Artie Shaw Quotes

"I'm not conditioned to be an entertainer. An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists are misunderstood by all. I'm not interested in the clarinet but in music. we speak our emotions into music. An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away. My situation is the same. Let them concentrate on my music and not on me. I like the music. I love it and live it, in fact. But for me, the business part of music just plain stinks." - Artie Shaw

source: Artie Shaw's commencement speech entitled 'Three Chords For Beauty And One To Pay The Rent', given to the graduates at California Lutheran University, 1987.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I pride myself as a semi-schizophrenic. I'm trying to understand the universe. There is no sense in the real world. I try to inject a bit of rationality in this wide-range of irrationality. So what am I doing? Criticizing the hell out of everything!"

source: Artie Shaw's commencement speech entitled 'Three Chords For Beauty And One To Pay The Rent', given to the graduates at California Lutheran University, 1987.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"Whatever you do in life, aim at perfection. It will not be understood or even appreciated by most people. However, in the long run, the closer you come to achieving your own inner standards of perfection, and they'll be rising all the time, the better you'll be. In your lifetime you will come reasonable close (two or three times) to perfection. I've come about twice where I can say that is as close to perfection as I can get. I consider myself an 80-percent loser, of which I am proud. So, have fun. Get into your life and do what you enjoy and be the best at what you can be. Maybe you won't be successful and rich by the world's standards, but you will have the best life capable of having. If you don't do that, you're cheating yourself." - Artie Shaw

source: Artie Shaw's commencement speech entitled 'Three Chords For Beauty And One To Pay The Rent', given to the graduates at California Lutheran University, 1987.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"People ask what those women saw in me. Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?" - Artie Shaw

source: Interview with New York Times, 1994.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less." - Artie Shaw (when asked about the cause of his early retirement)

source: Interview with New York Times, 1994.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I wanted to resign from the planet, not just music. It stopped being fun with success. Money got in the way. Everybody got greedy, including me. Fear set in. I got miserable when I became a commodity." - Artie Shaw (when asked why he walked off stage at the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1939, and eventually moved to a little village in Mexico.)

source: Jazz Connection Magazine

Artie Shaw Quotes

"The distance between me and Benny [Goodman], was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I'd never deny that. But listen to our two versions of 'Star Dust.' I was playing; he was swinging." - Artie Shaw

source: Jazz Connection Magazine

Artie Shaw Quotes

"That's the clarinet I used to use... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops... and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything... " - Artie Shaw

source: Interview with NPR (March 8, 2002)

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I was very uncomfortable, I played the role called Artie Shaw. People (ask) me for autographs, so I (say), 'I got out of the Artie Shaw business about 50 years ago.' That's why I walked out. I walked out of the business at my peak. I quit." - Artie Shaw

source: Interview with NPR (March 8, 2002)

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I knew that was going to be kind of scandalous, but she was a good singer." - Artie Shaw (on his decision to ask Billie Holiday to sing on 'Any Old Time' with his all-white band in 1938)

source: Interview with NPR (March 8, 2002)

Artie Shaw Quotes

"You run into a party and [a] woman comes up to you. She's the most beautiful creature you ever saw — Ava Gardner — and says, "I like you and why don't we get together?" What are you going to say, "No"? You'd have to be an idiot. She was an incredible creature." - Artie Shaw

source: Artie Shaw, the Reluctant 'King of Swing', 2002/03/08

Artie Shaw Quotes

"Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel." - Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw Quotes

Dance music, as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing 'Melancholy Baby' and you've got dance music.

Artie Shaw Quotes

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Form will ever come back?'"

Artie Shaw Quotes

There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. If you're playing a money game, why not get into banking?

Artie Shaw Quotes

No matter how carefully and assiduously and how deeply you bury shit, the American public will find it and buy it in large quantity. It's true, absolutely true.

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I was really running a music school back then, because my band wasn't making any money. I keep talking about money, because most people don't understand the part of money in running a band." - Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw Quotes

"Swing is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a swing band in music." - Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw Quotes

"I can't understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them 'What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?'" - Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw Quotes

"You have no idea of the people I didn't marry." - Artie Shaw