LEGIONS of swing fans and the international entertainment industry were stunned in 1939 when Artie Shaw packed away his clarinet, walked off the bandstand in mid-engagement in the American town of Buffalo, and disappeared to Mexico, with the announcement that he was abandoning his musical career. The general dismay was captured by The New York Times which said: “Any commentary that might occur to us would be lost in the Shakespearean sweep of Mr Shaw’s exodus: the kind of spectacularly irreverent farewell to his work and former associates that even the timidest soul must occasionally dream of, a beautifully incautious burning of all his bridges behind him.”

Shaw was rivalled only by Benny Goodman as the “King of Swing”. At 29 he commanded mass adulation and a prodigious income. But he was a complex character who sought something more than the ecstasy of the fans. He was sick of the corruption of the music business, the greed of the promoters and agents, and was artistically frustrated by the demands of audiences to hear exactly what they had heard before. As he explained it, more than 30 years later: “Begin the Beguine is a pretty nice tune. But after you’ve played it five hundred times in a row it gets a little dull. If you are reduced to packaging what you do as a commodity, and involved in selling it to a vast audience, you are in serious trouble.

“I decided that if I didn’t quit, I would be incapable of living with myself. At first I thought I couldn’t quit, I was booked solid — about a million dollars’ worth of contracts. My lawyer said I’d be sued to death if I left. I suggested insanity might be a defence. He said: ‘What kind of insanity?’ My reply was: ‘If a nice American boy walks out on a million dollars, wouldn’t you say he was insane?’ ”

In fact Shaw made a musical come-back a year later and regained his place at the pinnacle of the swing era. He eventually made his last public appearance as an instrumentalist in 1954, at the age of 44 while still at the apogee of his fame.

It was the lyrical cadences of his clarinet playing and the immaculate precision both of his musical arrangements and of the sidemen in his orchestra that enabled Artie Shaw to rival Goodman. His virtuosity was a little more deliberate, his tone a trifle warmer, his orchestrations a touch more subtle and adventurous. Although he may have lacked the instinctive jazz soul of some of his illustrious rivals, particularly Goodman, Shaw’s recordings of Begin the Beguine, Frenesi, Stardust and Concerto for Clarinet were enormous popular hits that stand as symbols of an era. Shaw’s small group, the Gramercy Five, made its own distinctive mark in the jazz world.

Shaw was strikingly handsome with a fascinating and charismatic persona. A ladies’ man on an heroic scale, he married — and divorced — eight beautiful and mostly famous women, including the film stars, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner and the writer Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber.

He was an equally astute musical talent spotter and a courageous flouter of the racial segregation of the period. He was the first white bandleader to tour with Billie Holiday as his vocalist. He also featured the black trumpeters “Hot Lips” Page and Roy Eldridge in his band at a time when most touring bands were either black or white.

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky to a Russian father and an Austrian mother, Artie Shaw grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. An unwilling pupil at school, he nevertheless had an appetite for books and a fascination with music. At 13 he worked in a delicatessen, saving $40 to buy a C-melody saxophone which he taught himself to play well enough to perform at semi-professional gigs while at high school.

In order to join Johnny Cavallaro’s Orchestra in 1924 he became an expert sight-reader within a month. Similarly he learnt to play the clarinet because the band required it. Around this time he began hearing Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five playing Savoy Blues, West End Blues. Shaw made a pilgrimage to Chicago’s Savoy Ballroom to hear Armstrong in person.

At 19, Shaw drove out to Hollywood to join the Irving Aaronson dance band. Shortly afterwards it spent a month in Chicago where he first heard the works of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel, which were to inspire him.

In 1931 he left Aaronson to stay in New York. His first break came when he landed a job with Red Nichols. He began concentrating more on the clarinet, dividing his time between working as a freelance session musician and jamming in the jazz venues of Harlem. In this period he accompanied Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday on several fine records.

In 1935 Shaw was invited to appear at a jazz concert at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. At that time unknown to the general public, he was booked to fill the interludes in front of the stage curtain while the musicians of such established bandleaders as Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby were setting up behind. To the standard rhythm section, Shaw added a string quartet — an innovative combination for that time — to perform a three-minute composition he had written for the occasion called Interlude in B-Flat. His spot proved to be the hit of the show. Encouraged by this, he attempted to build a band around the string quartet, but without success.

Two years later, however, he began leading a big band with the conventional line-up of five brass, four saxophones and four rhythm. It was a musical golden age when jazz and popular music were travelling along the same path, engendering what came to be called swing. The Artie Shaw Orchestra shot to national and then international fame in 1938 on the strength of a recording of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine. It was the first of eight million-selling records he was to make.