for the band, other free-lance arrangers who contributed scores and got paid per arrangement, a singer and music copyists (to transcribe -by hand- the arrangers' scores onto individual pages of music "parts" for the individual musicians to use on their music stands, plus hire a bus and bus driver to go wherever the bookings took the band and pay a "band boy" who was in charge of all of the musicians' instruments and getting the bandstand set up and broken down every night who also dealt with all of the band equipment and music cases that carried the band's music library. Booking agency commissions payable just to get the work back then were capped (in the USA) by the Musicians' Union at 10%. A trusted musician was often the "road manager" for a few extra bucks a week who was responsible for settling with the promoter at every venue. As it turned out, Artie was also making HUGE money for being the "House" bandleader & band for the Burns and Allen Radio Show (every Monday night) beginning in July 1940 and was walking off the stage after the radio show every week pocketing more cash than Burns and Allen were making. He made the movie "Second Chorus" that summer during August too, along-side the radio series; and throughout the autumn Artie and the band's regular gig was playing 5 nights a week at the Palace Hotel (in the infamous "Rose Room"), in San Francisco, then later on at the Hollywood Palladium ballroom (whose dance floor could fit 6,000 dancers on any night of the week, in the era before TV's really existed when people flocked to dance halls and movie theaters). Once the fall booking at the Palace Hotel began, the band traveled by bus from San Francisco to Hollywood just for the radio show one night a week then immediately returned to San Francisco to begin their Tuesday-Saturday booking at the Palace. Top-shelf musicians' salaries for each were upwards of $200 a week by 1940 making them paid like well-paid accountants or lawyers or other white-collar executives (at a time when your average worker salary in the country was about $25 per week). At the height of all the hysteria of the Swing Era before the war, Artie was grossing upwards of $30,000 a week with his expenses coming to less than $5,000 not including agency commissions and his management and legal expenses but including what it cost to pay everybody else, so even with all that on $30K a week Artie would have been pocketing well over $20K with virtually everybody paid off. The obvious problem then, for any bandleader, was getting into that stratosphere which is why now, 85-90 years later we know the number of bandleaders who reached that level of the stratosphere on two hands. But all over the US, there were literally 1,000s of bands looking for any degree of fame. Bandleaders were the Crown-Princes of the entire music business. Singers were a dime a dozen and 9 out of 10 singers were just employees of bandleaders and many got paid less than the musicians playing in the same bands, because singers only sang 3 or 4 tunes (at the most) during a 50-minute set that may include 12 songs played. People were interested in dancing, and most of the work was in ballrooms. "Dance bands" didn't play "concerts" and if they did it was a BIG deal (such as Goodman's 1938 Concert in Carnegie Hall, which, more than anything, was conceived as a publicity stunt more than anything else by an aggressive promoter at the time). Even the plot of Shaw's 1940 movie "Second Chorus" is built on the outlandish premise (!) of a dance band actually putting on a concert. Needless to say, things were a lot different back then.
@@bblegacy Thank you so much for your reply. That really laid it out there!! It is much appreciated. Incredible amount of traveling, head aches & stress to manage all that!! Needless to say, I never knew all that & learned alot.
He sure did, Tim - both times. ;) Artie's first band (1936-1937) consisted of 4 horns, 4 rhythm & 4 strings (with Jerry Gray among the latter). Then, upon his return from Mexico in early 1940, Artie re-assembled his band less 1 trombone and added 9 strings - which is the band you're hearing now. The "Stardust" band. While James didn't have strings until 1941. This was a great band that laid down some amazing music throughout 1940-early 1941, but my favorite of Artie's bands with strings is the mild revamp he did in mid-1941 - the one that saw Hot Lips Page, Ray Conniff, saw the return of Georgie Auld and even sat Dave Tough at the drum chair. 31 pieces worth of orchestra (with a larger 15 piece string section) that had massive feeling and soul.
@@SwingMan1938 I completely agree with your 1941 assessment. The re-incarnation of the Hollywood band in NYC with 7 key musicians from it and then filled out with NYC players JUMPED (not that the earlier Hollywood band didn't or couldn't). I really like the compactness of the Hollywood band with its 4-Saxes and 5-Brass don't get me wrong. It still could jump like any great TIGHT swing band, but it just didn't have the oomph and power of later the '41 band. It was on this session for "This Is Romance" in Hollywood that Ray Coniff joined the band on 3rd Trombone and the brass section was finally back up to 6, but the short-lived HUGE 1941 band swings mightily as a 16-piece band plus Artie plus its 15 Strings and it's a total force to be reckoned with, with its additional 5th Sax (Baritone) giving weight and guts to the Saxes and having a 4th Trumpet (Hot Lips Page), not to mention 6 more Strings than only the 9 that were in the Hollywood band. The later band could really tear up and shred anything it played when it was firing all cylinders and just about any musician knows how difficult it is for 12 or 15 guys to really swing together let alone 31. And Dave Tough's drumming and cymbals work was to die for. The air checks bear out how really REALLY good the 1941 NY band was. It's not really surprising since it was NYC after all and it was really NYC that was Ground Zero for the Swing Era being the center of all of radio, jazz and popular music, the big bands, 52nd Street & midtown jazz clubs, all of the MAJOR entertainment business in general (music publishing, etc.) not to mention LIVE! theater, NY's nightclub scene, Harlem (I.E. the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom and everywhere else "uptown"), and even what still remained of Vaudeville with all of those acts still booked in-between movies in all of the movie palaces. Artie even said he probably would have kept with that band for much longer than he did but Pearl Harbor made the decision for him for him to end it four months after the NY band came together in August 1941 so unfortunately that was it for that band. It exploded onto the scene and then it was gone in barely 4 months. Deep down I've always thought that the later NY band would have been a MAJOR musical force to be reckoned with had it been able to go on, and this doesn't even get into Artie's own playing during that period and not surprising, his clarinet playing was absolutely spectacular too.
Artie got the ball rolling with all of the fiddles present, on 3/3/1940 when he recorded "Frenesi" and 5 other tunes as a one-off studio date using an orchestra of Hollywood free-lancers that was hastily assembled just for the recording date because Artie didn't even have a band at that point. (I'm not counting his 1936-37 glorified 8- (later, 9-) piece combo that had a string quartet added to it.) "Frenesi" exploded off the charts and that's when Shaw reorganized full-time with his band that included nine strings in it. Tommy Dorsey followed suit in early 1941 when Artie left Hollywood in January 1941 for New York because he was the house bandleader for the George Burns and Gracie Allen Radio Show, and the radio show went back East to be based out of NY. When Artie broke up his Hollywood band Dorsey hired all of Artie's nine string players as a section and added one more Violin, and that's when the parade of Dorsey hits with his skinny young singer Frank Sinatra got underway. James recorded "You Made Me Love You" in May 1941 that included a freelance string quartet on the record and that's when the string section thing came along for James (who by then was on the verge of having to break up his band because James was so badly in debt and desperate for a hit record to be able to stay in business AND pay off Benny Goodman who had financed James's band). By 1941 James also had Helen Forrest to sing what would become her parade of hits with James that sold an enormous number of records with the fiddles present on them (that James's jazz fans HATED). For Shaw though, throughout his period of using Strings from 1940-42, the stuff written for the strings was really vital to those arrangements. You can't just play those arrangements and cut out the string section because doing that would leave huge empty holes in those arrangements with nothing really going on without the strings. On the other hand, TD told his arrangers (notably, the young Nelson Riddle) to essentially keep the string parts' writing essentially "optional" so that they could be dropped when the time came and have no effect the repertoire to any great extent, and not having to re-write all of it for a band without a string section (a problem that plagued Shaw later on). An Honorable Mention should go to Gene Krupa too, who also jumped on the "big band with strings" bandwagon by around 1942 or '43 because he was also desperate for a hit record or else he may have found himself going out of business. James only used about 5 or 6 string players regularly during most of the war though and it wasn't until 1944-45 after the James / Forrest pairing that created so many wartime hits that James enlarged his number of strings to way over a dozen on some record dates, and with all of the record hits by then made it James and his band a big movie favorite to put in front of the cameras in Hollywood. TD's wartime band with Strings deserves a good revisit too though, because it was an exceptional band that had Buddy Rich as it's drummer (until he got drafted into the military anyway) and the best album of TD with Strings was a bunch of 20th Century Fox recordings from 1943-45 pressed on to a double album called "Tommy Dorsey's Greatest Band" that's amazingly high-ish fidelity for that period that was still technically pre-HiFi. Fun fact: the movie studios were recording on tape and using High Fidelity and recording in Stereo long before the record companies finally got into it about 1949-51 (first with HiFi, then Stereo about a year later).
One of my favorite Artie Shaw’s songs! Can’t stop listening to it!
Yeah, thank you, Mr SM, for the sweet memories of my parents young and beautiful on the dancing floor in the casino... :)
That is SOOOOO beautiful and reminds me of Charlie
2022 e eu ouvindo isso aqui
finalmente achei alguém que ama esses estilos de música
One of my favorites!
What an intriguing melody... haunting yet at the same time uplifting!
I can't stop listening to this; I absolutely love it!!!
What infectious song, gives me goosebumps every time i hear it, so romantic. Love to get hold of the sheet music for this, seems to be quite rare even Pyramid is difficult as well.
outstanding ..........thank u so much swingman 1938 ......... stopped here ....on my way to ralph flanagan .....a very under rated performer .....
What I believe are clarinets at 1:18 makes my heart fly 💓
It's the saxophone section with the superlative lead alto of Les Robinson.
Of course, all the reed men doubled on clarinet. But they're on their saxes for this particular passage. Check out (here on RUclips) Shaw's "Man I Love" for a stunning example of the sax section at work. (Shaw himself was an excellent lead alto man, although he confined himself to clarinet after his free-lance studio days.)
At 93 I still 'dig' !!
Can still get out of bed and put my pants on.@Mason Wyberg
nice
I hope you have a great year míster! God bles you and we hope one day we can live as long as you, love from México
I love it!
This is one of my favorite Artie Shaw's songs! Thank you for posting it!
I can't listen to it without whistling. Absolutely one of my 10 desert island songs.
Love this!
Wow! What a wonderful performance! Love it!
All you wanted to do was get back there. You didn't get back there.
I love it
Jack Jenney's solo is something else! Too bad his own band was so short lived..
Muito bom ❤️🇧🇷
sim
How did these band leaders ever make any money? After paying all band members, lodging, transportation, singers & all the myriad other costs both legal, publicity & band related? I love them all even though I grew up as a Boomer.
They were the rock stars of their generation during an era when media was summed up as newspapers, magazines, radio and movies. The amount of money that Goodman (1935-1939), Shaw (1938-1945), Tommy Dorsey (1935-1947) and Miller (1939-1942) made for RCA Victor records alone during those years they were under contract to RCA Victor was enormous. TD was Victor's highest money-maker until Elvis came along. When Artie put this band together in 1940 there was no guarantee that it would succeed, so he cut his brass section from his previously having used six men (3 Trumpets and 3 Trombones) back to five (using only 2 Trombones), in order to save as much money as possible and have a minimally small yet still "full" band (13-pieces) for the time; so that the 9 horns in it (4 saxes and 5 brass) was offset by having 9 strings just to sound "balanced" out in front - during the age when everything was almost entirely acoustic and the entire band might only have one microphone to work with wherever they worked. At any rate you're correct about the enormous cost by the time you factor in also having to pay at least one arranger to write arrangements for the band, other free-lance arrangers who contributed scores and got paid per arrangement, a singer and music copyists (to transcribe -by hand- the arrangers' scores onto individual pages of music "parts" for the individual musicians to use on their music stands, plus hire a bus and bus driver to go wherever the bookings took the band and pay a "band boy" who was in charge of all of the musicians' instruments and getting the bandstand set up and broken down every night who also dealt with all of the band equipment and music cases that carried the band's music library. Booking agency commissions payable just to get the work back then were capped (in the USA) by the Musicians' Union at 10%. A trusted musician was often the "road manager" for a few extra bucks a week who was responsible for settling with the promoter at every venue. As it turned out, Artie was also making HUGE money for being the "House" bandleader & band for the Burns and Allen Radio Show (every Monday night) beginning in July 1940 and was walking off the stage after the radio show every week pocketing more cash than Burns and Allen were making. He made the movie "Second Chorus" that summer during August too, along-side the radio series; and throughout the autumn Artie and the band's regular gig was playing 5 nights a week at the Palace Hotel (in the infamous "Rose Room"), in San Francisco, then later on at the Hollywood Palladium ballroom (whose dance floor could fit 6,000 dancers on any night of the week, in the era before TV's really existed when people flocked to dance halls and movie theaters). Once the fall booking at the Palace Hotel began, the band traveled by bus from San Francisco to Hollywood just for the radio show one night a week then immediately returned to San Francisco to begin their Tuesday-Saturday booking at the Palace. Top-shelf musicians' salaries for each were upwards of $200 a week by 1940 making them paid like well-paid accountants or lawyers or other white-collar executives (at a time when your average worker salary in the country was about $25 per week). At the height of all the hysteria of the Swing Era before the war, Artie was grossing upwards of $30,000 a week with his expenses coming to less than $5,000 not including agency commissions and his management and legal expenses but including what it cost to pay everybody else, so even with all that on $30K a week Artie would have been pocketing well over $20K with virtually everybody paid off. The obvious problem then, for any bandleader, was getting into that stratosphere which is why now, 85-90 years later we know the number of bandleaders who reached that level of the stratosphere on two hands. But all over the US, there were literally 1,000s of bands looking for any degree of fame.
Bandleaders were the Crown-Princes of the entire music business. Singers were a dime a dozen and 9 out of 10 singers were just employees of bandleaders and many got paid less than the musicians playing in the same bands, because singers only sang 3 or 4 tunes (at the most) during a 50-minute set that may include 12 songs played. People were interested in dancing, and most of the work was in ballrooms. "Dance bands" didn't play "concerts" and if they did it was a BIG deal (such as Goodman's 1938 Concert in Carnegie Hall, which, more than anything, was conceived as a publicity stunt more than anything else by an aggressive promoter at the time). Even the plot of Shaw's 1940 movie "Second Chorus" is built on the outlandish premise (!) of a dance band actually putting on a concert. Needless to say, things were a lot different back then.
@@bblegacy Thank you so much for your reply. That really laid it out there!! It is much appreciated. Incredible amount of traveling, head aches & stress to manage all that!! Needless to say, I never knew all that & learned alot.
Nice one! And did Artie have a string section before Harry James? : ^ /
He sure did, Tim - both times. ;)
Artie's first band (1936-1937) consisted of 4 horns, 4 rhythm & 4 strings (with Jerry Gray among the latter). Then, upon his return from Mexico in early 1940, Artie re-assembled his band less 1 trombone and added 9 strings - which is the band you're hearing now. The "Stardust" band. While James didn't have strings until 1941.
This was a great band that laid down some amazing music throughout 1940-early 1941, but my favorite of Artie's bands with strings is the mild revamp he did in mid-1941 - the one that saw Hot Lips Page, Ray Conniff, saw the return of Georgie Auld and even sat Dave Tough at the drum chair. 31 pieces worth of orchestra (with a larger 15 piece string section) that had massive feeling and soul.
@@SwingMan1938 I completely agree with your 1941 assessment. The re-incarnation of the Hollywood band in NYC with 7 key musicians from it and then filled out with NYC players JUMPED (not that the earlier Hollywood band didn't or couldn't). I really like the compactness of the Hollywood band with its 4-Saxes and 5-Brass don't get me wrong. It still could jump like any great TIGHT swing band, but it just didn't have the oomph and power of later the '41 band. It was on this session for "This Is Romance" in Hollywood that Ray Coniff joined the band on 3rd Trombone and the brass section was finally back up to 6, but the short-lived HUGE 1941 band swings mightily as a 16-piece band plus Artie plus its 15 Strings and it's a total force to be reckoned with, with its additional 5th Sax (Baritone) giving weight and guts to the Saxes and having a 4th Trumpet (Hot Lips Page), not to mention 6 more Strings than only the 9 that were in the Hollywood band. The later band could really tear up and shred anything it played when it was firing all cylinders and just about any musician knows how difficult it is for 12 or 15 guys to really swing together let alone 31. And Dave Tough's drumming and cymbals work was to die for.
The air checks bear out how really REALLY good the 1941 NY band was. It's not really surprising since it was NYC after all and it was really NYC that was Ground Zero for the Swing Era being the center of all of radio, jazz and popular music, the big bands, 52nd Street & midtown jazz clubs, all of the MAJOR entertainment business in general (music publishing, etc.) not to mention LIVE! theater, NY's nightclub scene, Harlem (I.E. the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom and everywhere else "uptown"), and even what still remained of Vaudeville with all of those acts still booked in-between movies in all of the movie palaces. Artie even said he probably would have kept with that band for much longer than he did but Pearl Harbor made the decision for him for him to end it four months after the NY band came together in August 1941 so unfortunately that was it for that band. It exploded onto the scene and then it was gone in barely 4 months. Deep down I've always thought that the later NY band would have been a MAJOR musical force to be reckoned with had it been able to go on, and this doesn't even get into Artie's own playing during that period and not surprising, his clarinet playing was absolutely spectacular too.
Artie got the ball rolling with all of the fiddles present, on 3/3/1940 when he recorded "Frenesi" and 5 other tunes as a one-off studio date using an orchestra of Hollywood free-lancers that was hastily assembled just for the recording date because Artie didn't even have a band at that point. (I'm not counting his 1936-37 glorified 8- (later, 9-) piece combo that had a string quartet added to it.) "Frenesi" exploded off the charts and that's when Shaw reorganized full-time with his band that included nine strings in it. Tommy Dorsey followed suit in early 1941 when Artie left Hollywood in January 1941 for New York because he was the house bandleader for the George Burns and Gracie Allen Radio Show, and the radio show went back East to be based out of NY. When Artie broke up his Hollywood band Dorsey hired all of Artie's nine string players as a section and added one more Violin, and that's when the parade of Dorsey hits with his skinny young singer Frank Sinatra got underway. James recorded "You Made Me Love You" in May 1941 that included a freelance string quartet on the record and that's when the string section thing came along for James (who by then was on the verge of having to break up his band because James was so badly in debt and desperate for a hit record to be able to stay in business AND pay off Benny Goodman who had financed James's band). By 1941 James also had Helen Forrest to sing what would become her parade of hits with James that sold an enormous number of records with the fiddles present on them (that James's jazz fans HATED).
For Shaw though, throughout his period of using Strings from 1940-42, the stuff written for the strings was really vital to those arrangements. You can't just play those arrangements and cut out the string section because doing that would leave huge empty holes in those arrangements with nothing really going on without the strings. On the other hand, TD told his arrangers (notably, the young Nelson Riddle) to essentially keep the string parts' writing essentially "optional" so that they could be dropped when the time came and have no effect the repertoire to any great extent, and not having to re-write all of it for a band without a string section (a problem that plagued Shaw later on). An Honorable Mention should go to Gene Krupa too, who also jumped on the "big band with strings" bandwagon by around 1942 or '43 because he was also desperate for a hit record or else he may have found himself going out of business. James only used about 5 or 6 string players regularly during most of the war though and it wasn't until 1944-45 after the James / Forrest pairing that created so many wartime hits that James enlarged his number of strings to way over a dozen on some record dates, and with all of the record hits by then made it James and his band a big movie favorite to put in front of the cameras in Hollywood. TD's wartime band with Strings deserves a good revisit too though, because it was an exceptional band that had Buddy Rich as it's drummer (until he got drafted into the military anyway) and the best album of TD with Strings was a bunch of 20th Century Fox recordings from 1943-45 pressed on to a double album called "Tommy Dorsey's Greatest Band" that's amazingly high-ish fidelity for that period that was still technically pre-HiFi. Fun fact: the movie studios were recording on tape and using High Fidelity and recording in Stereo long before the record companies finally got into it about 1949-51 (first with HiFi, then Stereo about a year later).