SATURDAY & SUNDAY

To the casual fan, clarinetist and big-band leader Artie Shaw (pictured) is best known for his 1938 hit with Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.” But jazz students know Shaw as a complicated man whose sudden celebrity made him nervous. As the musician with the matinee-idol looks slowly withdrew from public view, Shaw’s eight marriages, his psychotherapy-laced 1952 biography The Trouble with Identity: An Outline of Identity, and 1954 retirement became the subject of gossip and legend. But at 88 years old, the usually reluctant Shaw is coming to D.C. to speak on a topic he’s always been passionate about: racial equality in jazz. Shaw is joined by saxophonist Jimmy Heath, trumpeter Joe Wilder, saxophonist and former Benny Goodman archivist Loren Shoenberg, and Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra musical director David N. Baker for the panel discussion, “Windows and Mirrors: African American and Jewish American Connections in Jazz” at 4:30 p.m. Sunday, July 19, at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, 16th & Q Streets NW. You can also hear the connection when the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra performs the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Goodman, and Shaw at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 17, and 2 & 7 p.m. Sunday, July 18, at the Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. Future performances by the SJMO this summer include “Duke Ellington: Suite Sixteen Plus Six,” including interviews with the Duke’s granddaughter Mercedes Ellington and his biographer John Edward House, August 15 and 16 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st St. NW; and “Count Basie and the Music of Neal Hefti” with former Basie saxophonist Frank Foster, September 26-27 at the Lincoln Theatre. Free. (202) 518-9400, X230. (Christopher Porter)