Imperial Valley Christian Center

Mark Steyn's obituary of Big Band era musician Artie Shaw is really interesting. Good writing about a very interesting fellow who's name I had heard but didn't know much about. Here's a clip from one of his more famous songs Frenesi and Here's a little blurb from the obituary:

On the eve of World War Two, Time reported that to Germans America meant “skyscrapers, Clark Gable and Artie Shaw”. And Shaw lived more like a movie star than Gable did. In the ranks of legendary heterosexuals, he’s rivaled only by Sinatra when it comes to the number of A-list Hollywood babes he got to see in non-Hays Code situations. He was engaged to Betty Grable when he ran off with Lana Turner. He married Ava Gardner and had an affair with Rita Hayworth…
Three of the best bandleaders of the period were clarinetists – Shaw, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman – and it seems to me that’s the core sound of the era, so seductive, so insinuating. Artie, naturally, had no time for that kind of talk. According to him, the executives liked the clarinet because, in those days of primitive recording, its higher pitch made it cut through the band more clearly than the sax. Whatever. Digitally remastered and cleaned up, the arrangements still sound good. On his smash 1940 recording of “Star Dust”, Shaw’s solo manages, in just 16 marvelous bars, to sum up both the broad legato sweep of Hoagy Carmichael’s tune and yet get giddily away from it in those lovely triplets. There’s so much going on in those early hits – joyous explosive vamps that, for many listeners, became part of the song. You can find later recordings of “’SWonderful” and “My Blue Heaven” that aren’t performances of the numbers so much as of the Shaw band’s arrangements of them.