Including the pianist Hank Jones and the guitarist Tal Farlow, this was perhaps the most musically effective group that Shaw had led. His own playing was at its most accomplished and many of the recordings that the group made rank as classics. Then, in 1955, he walked away from the music again, this time for good.A brush with the House Committee on Un-American Activities caused Shaw to leave the US to live in Spain for the next five years. Besides, my name is still up front.When the United States entered the Second World War in 1942, Shaw broke up the band and volunteered for the US Navy. He formed a service band and was sent with it to the South Pacific where he and it remained, almost constantly under fire, for 18 months.

The musicians were so badly rattled that when the band returned home, they were given medical discharges.Shaw was soon back with a new band, this time including a more modern Gramercy Five. Although he didn’t play the music with the big band, Shaw had absorbed the innovations of the new Bebop. But in 1947 he decided on another exit and left band-leading to study classical playing for two years. He appeared in concerts with symphony and chamber orchestras before returning with yet another big band. In 1940 also he recorded his Concerto for Clarinet, a dazzling display of technical virtuosity spread over two sides of a 12-inch 78 record and forever a source of amazement for clarinet players from all fields.Another huge hit, fresh-sounding to this day, came in 1941 with “Stardust”.

“It’s the greatest clarinet solo of all time,” said de Franco The record remained a hit on juke boxes for several years. “I wrote a simple sketch,” Shaw described it, and then Lennie Hayton orchestrated it. He’d fire people if they received more applause than him, but I figured that if they are playing well it makes my band sound better. I would often write out the lead for songs and let others finish it and then give them the credit I differed from Benny Goodman about that. Musically she was a success, as her recording of “Any Old Time” confirmed, but society wasn’t ready for a black and white combination and the strain of the abrasive racial discrimination they encountered while touring proved destructive Holiday left because of it.

Shaw was to encounter similar problems when he hired the trumpeter Roy Eldridge for one of his best bands in 1944.In 1940, on return from self-imposed exile in Mexico, he recorded “Frenesi” with a studio band and strings. This was a colossal hit and forced him to form a new band to tour with. For the first time he included the Gramercy Five, a quintet from within the band that in its various manifestations was to dazzle listeners until the end of his career. He was to add a string section to the band whenever he could and from then on devoted himself to the clarinet, practising eight hours each day.Most of the stars who grew from Shaw’s band learned from him, and over the years some of the big names in his ranks included George Wettling, Buddy Rich, Billy Butterfield, Jack Jenney, Billie Holiday, Mel Torm?George Auld, Johnny Guarnieri, Hot Lips Page, Max Kaminsky, Roy Eldridge, Dodo Marmarosa and Barney Kessel.In a ground-breaking move in 1938 he hired Billie Holiday to sing with the band on tour.