After four years of retirement and reflection, Clarinetist Artie Shaw was back in the music business last week, at 43. He mounted the bandstand at Manhattan's jazz-bent Embers, looked unsmilingly over the jabbering crowd and spoke into the microphone: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that it's almost axiomatic that music sounds better against silence. Not dead silencejust enough so that we can hear ourselves play." It might have been the old Artie Shaw, the one who called jitterbugs "morons" back in 1939.
The clatter continued, but Shaw turned to the group...
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