Artie Shaw has been the stormy petrel of music for a good fifteen years. He has been in and out of the band business like a man caught in a revolving door. But when he has been in, he has been in it all the way and his bands have been very good bands — at least twice he hit the jackpot with them. His small groups, too, have been good ones, as those who saw and heard the Gramercy Five will testify.
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Shaw is a talented man with a pen, whether he is using it to chart his band's music (and his own arrangements were always the best ones) or whether working as an author. His auto- biography ”The Trouble With CindereIla” firmly established him as a writer and was, in its way, one of the most important books of the decade, shining, as it did, a hard light on a very important aspect of American culture. Everything Shaw does is news, apparently, so it was no wonder that when he organized a new Gramercy Five and opened in the summer of 1953 at the Embers in New York, the premiere was marked by all the commotion and spotlighted celebrities of a Hollywood first night. The attendant press notices were just as lavish. Time devoted a full page to a description of the event. Billboard and Variety, the show business Bibles, ran long stories. Daily newspapers and syndicated columnists turned out thousands of words about it. One thing stood out — the new Gramercy Five was a musical unit of as high a caliber as the first, andof just as much interest to the public. Shaw, for his own pleasure and to have a documentation for the future, recorded everything the new group had in its book. With Tal Farlow on guitar, Joe Roland on vibes, Hank Jones on piano, Tommy Potter on bass, Irv Kluger on drums, and himself on clarinet, Shaw took down, on tape, enough material for a whole series of LP's. There were new tunes, done by this group only ; old Gramercy Five standards brought out in new dress ; big band numbers revised and refurbished for the small group and special treatments of standard tunes. Out of the whole mass of material, these two LP's, Artie Shaw and His Gramercy Five # 1 & # 2, represent a careful culling. They were chosen to give as good a representation of this group as possible and to present a varied musical program.
(From the original Liner Notes)
Artie Shaw
And His Gramercy Five #1
Tracks
1 Sequence in B-Flat (Shaw) 8:43
2 I've Got A Crush On You (Gershwin, Gershwin) 3:52
3 The Sad Sack (Shaw, Harding) 6:08
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Personnel
Artie Shaw - cl
Joe Roland - vb
Hank Jones - p
Tal Farlow - g
Tommy Potter - b
Irv Kluger - dr
Recorded in New York ; December 1953