George Gershwin has long been a challenging figure to categorize and evaluate within mainstream music historiography. Few have gone as far as the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, who, after attending a performance of Rhapsody in Blue, deemed him “half human and half animal.”¹ But music historians and chroniclers have reacted variably to the composer’s rather anomalous achievement and place in the history of Western music.

To explore and gauge such differing perspectives on Gershwin, in particular his more serious compositions, I have examined his coverage – or lack thereof – among a fairly broad range of mainly American texts on Western and in particular American and twentieth-century concert music. For the most part, I have excluded from this survey music appreciation texts (to the extent that these can be distinguished from general histories) as well as more specialized studies, such as surveys of opera, popular musical theater, popular song, and jazz, along with essayistic monographs more obviously subjective in nature, such as Paul Rosenfeld’s An Hour with American Music (1929), Daniel Gregory Mason’s Tune In, America (1931), Lazare Saminsky’s Living Music of the Americas (1949), Vernon Duke’s Listen Here! (1963), Nicholas E. Tawa’s Serenading the Reluctant Eagle (1984), and Richard Crawford’s The American Musical Landscape (1993). Nor was every edition of some popular texts consulted, as revealing as such a project might be. Indeed, this study, limited to sources in English, makes no claim for systematic comprehensiveness on any level, but more simply considers a large sampling of some of the more prominent music histories from Gershwin’s time to our own.

Gershwin made an early entry into music textbooks with his 1929 appearance in the first edition of music critic John Tasker Howard’s Our American Music, a book that enjoyed four editions and numerous printings, making it the predominant chronicle of American music in the first half of the twentieth century.² A composer of light music who also penned landmark biographies of Stephen Foster (1934) and Ethelbert Nevin (1935), Howard (1890–1964) held Gershwin’s Broadway shows and Rhapsody in Blue – which he first heard at the famous February 5, 1924 run-through of the work that preceded its February 12 premiere – in the highest regard. He thought, however, that the Concerto in F (1925) and An American in Paris (1928), two works also written early enough to be discussed in the book’s first edition, came at a sacrifice of the composer’s “natural charm.”³ The use of the Rhapsody as a benchmark by which to assess the composer’s later compositions, already a fixture of journalistic criticism, would surface in subsequent history texts as well, although no consensus emerged, with some arguing for the superiority of Rhapsody, others favoring one or another later piece.

Initially, Howard discussed Gershwin in a section devoted to popular music and theater entitled, “Our Lighter Musical Moments,” as opposed to his voluminous chapter on “Our Contemporary Composers.” But by the time of the book’s third edition in 1946, he thought that it behooved him to “change the emphasis on Gershwin’s twofold output, and to present him in the gallery of serious composers.”⁴ Nonetheless, Howard remained committed to the idea of surveying Gershwin’s “twofold output,” that is, essentially, his concert pieces and his musical comedies, in tandem as he had done prior, arguing: “Gershwin’s lighter works are so much the germ and source of his larger compositions, that they cannot be considered separately” – a sensible and helpful tactic, but one not necessarily taken in later histories.⁵

As its subtitle might indicate, Aaron Copland’s Our New Music: Leading Composers in Europe and America (1941), which originated as a series of lectures, did not aim for anything like Howard’s sort of comprehensiveness, but nevertheless deserves attention here because of the author’s importance and authority. Like the monograph on contemporary music by composer-critic Marion Bauer (1882–1955) that preceded his own, Copland (1900–90) placed Gershwin alongside those composers associated with jazz – for many years a broad context that over time largely dwindled to a consideration of just three works from the mid-1920s: Milhaud’s The Creation of the World, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Copland’s own Piano Concerto. Otherwise, Copland had little to say about Gershwin but that his works “made up in originality and individuality what they lacked in technical finish.”⁶ Copland’s short shrift of Gershwin, expressed both here and elsewhere, for years attracted the attention of commentators, especially given the fact that from the beginnings of their careers, these two composers for various reasons – including their closeness of age, their Russian-Jewish backgrounds, and their relation to jazz – were often compared and contrasted. Accordingly, some ascribed Copland’s offhand treatment of Gershwin in Our New Music to some sort of psychological or professional need to distance himself from his more popular colleague, although few of Copland’s contemporaries, whether or not encumbered by any such rivalry, would have considered Gershwin a “leading composer” either, especially during this time period. Copland appreciated Gershwin enough to perform Three Preludes (published 1927) on early lecture recitals, and to conduct some of the famous orchestral pieces in his later years, but his reservations about the composer seem genuine enough – revealingly the flip side of his similarly cool 1936 appraisal of Samuel Barber as someone who “writes in a somewhat outmoded fashion, making up in technical finish what he lacks in musical substance” (an opinion later revised in light of Barber’s mature work).⁷ Indeed, among American composers, Our New Music singled out for detailed consideration only Charles Ives, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, and the author himself. If Copland sidelined Gershwin, the latter found himself in good company.

First published in 1955, and revised in 1966 and 1987, Gilbert Chase’s America’s Music, From the Pilgrims to the Present, a notable successor to John Tasker Howard’s Our American Music, took issue (in its first and second editions) with the latter’s discussion of Gershwin, arguing that the Concerto in F constituted “a better work of art than the Rhapsody in Blue.”⁸ An expert on Latin American as well as American music, Chase (1906–92) gave ample space to Gershwin, including Porgy and Bess, although with no acknowledgment of that opera’s checkered textual history, one marked by dramatic cuts and rewrites – a problematic lapse common to discussions of the piece. Calling Gershwin “a composer of the people and for the people,” at least in the book’s first edition,⁹ Chase also underestimated Gershwin’s connections with both jazz and serious music as opposed to popular music, an oversight encountered in many other accounts as well, and one attributed in part to a narrowing sense of what constituted jazz. Chase’s significantly revised second edition (1966) lavished rare praise on the “brilliant” Variations on “I Got Rhythm” for piano and orchestra (1934), and eliminated the erroneous claim that Arnold Schoenberg had orchestrated Gershwin’s Three Preludes, a blunder that in the interim had made its way into William Austin’s text discussed below.¹⁰ The similarly overhauled and expanded third edition (1987) showed the influence of Charles Schwartz’s 1973 Gershwin biography,¹¹ especially in its emphasis on the composer’s Jewish background and his connection with Yiddish theater, to the point that Chase now grouped Gershwin with Copland and Leonard Bernstein as one of several prominent Jewish-American composers, whereas he previously had not so much as mentioned Gershwin’s Jewish background. This third edition also made welcome reference to the highly neglected George Gershwin’s Song-Book (1932), and observed, again thanks to evolving scholarship on the composer, Gershwin’s relation to some of the stride and jazzy popular pianists of the day, such as Luckey Roberts and Zez Confrey.¹²

As already seen in the publications by Bauer and Copland, Gershwin naturally commanded less attention in more general music histories than those devoted to American music, at least during this earlier era. Exploring Twentieth-Century Music (1968) by the Hungarian-American cellist and writer Otto Deri (1911–69), for instance, gave Gershwin no more than a passing glance.¹³ In due time, however, Gershwin gained increasing prominence even among such general surveys, as suggested by the many editions of musicologist Donald Jay Grout’s ubiquitous History of Western Music, initially published in 1960. In the book’s debut edition, Grout (1902–87) devoted a short paragraph to Gershwin, but couched so subjunctively – the composer “hoped to bridge the gulf between popular music and the concert hall audience,” his Rhapsody in Blue consisting of “an attempt to combine the language of jazz and Lisztian Romanticism” – as to suggest merely quixotic aspirations on Gershwin’s part.¹⁴ This discussion remained in place after Claude Palisca (1921–2001) began to co-author the text in the late 1980s.¹⁵ But with the appointment of J. Peter Burkholder (b. 1954) as the book’s third author in the late 1990s, coverage of Gershwin expanded, reflecting not only the growing presence of popular music in academia but also Burkholder’s background as an American music specialist. By the time of the volume’s ninth edition (2014), Gershwin received two full pages of text, one for his popular theater works (with the book’s ancillary anthologies including the music for “I Got Rhythm” and a recording of that number by Ethel Merman), and another page, placed elsewhere, for his concert works and Porgy and Bess, with the composer credited for having created “a distinctively American modernist style.”¹⁶

Meanwhile, a few histories from the 1960s – Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961) by the Latvian-born Queens College professor Joseph Machlis (1906–98), Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (1964) by the British composer-critic Wilfrid Mellers (1914–2008), and Music in the 20th Century, from Debussy through Stravinsky (1966) by Cornell musicologist William W. Austin (1920–2000) – demonstrated Gershwin’s growing stock among music historians, even though the authors differed somewhat in their conclusions. Surprisingly unusual in its recognition of Ira Gershwin, George’s principal collaborator on his musical comedies and songs, Machlis deemed the composer “one of the most gifted musicians this country has produced,” and showed even greater esteem in the book’s 1979 second edition, which privileged Gershwin, along with Ives, Varèse, Ruggles, Copland, and Sessions, as one of only a few Americans with a chapter of his own. However, this same second edition made the grievous mistake of maintaining the false though widely circulated claim (found in other histories as well) that Duke Ellington thought Porgy and Bess diminished by its alleged “lampblack Negroism” (whereas that phrase had originated with Ellington’s white interlocutor, Edward Murrow).¹⁷

Typical of European response in taking the composer more seriously than many comparably sophisticated American commentators, Wilfrid Mellers went even further than Machlis, deeming Gershwin “certainly among the three or four finest composers ever produced by America,” the adjective “finest” in some distinction to the more familiar American description of the composer as “gifted.” Although lavish in his praise of Gershwin’s popular theater songs, which showed him “an adult and unexpectedly deep composer,” Mellers focused primarily on Porgy and Bess, taking the opera’s use of African American lore somewhat for granted, and, by sensing the composer’s identification with Porgy, honing in rather on the work’s autobiographical resonance. Mellers also proved unique in comparing the opera not only to the work of Menotti, Blitzstein, and Bernstein, but also to that of Mozart, Donizetti, and Verdi, concluding: “There are greater twentieth-century operas: but not one which offers more of the qualities that opera used to have in its heyday, and must have again if it is to survive.”¹⁸

William Austin, although more circumspect than either Machlis or Mellers, likewise acknowledged Gershwin’s importance by devoting two paragraphs to the composer in a book astonishingly encyclopedic in breadth. Moreover, Austin brought unprecedented attention to the composer’s development, writing: “In later works Gershwin’s Lisztian exuberance was restrained by a growing respectful awareness of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg, a growing appreciation of Beethoven, and an effort to emulate these masters with the help of Joseph Schillinger’s methods” (even if, as mentioned, Chase misled him with regard to Schoenberg’s alleged orchestration of the Three Preludes, whose date of composition Austin also got wrong). Austin’s wide-ranging knowledge and concerns allowed him not only to make the common references to Copland and Liszt, but in the course of the text, to draw connections with, in addition to Beethoven, Berg, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg as seen above, Debussy, Delius, Puccini, Ravel, Anton Rubinstein, Irving Berlin, John Alden Carpenter, Vernon Duke, Jerome Kern, William Grant Still, several leading jazz musicians, and by implication, Kurt Weill, Isaak Dunayevsky, and many others, stating: “A synthesis of popular and prestigious elements was achieved without any theory of ‘gestic music’ or ‘realism’ by the American George Gershwin.”¹⁹ At the same time, Austin’s carefully calibrated rankings prompted distinctions not always to Gershwin’s advantage. He claimed that Prokofiev “was not rightly to be classified with that of Glazunov or Khachaturian, much less with Lehár or Gershwin”; that Gershwin did not, like Copland, share those “international standards” exemplified by Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Elliott Carter; and that Poulenc’s Les Biches “could never provide comfort or thrills to the naive audience of Gershwin, nor could it command the respect of all admirers of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.” Austin imagined nonetheless that the “usefulness and influence [of Gershwin’s music] might well outlast the later hit shows of Frederick Loewe.”²⁰

Two other texts from the 1960s, part of a classroom-friendly series published by Prentice-Hall – Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (1967) by composer Eric Salzman (1933–2017), and Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (1969) by musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock (1923–2007) – added little to the conversation. In referring to Porgy and Bess as “in spite of its ambitions, a masterpiece of musical comedy,” Salzman perpetuated a misnomer encountered endlessly in studies especially of the Broadway musical, and one the author corrected in his 1988 third edition of the text by calling the work “actually a full-scale grand opera.”²¹ Hitchcock’s cavalier treatment of Gershwin, which differed markedly from the roughly contemporary assessments by Machlis, Mellers, and Austin discussed above, represented a low point with regard to the academic reception of Gershwin, beginning with the fact that the author, in odd disregard to both genre and chronology, situated the composer, including his concert music and Porgy and Bess, in the “Popular Music and Musical Comedy” section of a chapter entitled, “The 1920s.” Nor did Hitchcock show much enthusiasm for Gershwin’s work itself, relying on fellow historian Richard Crawford to say something mildly approving about Porgy and Bess – a discussion hardly modified in the text’s three successive editions.²²

Although the eminent composer-critic Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) achieved some notoriety for his condescending review of Porgy and Bess at the time of its premiere (when the work represented a rival to his own opera, Four Saints in Three Acts),²³ he showed greater forbearance in his overview of American Music Since 1910 (1970), which regarded the “sweet-singing” Porgy and Bess as a milestone in the history of American music, and which summarized Gershwin as possessing “[l]ively rhythm, graceful harmony, and a fine melodic gift.”²⁴ Another composer, Edith Borroff (b. 1925), in her sprawling Music in Europe and the United States (1971), took respectful note of Gershwin as well, while painting, like many others, an exaggeratedly bleak picture with regard to Gershwin’s reception among his contemporaries.²⁵

Even prior to its landmark 1976 revivals, the growing prestige of Porgy and Bess, as evidenced in Mellers, Borroff, and others, could be discerned in the chapter contributions of music librarian Wayne Shirley (b. 1936) in Music in the Modern Age (1973) and conductor-composer Richard Franko Goldman (1910–80) in the New Oxford History of Music (1974), although the latter also included a sizeable excerpt from Rhapsody in Blue. Shirley, meanwhile, demonstrated the influence of both Stravinsky’s “Petrushka chord” and Southern black folk music on Porgy and Bess by way of two musical examples, thereby neatly illustrating the incorporation of modernist and vernacular styles in the composer’s work. Porgy and Bess also emerged as a prominent focus in American Music: A Panorama (1979) by composer Daniel Kingman (1924–2003), although the book’s 1990 second edition, aware of shifts in the cultural climate, acknowledged some recent “rejection” of the work as “racially exploitative and demeaning.”²⁶

Gershwin made at least a cursory appearance as well in some monographs from the 1980s (all written by an emerging generation of “baby boomers”) that, no doubt stimulated by current trends, addressed questions of American musical “identity,” including A History of Musical Americanism (1980) by musicologist Barbara A. Zuck (b. 1946), and three books by historians: Musical Nationalism: American Composers’ Search for Identity (1983) by Alan Howard Levy (b. 1951); Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (1985) by MacDonald Smith Moore (b. 1945); and An American Music: The Search for an American Musical Identity (1986) by Barbara L. Tischler (b. 1949).²⁷ Surprisingly, Gershwin figured only peripherally in these studies, which largely viewed American musical identity in terms of such composers as Copland and Roy Harris, thereby maintaining Gershwin’s long-established segregation from other serious composers, although Moore took the novel approach of placing Gershwin in the context of the Jewish Swiss American composer Ernst Bloch, and Tischler offered a corrective by noting similarities in the critical reception of Gershwin and Copland.²⁸ Such publications as these found precedent in, among other titles, Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music (1960) by the Marxist arts critic Sidney Finkelstein (1909–74), who applauded Gershwin’s concert works and musicals, if not the “patronizing” and “melodramatic” Porgy and Bess.²⁹

In 1983, musicologist Charles Hamm (1925–2011) brought forth a large history, Music in the New World, notable for its emphasis on vernacular American musics, the author’s principal field of scholarship. Hamm duly presented Gershwin – in the tradition of Isaac Goldberg’s seminal 1931 biography – as a sort of folk hero, an untrained and unequipped composer incapable of growth, who succeeded nevertheless in achieving “what no ‘serious’ American composer of the 1920s was able to achieve – a sense of being truly American in character.”³⁰ Such an assessment, easily challenged by the facts, managed both to obscure Gershwin’s real skills and capacity for development and to minimize the accomplishments of such contemporaries as Thomson, Harris, and Copland. None of this prevented Hamm from declaring Porgy and Bess “the greatest nationalistic opera of the century, not only of America but of the world.”³¹

Two music appreciation texts from 1990 – America’s Musical Landscape (now in its seventh 2013 edition) by Jean Ferris (b. 1936) and The Musical Art: An Introduction to Western Music by R. Larry Todd (b. 1952) – revealed not only Gershwin’s solidifying academic reputation, but in particular, the increasing centrality of Porgy and Bess as compared to Rhapsody in Blue. Ferris aptly selected the opera’s love duet, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” as an accompanying listening example.³² And Todd, although he somewhat misleadingly represented the composer’s achievement by discussing his serious work under the subheading, “Other Developments in Jazz and Popular Music” and included a misstatement about an alleged consultation with Ravel in Paris, recognized Porgy and Bess as Gershwin’s “masterpiece.”³³

In contrast, two notable books from the same time period with more of a focus on style analysis, as evidenced by their titles – Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (1986) by Bryan R. Simms (b. 1944), and Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (1991) by Robert P. Morgan (b. 1934) – had nominal use for Gershwin. Simms’s one sentence on Gershwin appeared in a section, “Interactions with Rock,” in which the author contended that Gershwin’s “attempts to synthesize the realms of popular and serious composition” anticipated the likes of Peter Nero and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.³⁴ Morgan, who spotlighted Copland, Sessions, Cowell, Partch, and Varèse among American composers of Gershwin’s generation, similarly took only parenthetical notice of the composer; apparently unaware of such works as Lullaby (1919) and Blue Monday Blues (1922), this scant mention tapped the familiar but erroneous notion that “before the Rhapsody Gershwin had been exclusively a composer of popular songs.”³⁵

Five texts from the later 1990s – Modern Times: From World War I to the Present (1993), edited by the same Robert Morgan; Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (1995) by musicologist Glenn Watkins (b. 1927); The History of American Classical Music: MacDowell Through Minimalism (1995) by composer-pianist John Warthen Struble (b. 1952); American Music in the Twentieth Century (1997) by composer and music critic Kyle Gann (b. 1955); and the Cambridge History of American Music (1998), edited by British composer and musicologist David Nicholls – offered a variety of perspectives.³⁶ Carol Oja (b. 1953), in her chapter on American music for the Morgan book, for example, knowingly alluded to Gershwin’s impact on the new-music community and his association with African American artists and intellectuals. Glenn Watkins’s interest centered rather on Gershwin’s influence on especially European composers of distinction, to the point of discussing him in a chapter entitled, “The New Simplicities: Germany.” Even so, Watkins seems to have underestimated Gershwin’s importance to George Antheil and John Alden Carpenter (perhaps because, with respect to the latter, he cited Skyscrapers as dating from 1921 as opposed to 1924).³⁷ John Struble favored Gershwin with unusually expansive coverage, devoting single chapters only to him and Ives; but his appraisal proved highly mixed, stressing formal deficiencies and somewhat slighting the composer’s seriousness as a student of music even as he expressed admiration for Gershwin’s “holistic” welding of melody, harmony, and orchestration, and his capacity for growth, as exemplified by the Second Rhapsody (1931).³⁸ Kyle Gann, whose preoccupation with America’s more avant-garde traditions pushed Gershwin somewhat to the side, also seems to have underappreciated the composer’s early formal training, although he recognized connections with both Alban Berg and the Schillinger method with regard to Porgy and Bess. (Like many others, Gann mistakenly ascribed the famous anecdotal exchange between Gershwin and Stravinsky – with the latter saying, after hearing about the former’s earnings, “perhaps it is I who ought to study under you!” – to Gershwin and Ravel.³⁹)

The Cambridge History of American Music dramatically bifurcated Gershwin’s achievement by discussing his popular theater work in the chapter “Popular Song and Popular Music on Stage and Film” by British musicologist Stephen Banfield (b. 1951), and his more serious compositions in “Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960” by American musicologist Larry Starr (b. 1946).⁴⁰ The latter essay, mostly devoted to Gershwin and Copland, constituted a fresh approach to Gershwin in a number of ways: it underlined the composer’s evolution as he matured, highlighted the limits of Porgy and Bess criticism based on abridged texts, and shed new light on Gershwin’s formal finesse, including the observation that “beginning with the Rhapsody, Gershwin wrote instrumentally conceived, often asymmetrical themes with complex harmonic implications – frequently involving blue notes – for his concert works, and spun his distinctive forms out of their unusual potential.”⁴¹

Such reassessment continued with musicologist Richard Crawford’s generous consideration of Gershwin in his America’s Musical Life: A History (2001), a successor to those copious texts by John Tasker Howard, Gilbert Chase, and Charles Hamm. Crawford (b. 1935) noted Gershwin’s abilities as a pianist, and offered sensitive analyses of both “The Man I Love” and Rhapsody in Blue, even if he appeared to underrate the organic tightness of the latter as had been recently detailed by Steven Gilbert (1943–99) in his landmark treatise, The Music of Gershwin (1995), as well as by composer David Schiff (b. 1945) in Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1997).⁴² Crawford’s discussion of Porgy and Bess, imprecisely included in a chapter entitled “The Golden Age of the American Musical,” further seemed problematic in its willingness to raise challenges to the work’s operatic pedigree and “authenticity” without countervailing facts and opinions, including any discussion of Gershwin’s travels south to research Southern black music.⁴³

In their somewhat revisionist discussions of Gershwin, both cultural historian Joseph Horowitz (b. 1948) in Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (2005) and musicologist Richard Taruskin (b. 1945) in Music in the Early Twentieth Century (2005) showed a heightened interest in the comparative reception histories of Gershwin and Copland.⁴⁴ Such discourse drew on the writings of musicologist Carol Oja, including Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (2000), which stated, “Copland was elevated at Gershwin’s expense,” although the author herself considered such matters only in the context of Copland, with her report on Gershwin centering rather on an analysis of the Concerto in F.⁴⁵ For Horowitz, who declared Gershwin, along with Ives, one of his “heroes,” preferences for Copland over Gershwin signaled the country’s immature subservience to “the ‘white’ Eurocentricity of American classical music and the masterpiece obsession of its culture of performance,” but his broad claim that “American classical music closed ranks against Gershwin” conflicted not only with the historical record, but also with observations made elsewhere in the book.⁴⁶

Music in the Early Twentieth Century, the penultimate text in Richard Taruskin’s epic five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, devoted more space to Gershwin than any other American composer aside from Ives and Copland, further evidence of Gershwin’s growing stature. Taruskin committed a few faux pas in his treatment of Gershwin, including failing to recognize that the composer pursued a formal musical education in his teens even while working as a popular song plugger and pianist; again confusing Ravel with Stravinsky in the aforementioned anecdote (a misstep only partially emended in the history’s abbreviated college edition prepared with Christopher H. Gibbs); and crediting the libretto of Porgy and Bess to Ira Gershwin (who only wrote a few of the lyrics) rather than DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (the latter name, incidentally, commonly and unfairly omitted in discussions of the opera, both in textbooks and elsewhere).⁴⁷ Moreover, heading his discussion of Copland “Transgression” and Gershwin “Redemption,” Taruskin took to extremes stock notions regarding the early reception of these two contemporaries as antithetical.⁴⁸

In his popular survey of “twentieth-century classical composition,” The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), the longtime New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (b. 1968), representing a still younger generation, offered a refreshingly appreciative account of Gershwin, even opening his book with some thoughts on the relation between Porgy and Bess and Berg’s Wozzeck, a topic considered in greater detail later in the book.⁴⁹ Ross proved not only deft in circumventing some of misconceived lore surrounding Gershwin, but also particularly eloquent in his depiction of the music, whether describing the “graceful merry-go-round of major, minor, dominant-seventh, and diminished-seventh chords” in “’S Wonderful,” or “the tunes [that] undergo kaleidoscopic development and are stacked up in wickedly dissonant polytonal combinations” in An American in Paris.⁵⁰

Admittedly, Gershwin remained a marginal figure in texts that continued to privilege high modernist art, such as A Concise History of Western Music (2006) by music critic and writer Paul Griffiths (b. 1947), and Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2013) by musicologist Joseph Auner (b. 1959).⁵¹ But despite such continued disengagement, especially among music theorists, academic texts increasingly came to regard Gershwin as one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century. Thanks to a new era of Gershwin scholarship ushered in by Edward Jablonski’s 1987 biography and the aforementioned monograph by Steven Gilbert, as well as by The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin (1999), edited by musicologist Wayne Schneider, with its important contributions by, among others, Wayne Shirley and Larry Starr, historians also proved more accurate in their reportage.⁵²

Some false claims and dubious views naggingly persisted, nonetheless. Moreover, certain aspects of Gershwin’s life and work still warranted greater attention, including his involvement with modernist musics, friendship with black musicians and artists, activities as a painter and art collector, contribution to the development of the Broadway musical, and musical growth as seen in his underrepresented work from the 1930s. But given the current flourishing of Gershwin studies – including new biographies by William Hyland (2003), the current author (2006), and Walter Rimler (2009); specialized monographs by Larry Starr (2010), Ellen Noonan (2012), Joseph Horowitz (2013), and Ryan Raul Bañagale (2014); various scholarly articles, including those by Ray Allen (2004), Christopher Reynolds (2007), Andrew Davis with the current author (2007), Susan Neimoyer (2011), Naomi André (2012) and Gwynne Kuhner Brown (2012); and the recent initiation of critical editions of the composer’s work (under the auspices of the University of Michigan and the supervision of editor-in-chief Mark Clague)⁵³ – there seems little reason to doubt that future texts will provide students of music history with ever more nuanced and judicious accounts of the composer and his work.

Ella Fitzgerald launched her career in a highly inauspicious way, with the humblest of songs, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” This swinging adaptation of a traditional nursery rhyme – it really was about a little yellow basket – was such a hit that it led to other novelty-type songs that made even her “Tisket” look positively erudite by comparison: “Melinda the Mousie,” “Gotta Pebble in My Shoe,” and even the inevitable sequel, “I Found My Yellow Basket.” Yet within twenty years, Fitzgerald had moved from such ephemeral material all the way up to the top of the food chain, to the most sophisticated and highly regarded songs ever written, most notably those by George and Ira Gershwin. By the late 1950s, she had reinvented herself as a key player in the process of defining what would come to be known as “The Great American Songbook.”

Norman Granz, Fitzgerald’s producer and manager for what might be described as the glory years of her career, occasionally gets credit for inventing the idea of the songbook album. Granz was not a humble man, but even he would have hesitated to take a bow for this particular innovation. “Songbook” albums dedicated to the canon of a single composer, lyricist, or team, go back at least as far as 1939, when the jazz and torch singer Lee Wiley launched a series of songbook projects that ultimately extended to six different albums. The songbook’s growing popularity as a format appears to have gone hand-in-hand with the introduction of the long-playing record in 1948: Margaret Whiting did a Rodgers and Hart collection for Capitol Records in 1947 (released as a 10 inch LP in 1950), and even more notably, Fitzgerald herself recorded her first songbook, Ella Sings Gershwin, in 1950.

That premiere Fitzgerald songbook was produced by Milt Gabler, an under-appreciated figure in the arc of Ella’s career and in jazz in general. Yet Norman Granz deserves credit for something else, something closely related. Although Gabler produced Fitzgerald’s breakthrough album in 1950 (as well as the masterpiece Lullabies of Birdland in 1955), his goal for the most part was to provide new songs for the great singer that could potentially be hit singles. While Fitzgerald topped the charts only rarely (her biggest hits, after “Tisket,” were two rather unlikely numbers, “My Happiness” and “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” the latter a duet with Louis Jordan), she nonetheless sold a ton of product in these years and overall was the most significant female singer on Decca Records.

Granz’s masterstroke, however, was to take Ella out of the singles market. This became possible with the new long-playing technology, first the 10 inch LP, beginning in 1948, and then the 12 inch, which became the dominant long-playing format around 1955. In that same year, Granz, who had been producing jazz for Mercury Records, founded Verve Records. Building on what Gabler had already accomplished with Ella Sings Gershwin and Lullabies of Birdland, Granz further established that the long-playing format complemented Ella’s evolving artistry. Granz had the vision to take her out of the singles format dominated by singers like Jo Stafford and Patti Page, and put her in a whole new arena, one where she set the standards for those who followed. Granz and George Avakian (of Columbia Records) were among the visionaries – another was Frank Sinatra – who realized that the traditional songs were ideally suited to the new media, like long-playing albums and television, while the so-called new music, the baby-boomer centric pop that was being dubbed rock ’n’ roll, was a perfect fit for the old media, like single records and radio.

More than anyone else, it was the dual impact of Fitzgerald and Sinatra that solidified the album as the vehicle for what Alan Livingston, then president of Capitol Records, described as “standard product.” Yet their approaches could not have been more different. Sinatra’s concept was to construct albums of works by multiple composers but arranged to fit into a common mood, unified by tempo and orchestra. Fitzgerald became most famous for the songbook albums, which were unified by focusing on songs by a single composer. Each album also tended to have only one arranger (there was considerable consistency in that). Consequently, on a Fitzgerald album, a slow ballad might be followed by a fast swinger, a phenomenon that almost never occurred on one of Sinatra’s classic “concept” albums.

For Granz, the songbook albums were a win–win on multiple levels. He was not only a major jazz buff, who, as an impresario a few years earlier, had done much to make the music acceptable in the concert halls with his Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, but also an equally tireless advocate for the better class of American song. Granz is part of the reason why what we now call the Great American Songbook is so closely tied to the films of Fred Astaire. (The overwhelming majority of writers in the Ella songbook series wrote specifically for the great song-and-dance man.) Granz seems to have been well aware that there had been songbook albums before him, but only he approached the idea with such ambition and scope that his intention seems to have been to make everybody forget the idea had been done previously: all of the songbooks thus far were double disc sets containing at least thirty-two songs, and he made a point to keep up the schedule of at least one songbook per year:

The Ellington album was the most ambitious of them all, originally released as a four-LP set. Granz clearly knew what he was doing: it was the quality of Fitzgerald’s voice and the charm of her personality that made us want to listen to her longer than any other vocalist. When one listens to Anita O’Day on Verve, for instance, as great as she is, her single disc songbooks of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart, done for Verve with Billy May, are all that one needs to hear.

With Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Ellington, and Berlin under their belts, it was clear that the Ella/Verve songbook series was going to have to address George Gershwin. In fact, in the wake of the Ella/Verve songbooks, two of Fitzgerald’s “rival” female vocalists recording for other labels, Sarah Vaughan (on Mercury) and Chris Connor (on Atlantic), had already done double-length Gershwin collections that were clearly modeled on Granz and Ella. Yet Fitzgerald had already done a Gershwin songbook – the aforementioned Ella Sings Gershwin in 1950 – how to deal with that?

One thing was clear, the 1950 album was not a pushover. In fact, near the end of Fitzgerald’s life, singer-scholar Michael Feinstein met Fitzgerald in person and told her that he actually preferred the more modest 1950 effort to the 1959 masterpiece. “I know what you mean,” Ella answered, “it’s more intimate.” She was right of course: Ella Sings Gershwin consists of eight exquisitely-sung tracks with equally jewel-like piano settings provided by one of the all-time giants of vocal accompaniment, the brilliant and understated Ellis Larkins. It is a particularly far-sighted venture; the recordings were done on tape, which gives them a very modern sound. Indeed, the whole project, in terms of conception and audio quality, is much more like a product of the LP era than the 78 rpm era. In tempo and mood as well: Fitzgerald began most of the eight songs with the verses – something rarely, if ever, heard during the big band era. Supported by Larkins’s brilliant accompaniment, Fitzgerald offers some of the most poignant lyric interpretations she had done to date. She is vulnerable on “Someone to Watch Over Me,” pouty and diffident on “My One and Only,” inquisitive and introspective on “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and coy and playful on “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” To many observers in 1959, it must have seemed like the better idea for Ella and Granz to simply skip Gershwin altogether.

Yet Granz was nothing if not supremely competitive; besting the 1950 album was a matter of scope and ambition. The 1950 album had been a mere eight songs on a humble 10 inch disc; the 1959 package would include about fifty-five songs (give or take a few bonuses and extras) in a lavish five-LP set. The 1950 album had used the intimate, knowing piano accompaniment of Ellis Larkins; the 1959 would employ a large symphonic orchestra helmed by Sinatra’s principle lieutenant, and the man regarded as the number one ace arranger of great songs for great singers, Nelson Riddle.

Getting Riddle for the project was not a foregone conclusion, even after Granz realized that utilizing a musical director of his caliber was crucial. As Peter Levinson relates in his 2001 biography of Riddle, the singer Anita O’Day tried to push Granz to hire Riddle as early as 1956. Riddle scored one single for Fitzgerald (“Beale Street Blues”) in 1958, but when Granz hesitated to offer him more work, Riddle then signed an exclusive contract with Capitol Records, where he continued to craft beautiful charts, most famously for Sinatra and Nat King Cole. For Granz to use him in 1959, he had to get a special release from Capitol.

But the Gershwin project was worth the additional effort. Even twenty-two years after his death, George Gershwin seemed more relevant than ever: there were probably more songbook albums dedicated to his music than any other composer, in 1956 there was a major 90-minute TV special titled The Music of Gershwin featuring not only Broadway stars Alfred Drake and Ethel Merman (as well as pop singer Tony Bennett), but also classical pianists and ballet dancers – clearly no other songwriter was getting that kind of treatment. In 1957, Funny Face, the best of the posthumous Gershwin movie musicals, was released, and in 1958, the best biography up until that point, The Gershwin Years, by Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart, was published. Stewart would be a key player in the Fitzgerald/Granz Gershwin project; it was the affable academic, who spent most of his career as a professor of English at the University of California, Northridge, who supplied Granz with a list of Gershwin songs to consider.

With the exception of George Gershwin and, later, Jerome Kern, all the songwriters in the Fitzgerald songbook series were still alive and highly supportive when the albums were produced. When Granz sent test pressings of the first set to Cole Porter, he responded enthusiastically. Richard Rodgers, who was widely perceived as not liking jazz (and who had little use for the songs from his first partnership, with Lorenz Hart) also gave Fitzgerald and Granz the thumbs up. In 1958, Irving Berlin even tried to initiate a Songbook volume of his own with Verve Records by offering to cut his usual royalty rate in half. But thanks to Stewart, Ira Gershwin became a more active participant. After Stewart sent Granz a list of suggestions and a pile of sheet music, Ira Gershwin added his own, and decorated one of Stewart’s typed song lists with a signature doodle. (In other instances, the elder Gershwin also offered to help adapt certain lyrics for Fitzgerald.)

Granz was so impressed that the veteran lyricist had taken an interest in the project that he changed the focus of the project halfway through production. When the project began, its tentative title was Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George Gershwin Songbook. But in January 1959, after the first batch of sessions were done (nineteen usable masters taped over three days), Granz retitled the project Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, in deference to Ira’s participation, and from that point on, all the lyrics were Ira’s.²

Overall, the basic fifty-three songs included in the original five-LP set are a vital survey of the conjoined careers of the Gershwin brothers, from their first notable song together, “The Real American Folk Song (is a Rag)” (and also Ira’s first song in a show, from the 1918 Ladies First) to “Love Is Here to Stay” (from The Goldwyn Follies, 1938), which Ira identified as his brother’s final song. The bulk of the songs were somewhat familiar from show and film scores, including the majority of the standards that the brothers wrote for Fred Astaire on stage and screen, for the productions Lady, Be Good!, Funny Face, A Damsel in Distress, and Shall We Dance. The Astaire–Gershwin relationship was regarded as still very much alive at this point, thanks to the 1957 release of the film version of Funny Face.

With room for fifty-three songs, the team went beyond well-known classics like “The Man I Love,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “But Not for Me.” Stewart suggested a few Gershwin oddities that Granz did not approve, such as “In the Mandarin’s Orchid Garden,” written in 1930 for the unproduced East is West, and “The Jolly Tar and the Milkmaid,” a parody of a traditional English madrigal from A Damsel in Distress, which is one of the few songs that I cannot imagine Fitzgerald actually singing. But the producer did green light a few oddities that counterbalanced the familiar standards, and it is worth noting that these – starting with “The Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag)” – all draw on Fitzgerald’s highly developed senses of rhythm and humor.

“Just Another Rhumba” had been written for, but not used in, Goldwyn Follies. When Fitzgerald recorded it, the song was pretty much unknown. Lyrically, it is a Caribbean update of “Fascinating Rhythm” in which the singing protagonist is colorfully complaining about a piece of music that is driving him crazy – he dismisses it as “just another rhumba,” but it has a strange power over him that he cannot resist. Musically, the song gives Riddle a chance to use all sorts of Pan-American effects, reminiscent of Gershwin’s concert work, Cuban Overture. (The song is also a cousin of “Island in the West Indies,” which Ira Gershwin wrote with Vernon Duke.) “By Strauss” is a comedy waltz that owes its existence to Vincente Minnelli, who insisted on using it in his 1936 Broadway revue The Show Is On and more famously in the classic 1951 An American in Paris.

After the three dates in January, work continued on the epic project for another eight months; there were two dates in March, and a sprint of four consecutive days of recording sessions in mid-July. As a special bone to throw longtime Fitzgerald fans, Granz had Riddle prepare a new arrangement of the 1924 jam session perennial “Oh, Lady Be Good.” For a long time this was the most frequently heard Gershwin number in the Fitzgerald repertoire, in the customary form of an extended scat improvisation. However, instead of doing it as a wild uptempo improv, as she usually sang it (as on the 1955 album Lullabies of Birdland and on thousands of live concerts), this performance features a slow ballad arrangement that begins with the verse, which automatically differentiates it from the many other Fitzgerald performances of this Gershwin classic. But because Fitzgerald usually included at least one extended scat solo in every concert set and most of her albums (i.e. “Blue Skies” on The Irving Berlin Songbook), this time the honor went to Gershwin’s most iconic jazz standard, “I Got Rhythm.”

Every jazz singer in the world had already done “I Got Rhythm” (Nat King Cole, as pianist and singer, had recorded roughly a dozen variations on those familiar chord changes), thus Riddle and Fitzgerald were inspired to come up with a completely different approach: Riddle opens with the rubato, minor key verse in a contemporary classical setting, with modish, polytonal chords that suggest Aaron Copland; then, for the chorus, while keeping the whole thing swinging, they take a Broadway-like approach, with several tempo changes and a beat that stops and starts, much more like concert music than big band dance music.

Overall, the Gershwin Songbook is also the best example of two major features of Ella Fitzgerald’s music, especially at this moment, which might be considered the midpoint of her career: for one thing, she had come a long way since the days of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which was hardly the worst song she ever sang during the Chick Webb period. Not only is there a feeling that she is now singing the greatest songs ever written in all of the twentieth-century American experience, but that the songs themselves could have no better interpreter. Ella doing this music, in this songbook, is a case of what her friend Joe Williams referred to as “water seeking its own level.” The Gershwin package even puts the previous Verve Songbooks to shame, particularly the first two, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, where Bregman’s arrangements sound like hack work compared to Riddle.

The other point best illuminated by the Gershwin project is in Fitzgerald’s singing itself, which represents a case of what I call “Garbo’s foot syndrome”: in the 1930s, at the height of the Hollywood studio system, Greta Garbo was the most beautiful woman in the world, but the caricaturists and other wisenheimers who wanted to make fun of her decided to harp on this idea that she had unusually large feet. They had to find something wrong with her! Fitzgerald was the greatest singer in the world, and those negative Nellies and moaning minnies who are determined to find fault with everything started promoting the false notion that Fitzgerald was only “about” the music, never about the words. One of the more satisfying aspects of the Gershwin album is that it represents some of Fitzgerald’s best singing of lyrics as well as melodies. Even the naysayers knew to expect that Fitzgerald’s uptempos were going to be awesome, like “Strike Up the Band,” with its march-time intro and college football fanfare.

But there was no denying that this album would contain some of the greatest and most moving ballad singing Fitzgerald would ever do, in track after track. We have already mentioned “Oh, Lady, Be Good,” and that is a key track that must have really caught listeners off guard – Ella is so effusive, so forthcoming with all of her emotions, so overwhelmingly warm and full of heart, that the word “disarming” barely begins to describe it.

For this particular project, Riddle and Fitzgerald came up with a whole new way to use time: few of the tracks are very fast or very slow. Instead, nearly all of them have elements of both. Fitzgerald does not need the crutch of a super slow tempo to be effective: she can break our hearts even while the beat is still going, as on “Somebody from Somewhere.” “I Was Doing All Right” is one of the faster pieces on the package, but still it is barely fast at all, compared to one of Fitzgerald’s horse-race tempo bebop excursions, like many of those found on her epic scat collection, Lullabies of Birdland (including the original, mostly scatted 1947 version of “Oh, Lady Be Good” – now that is fast!) Keeping the tracks both fast and slow, and, with exceptions (like the new “Lady, Be Good”), both happy and sad helped enhance the album as a whole: it is one occasion when you can listen to almost sixty songs by one composing team, one vocalist, and one arranger and never feel the monotony. Like so much of the best Fitzgerald, when you get through all five albums, you only want to listen to more Ella Fitzgerald.

In August, Granz asked Riddle to work up arrangements on two special bonus tracks – unusual material that would be issued in an unusual format. These would be Gershwin’s Three Preludes (his most famous instrumental compositions after Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris) and three other instrumental pieces that all pertained to the act of walking, “Promenade (Walking the Dog),” “March of the Swiss Soldiers,” and “Fidgety Feet,” which Riddle joined together and christened as The Ambulatory Suite. The two extraordinary sets, which timed at six and a half and seven minutes, respectively, were issued in the finished set as a bonus disc, in the unusual format of a 7 inch 33⅓ rpm extended play single.

Granz was a fervent art buff, and it shows. He was also a maven for packaging. The Gershwin Songbook package was issued in various formats, the most notable of which was the deluxe $100 edition – at a time when the average price of a new album was about $3. The deluxe edition was housed in a box with a cover illustration by the contemporary French artist Bernard Buffet; in addition to the cover, a set of lithographs by the artist was included in the edition. These were used as the covers of the individual volumes when the set was eventually issued as five separate LPs. Also included was a substantial hardcover booklet by Lawrence D. Stewart, which made a proper companion volume to The Gershwin Years. Then, there was the 7 inch EP, containing the two Riddle/Gershwin instrumental suites. And, of course, there were the five 12 inch LPs containing the fifty-three Gershwin songs.

Frank Sinatra helped launch the album on his November 25, 1959 ABC-TV special (with the introductory line included at the top of this chapter). In a case of noblesse oblige that was especially magnanimous, Sinatra devoted eight full minutes, the finale of his special, to the Gershwin Songbook with Nelson Riddle himself conducting the studio orchestra. Fitzgerald opened with “He Loves and She Loves,” the Hi-Los vocal group sang “Love Walked Right In,” then Sinatra did his solo, “Love Is Here to Stay” (the classic Riddle arrangement from Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, 1956), and, for a climax, “Love Is Sweeping the Country” was performed by the entire cast: Fitzgerald, Sinatra, the HiLos, plus Peter Lawford, Hermione Gingold, and dancer Juliet Prowse. It was probably the best prime time exposure that any new album ever received in that period.

You might say Sinatra had a vested interested in promoting Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, and I do not mean because he was, at the time, attempting to purchase the entire operation outright from Granz. Rather, he had always known that he and Fitzgerald and Granz were going for the same thing: to achieve a new level of respect for jazz, popular singing, and the Great American Songbook. When Fitzgerald and Sinatra were young band vocalists, dancing to big bands was just something that teenagers did, and that no one else took seriously; places where jazz was heard were considered dives where no respectable person would ever bring his wife or his mother (his mistress, maybe); and there was no “Great American Songbook,” there was only the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, where forgettable novelties like “Mairzy Doats” usually took top place. The gatekeepers of high culture looked down their noses (and through their lorgnettes) at all of these enterprises. Yet the classic Sinatra albums and the Gershwin and other songbooks did much to change all that. After hearing the magic that Fitzgerald and Riddle wrought on “But Not for Me” and “How Long Has This Been Goin’ On,” it was still possible to debate what kind of art this was, but there was no denying that it was, indeed, art.

Following the huge success of the Gershwin project, in 1960, the Songbook series took a year off. Fitzgerald’s blockbuster release for the opening of the new decade was Mack the Knife – Ella in Berlin, her classic live concert album, taped in February at the Deutschlandhalle. Whereas the epic Gershwin Songbook had taken eight months and the services of dozens of musicians to record, for this album, Granz simply stuck a mic in front of the great lady and turned on the tape recorder. The results were both pure musical magic and cash register gold.

Then he resumed the Songbook project in 1961, with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook, featuring the audacious arrangements of Billy May in their only collaboration together. The final volumes in the series were both single disc packages under the baton of Riddle: Jerome Kern in 1963 and Johnny Mercer in 1964. From that point on, there were a number of addenda to the Songbook series: in 1981, she released Ella Abraça Jobim (subtitled Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Antonio Carlos Jobim Songbook), a two LP package of compositions by the innovative Brazilian composer, whose work Fitzgerald had long exalted. There was also Ella Loves Cole, from 1972 (reissued as Dream Dancing), in which the new arrangements by Nelson Riddle made it a major improvement over the original 1956 Cole Porter Songbook arrangements by Buddy Bregman.

And finally, there was Nice Work If You Can Get It from 1983. This third and final Ella-Gershwin project grew out of the admiration that pianist (and conductor and composer) André Previn felt for Fitzgerald; in 1979, she had been a guest on his PBS TV series, Previn and the Pittsburgh, on which he spoke at length of his love for the Songbook albums. She sang some Cole Porter (“Dream Dancing”), some Ellington (“I’m Just a Lucky So and So”), some Rodgers and Hart (“Glad to Be Unhappy”), and naturally, some Gershwin (“They Can’t Take That Away from Me”). This also was the only occasion I know of when Fitzgerald sang both versions of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” the uptempo arrangement with the wild scat solo and the slow ballad version with the verse. As Fitzgerald explained to the host: “Andre, I’d like to say that this was Norman Granz’s idea to try it slow. I think that a lot of people never realized what a beautiful song it is. You understand the lyrics this way!”

Nice Work If You Can Get It was formally subtitled Ella Fitzgerald and Andre Previn Do Gershwin. As with the 1950 Ella Sings Gershwin, it is a more intimate project than the 1959 Songbook, and it is even more of a full-scale collaboration with a major pianist than the 1950 album. Recorded nearly twenty-five years after “the big one,” Fitzgerald’s voice has notably aged, but she is still in excellent shape, vocally, overall. All eight tracks (one of which is a three-song medley) are also in a decidedly medium tempo. It could be that this is a tempo that better suits Gershwin’s melodies than say, those of Cole Porter or Irving Berlin; some are slightly faster or slower, but there is nothing of the crawl-tempo ballads or the horserace tempo swingers. In this case, however, the extreme tempos were likely avoided because the middle speeds were easier on Fitzgerald’s aging voice.

Granz could have looked around for songs that Fitzgerald had missed in 1950 or 1959, or even some of the Porgy and Bess songs that Louis Armstrong had sung on his album with her, but no. These are all, so to speak, remakes of songs Ella had done before. Granz apparently conceived the album as a kind of last hurrah for both Fitzgerald and Ira Gershwin; Ella would make two more studio albums for Granz, but this is the best of her later projects, and Ira would live long enough for the sessions (in May 1983) but passed away (on August 17) just a few weeks before the album’s release. In these recordings, Ella does not hold back. Her melodic inventiveness, particularly on the many embellishments on “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” is greater than ever, while the melancholy mood she spins on “But Not for Me” is even more convincing than on her 1950 and 1959 versions. She also benefits greatly from the brilliant keyboard work of Previn, who ranks alongside Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, and Jimmy Jones, as among the finest of Fitzgerald’s keyboard collaborators. Fitzgerald and Previn, relate marvelously both to the material and to each other. Nice Work is not so much an improvement as an addendum to her earlier Gershwin recordings. Nonetheless, the album is fairly essential to her overall output.

Unlike nearly every singer of any generation, by the third or fourth decades of her career, Fitzgerald was no longer singing her biggest hit singles; there are very few live versions of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” from the 1960s. Her whole focus was on what was increasingly known as “The Great American Songbook,” and it is worth noting that her other albums were filled with classic tunes by worthy composers – like Harry Warren, Frank Loesser, and Rodgers and Hammerstein – who never, alas, were awarded a songbook of their own.

In all three of her Gershwin projects (1950, 1959, and 1983), Fitzgerald exalted this music by singing it as close to what the composer intended as possible. While she was the greatest scat singer ever (no arguments, please), she also could make the original melodies sound supremely beautiful without changing them at all, and when she did make alterations, they were so subtle that the composers themselves barely noticed, and if they did, fully approved of them. Small wonder that Ira Gershwin spoke for the whole profession of songwriters when he said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”

Rhapsody in Blue on Multiple Fronts

Music and war go hand in hand. One such example is the sonification of the Allied forces “V for Victory” campaign that emerged during World War II. Programmers for BBC radio realized that the Morse code for the letter V – dot, dot, dot, dash – rhythmically aligns with the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.⁷ This simple melody became recognized by civilians throughout Europe as a sonic calling card for the Allies. Albeit in less strategic ways, Rhapsody in Blue was also deployed in support of the war effort.

The Music Branch of the United States Special Services Division created the “V-Disc” record label in October 1943, providing an ongoing series of 78 rpm recordings for the entertainment and diversion of troops around the globe. The music released on this label represented, by and large, the only new popular music recordings to emerge between the summer of 1942 and the fall of 1944 while the American Federation of Musicians held a strike against commercial recording companies over a royalty dispute.⁸ Rhapsody in Blue appears twice in the “V-Disc” catalogue.

The first version of the Rhapsody released by the Music Branch’s V-Disc series has its roots in Hollywood. In the summer of 1942, Warner Bros. Pictures began work on a biopic about the life of Gershwin, titled appropriately enough, Rhapsody in Blue. One ongoing critique of the film is that it misrepresents certain aspects of Gershwin’s history, even as it attempted to interpolate real-life celebrities that had figured prominently in his career.⁹ Nonetheless, Variety observed that “as cinematurgy, designed for escapism and entertainment, no matter the season, Rhapsody in Blue can’t miss.”¹⁰ Bandleader Paul Whiteman – who originally had commissioned and introduced Rhapsody in Blue – found himself in Hollywood that summer making a new recording of the piece with pianist Oscar Levant for use in the cinematic restaging of its 1924 premiere.

Although the film Rhapsody in Blue exaggerates various elements of Gershwin’s life, it manages to capture the spirit of the premiere of the Rhapsody – but probably not the look of the first performance. Appearing on a multiterraced stage set, the Whiteman Ensemble is enlarged to forty members from the twenty-two who originally performed the piece. This enlarged ensemble facilitated a transformation of the work, mirroring the shift in audience encounters with the piece. The original jazz ensemble accompaniment had been completely supplanted by a full symphony orchestra by the 1940s. There are two additional trumpets, trombones, and reed players as well as an enlarged string section that integrates violas and cellos – instruments not at all present in Ferde Grofé’s original arrangement of the piece. Ray Heindorf, an Academy-Award-winning composer and arranger for Warner Bros. Studios, prepared this particular version. With this expansion of the ensemble came several cuts that brought down the running time of the piece in the film. It was also condensed to allow the recording to fit on two sides of a 12 inch, 78 rpm disc, which was the format upon which it was released by V-Discs.

Placing the piece in this particular filmic environment further re-casts the sonic landscape and narrative destiny of the Rhapsody. For example, during the well-known andantino Love theme section, there is no piano present. Rather the expanded ensemble, section by section comes to the sonic and visual foreground – the grandeur is enhanced by the elongated shadows of the musicians cast on the backdrop. As the Love theme repeats, the camera takes the viewer on a bird’s-eye trip over the audience, capturing the emotional responses of individuals while Gershwin basks in the glory of the moment from the stage. Given that movie-goers already know the outcome of the film – Gershwin’s early death – this out-of-body representation of the performance adds an extra level of emotional import to this pivotal moment in Gershwin’s career at a pivotal moment in the history of the Rhapsody.

The recording of Rhapsody in Blue encountered in this film was released as V-Disc 139 (Series “E”) in February 1944, more than a year ahead of the movie’s June 1945 New York City premiere and eighteen months before its national release the following September. The primary reason for this delay between filming and release was the studio’s increased focus on war-time propaganda, including a short film titled “I Won’t Play” released by Warner Bros. in November 1944.¹¹

Although not directly about George Gershwin or Rhapsody in Blue, “I Won’t Play” reveals a great deal about the standing of both as the United States found itself ever more ensconced in World War II. The protagonist is Joe Fingers, a Marine Corps Private with seemingly endless show business connections. Fingers incessantly impresses and entertains with tales of his illustrious associations. He “gave George [Gershwin] a hand with his opus;” helped Frank Sinatra get his start with Tommy Dorsey; played piano with Benny Goodman; and “invented” Hollywood starlet, Kim Karol – the very pinup girl that adorns the wall of the character’s barracks. The extravagance of his accounts – including his claim to have written a portion of Rhapsody in Blue – raises suspicion among his fellow marines, who unceremoniously declare him an impostor. To make a short story shorter, a fortuitous series of events reveals his genuine relationship with Kim Karol, which is good enough evidence for the boys that Joe Fingers is for real.

Of course, Joe Fingers is no more real than his connection to the Rhapsody in Blue – both are the invention of Hollywood screenwriters Laurence Schwab and James Bloodworth, who arrange both Gershwin and the Rhapsody on multiple levels. The most apparent type of arrangement occurs though the sonic manipulation of disparate portions of the Rhapsody while maintaining its fluidity and familiarity. Each of the three phrases of the piece that Fingers plays on screen in less than a minute comes from a different part of the Rhapsody, even incorporating a transpositional key change. At the same time, however, “I Won’t Play” arranges Gershwin and his music into the narrative action, relying heavily on the associative value of both. The presence of the Rhapsody – often thought of as the quintessential piece of American music – provides a sense of familiarity that both the characters on screen and the movie-going audience would have craved in a time of war.

Concurrently, the film arranges perceptions of Gershwin and the creation of Rhapsody in Blue – and, in doing so, contributes to the mythology of both. The compositional abilities of Gershwin were questioned long before his death, and here such supposition sustains. The film highlights Mr. Fingers’s apparent involvement in the development of the Rhapsody. To use a Latin phrase from early Christianity, the film situates him dextera domini: Fingers becomes the right hand of the divine spirit known as Gershwin. Of course, a moment’s reflection reveals the arrant absurdity of this facet of “I Won’t Play”: the early twenty-something Marine Corps Private that we see on screen in 1944 would have been a young child when the Rhapsody was written and premiered in 1924. This detail may explain the deliberate wink offered by Fingers to the audience in the closing moment of the film.

Although the films “I Won’t Play” and Rhapsody in Blue introduce arrangements of the Rhapsody closer to what audiences had come to expect of the piece – a work for orchestra and piano – the second instance of the Rhapsody released on V-Disc reminds us that the flexibility of the work remained just as strong with respect to its musical pliability as it did when telling the story of George Gershwin. This second recording, by Elliot Lawrence and his orchestra, appeared in February 1947.¹²

Lawrence provides a spoken introduction prior to the performance – a common feature of the V-Disc series. He concludes his remarks by saying: “We’ve got an unusual arrangement of the Rhapsody in Blue. How about it men? Shall we play?” Following an affirmative group response, the full ensemble launches in with an introductory fanfare motive. Although it does not replicate the famous clarinet glissando, it immediately opens space for the playful arrangement that follows. For example, in the Shuffle theme, the rhythmic underpinnings shift toward what Jelly Roll Morton once called the “Spanish tinge,” a habanera feel made even more exotic by upper-register trumpet flourishes. The rhythm is also transformed in the Train theme, where the steady churning of the snare drum is replaced by plodding floor toms.

This “unusual” arrangement was prepared by Nelson Riddle, who had just recently been discharged from the army himself. Riddle would go on to a decorated career in the music industry, particularly through his arrangements for some of the biggest names on Capitol Records: Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland. But this version of Rhapsody in Blue represents one of his earlier “for hire” arrangements, prepared during his brief stint in New York as a freelancer during the summer and fall of 1946.¹³ Shortly after this recording, Riddle relocated to Los Angeles, having secured employment with Bing Crosby.

By the end of the 1940s, the status of both Gershwin and his Rhapsody were secure enough that an increasing number of musicians felt comfortable re-arranging the piece to best suit their individual style and professional goals. Simultaneously, the non-traditional approach taken by arranger Nelson Riddle and band leader Elliot Lawrence might be read as an example of the new confidence of a victorious nation, forwarded by the young men returning to civilian life after war. By shedding expected conventions of the piece and recasting it in a new sonic light, their arrangement signaled the beginning of a long series of Rhapsody arrangements following World War II.

Riffing on Rhapsody in Blue

As the United States settled into a Cold War reality during the 1950s, with its high patriotism and accompanying economic and domestic stability, the performance status of Rhapsody in Blue remained a bit more turbulent. In the two decades previous, the Rhapsody had become a “go to” pops selection for ensembles such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which performed the piece fifty-four times in the 1930s and thirty-three times in the 1940s, usually with pianist Jesús María Sanromá under the baton of Arthur Fiedler. But soon after the conclusion of the World War II, the work began to fade from the sonic landscape of the nation’s orchestras. The Boston Pops only performed the piece three times during the 1950s, each time during its summer residency at Tanglewood. The Rhapsody had become a staple of the midsummer season, appearing annually on the New York Philharmonic’s all-Gershwin concert at Lewisohn Stadium. But by the 1960s, it appeared that the piece might have run its course even in that venue. The May 1961 installation omitted the Rhapsody for the first time in nearly four decades.¹⁴

And then there is Leonard Bernstein. Perhaps owing to the ubiquity of the Rhapsody during his youth in Boston during the 1930s, Bernstein provided a boost in symphonic encounters with the piece on two separate occasions during his career.¹⁵ The first occurred shortly after he took the helm at the New York Philharmonic in 1957. The Rhapsody figured prominently both at home and abroad in his “root and branch exploration of American music” during the 1958–59 season.¹⁶ The second occurred during the 1976 American bicentennial. That summer, Bernstein conducted and performed the Rhapsody with the New York Philharmonic twenty times leading up to the monumental Fourth of July celebration. But the piece was not heard again from the New York Philharmonic until 1990 and then only four more times until the end of the millennium.

Although concert performances of Rhapsody in Blue continued to dot the symphonic landscape of the United States sporadically during the 1950s, it also became a piece that was used for experimentation by musicians of all stripes. John Duffy recorded a version on the Mighty Columbia Square Wurlitzer in 1955, and Hammond organist Wild Bill Davis released a rendition with his trio the following year.¹⁷ Most of these arrangements reduce the piece to under three minutes in duration – a medley of its famous themes. These include recordings by popular orchestra leaders such as Liberace (1956), Ray Coniff (1958), and Lou Busch (1958), as well as solo arrangements for instruments such as the banjo by Eddy Peabody (1958).¹⁸

Ultimately, jazz musicians played most freely with Rhapsody in Blue. From its earliest days, jazz has embraced innovation. That was part of the initial impulse of Rhapsody in Blue when commissioned in late 1923 by Paul Whiteman for his “Experiment in Modern Music” Concert. Ferde Grofé, the primary arranger and orchestrator for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, was responsible for taking Gershwin’s two-piano short score and preparing it for the performing powers of the Whiteman ensemble, a role he undertook out of a combination of convention and time constraints. In the process, Grofé installed a good amount of novelty and modern dance band scoring techniques into the original arrangement of the piece. In addition to arranging “inside the strain” – a technique where as much variation as possible was added within a given chorus – Grofé called for uncommon timbres such as a trumpet with a “kazoo mute” and unexpected instrumental pairings such as the baritone and sopranino saxophones. Much of this was smoothed out, however, as Grofé subsequently prepared the piece for its flexible, published stock arrangement and again in its eventual symphonic orchestration – this symphonic orchestration is the one that audiences encountered most often during the 1930s and 1940s, and it remains the one most familiar to audiences today.¹⁹

Jazz musicians of both traditional and modern styles turned to the Rhapsody during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1958, boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price and Cab Calloway trumpeter Doc Cheatham included a duet rendition of the piece on an album of Gershwin music produced in France.²⁰ Although not released until 1966, a medley of Gershwin tunes recorded by band leader and celebrated drummer Art Blakey in the spring of 1957 (following their Hard Bop sessions) located the Rhapsody at the outset. Blakey later stated, “we often find crackpots who wrongly say that modern jazz musicians do not know how to play a melody. For that reason, the guys and I got together to put this Gershwin medley on wax.”²¹ In 1958, Ella Fitzgerald riffed on the Stride theme on her celebrated recording of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.”²² And while these jazz encounters with the Rhapsody were relatively brief, others took the opportunity to expand the bounds of the piece, including Calvin Jackson.

Despite an extensive career, Jackson remains virtually unknown.²³ He was born in Philadelphia in 1919, and his musical talents were recognized early on; he received a scholarship from the National Association of Negro Musicians before he turned ten years old. The young Jackson studied with Joseph H. Lockett, an African American pianist who performed regularly with the Philadelphia Civic Orchestra and made appearances in New York’s Town Hall.²⁴ Jackson had already built enough of a reputation by the age of twenty that he caught the ear of a young Leonard Feather, who in 1940 wrote that Jackson is “quiet and modest about his ability on piano and organ, but plays anything from Brahms to the blues with a style and technique which more professionals would find hard to beat.”²⁵ In the early 1940s, while studying in the graduate program at the Juilliard School, Jackson served as accompanist for dancer Paul Draper – a performer also well known for his improvisatory abilities. Jackson relocated to Los Angeles to work for MGM Studios during the mid-1940s. In his work as an assistant music director to George Stroll, he provided orchestrations for films such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Ziegfeld Follies (1945). Jackson also composed music for Anchors Aweigh (1945) and Holiday in Mexico (1946), which featured pianist José Iturbi. Following his time in Hollywood, he toured with his small combo across North and South America, with New York City serving as his home base.

Even in the context of the more progressive and experimental 1950s jazz scene, Jackson knew that any reworking of the reified symphonic Rhapsody would be treading on sacred ground. He respected performances by figures such as Bernstein – those symphonic renditions that Jackson referred to as the “longhair interpretation” – but concluded, “if you love jazz and Gershwin as do I, you must have felt as though here was an enormously interesting and vital Huckleberry Finn being stifled in a boiled collar and tails.” In other words, Jackson saw the piece as a free spirit that had become bound to the concert stage. Of his 1957 recording of Jazz Variations on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Jackson wrote that “to re-analyze a major work in any light other than that which focuses on the traditionally accepted treatment is to invite ridicule, risk censure, incite the faithful to an examination of hempen cord and strong oak with the avowed intention of stretching the neck of the offender.” He concluded, “it was a challenge I could not ignore.”²⁶ Although he blithely entertains the possibility of being lynched for his efforts, the prose is softened by the album cover, which features a blue-velvet portrait of Jackson at the piano.

From the start, it is clear that Jackson’s 17 minute arrangement embraces what he identified as the “present-day standards of advanced harmonics and listenability.”²⁷ The initial measures sound like the opening of a late 1950s television variety show, introducing a host that will help us navigate the rest of the sundry program. Here the Ritornello theme of the Rhapsody serves that function. For the first five minutes, the listener experiences other familiar melodic gestures such as the Train and Stride themes, adorned with big-band flourishes and shifted placement of accents. Then, with the entrance of the Shuffle theme, the piece enters new territory. In fact, even those familiar with the Rhapsody might not recognize Jackson’s transformation of this bluesy melody. Just when the arrangement feels as if it has lost its way, Jackson grounds the listener by returning to one of Gershwin’s notated piano cadenzas. But this quickly becomes a point of departure for the long, improvised piano solo that emerges just after the halfway-point of the recording. This meditation on the Shuffle and Stride themes begins with a fugue that transitions into a waltz before Jackson gestures sonically toward the inevitable entrance of the Love theme. Albeit orchestrally and rhythmically recast, the final third of the arrangement largely follows that originally recorded by Paul Whiteman in 1924, with an unexpected harmonic alteration at the final cadence. Billboard reported: “The first attempt at interpreting ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in modern jazz could be more of an artistic than a commercial success … Jackson stays within the confines of the original melodic lines while still displaying inventive and highly colorful jazz.”²⁸

Jackson’s interpretation, though little known today, seems to have inspired a chain of jazz explorations of Rhapsody in Blue. The most immediate influence was on Billy Strayhorn, one of Jackson’s contemporaries and an important Duke Ellington collaborator. In fact, Strayhorn prepared his own version of the Rhapsody for the 1963 Ellington album Will Big Bands Ever Come Back?²⁹ Ellington’s ensemble had recently taken to riffing on the “classics” through its 1960 reworkings of music from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and Edward Grieg’s Peer Gynt – both arranged in large-part by Strayhorn.³⁰ David Schiff notes that “in both instances Ellington was reopening a dialogue that defined the boundaries of jazz history.”³¹ But in the case of Rhapsody in Blue, the dialogue began long before. Although historiography suggests that Ellington maintained a marked distance from the concert works of Gershwin, his ensemble played arrangements of the Rhapsody as early as 1925, with an additional version emerging in 1932.³² The iteration that appears on Will Big Bands Ever Come Back? re-envisions the piece through musical choices such as instrumentation and improvisation. Scoring similarities between Jackson and Strayhorn’s arrangements also emerge, particularly during the ensemble’s presentation of the Love theme. The theme becomes a backdrop for an improvised tenor solo by Paul Gonsalves that weaves intricate and increasingly chromatic figures around the Love theme. It is followed by a clarinet solo by Jimmy Hamilton – an outmoded instrument playing in a 1920s style, running gracefully up and down scales according to the changes. The contrast between the modern tenor and the quaint clarinet reminds the listener of the ways that expectations of jazz had changed in the forty years that separated this Rhapsody from the original.

Jackson and Ellington were not the only bandleaders to introduce improvisation into Rhapsody in Blue in an effort to conform to modern expectations of jazz. In 1995 jazz pianist Marcus Roberts recorded a thirty-minute arrangement of the Rhapsody prepared by frequent Jazz at Lincoln Center arranger Robert Sadin. This re-envisioning of the Rhapsody features extended improvised solos not only by Roberts but also by other members of an ensemble consisting of a symphony orchestra and jazz trio. As Roberts conceived it, the goal was to offer a rendering of the Rhapsody that Gershwin might have offered had he experienced many of the later trends that form present-day conceptions of jazz. In a similar manner to that recorded by Ellington in 1963 – though on a much broader scale with respect to both instrumentation and duration – it serves as a primer on the history of jazz as envisioned by historicist-minded bandleaders of the 1990s.

The semantic chaining that occurs as a result of the number and variety of jazz-oriented arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue continues unabated. For example, the Jackson-Ellington-Roberts trajectory of the piece inspired Bay Area percussionist, ethnomusicologist, and bandleader, Anthony Brown to recompose his own rendition of the Rhapsody in 2005 for his Asian American Jazz Orchestra. This version reflects the international scene of his hometown of San Francisco and his status as a child of the 1960s, placing traditional instruments such as the Japanese shakuhachi and the Chinese yangqin alongside the electric guitar and rock percussion. Arrangements such as that by Brown represent the embrace of an increasingly global audience for the piece over the course of the twentieth century and into the present day – one that has been particularly amplified over the past two decades by United Airlines.

Rhapsody in Blue Becomes Safe

As anyone who has flown United in the past quarter-century knows, the company has a long-standing history with Rhapsody in Blue. The piece appears in its television advertisements, its airport terminals, and even its pre-flight announcements. The history of the airline’s use of the piece, however, is far from straightforward. The company originally selected the piece in 1987 (just three years after its use in the opening ceremony for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles) because of its associations with the upwardly mobile image of the ascendant Gershwin – perfect imagery for an airline on the rise.³³ However, over the course of time – largely through United’s advertising campaigns – the piece has accompanied a range of narratives about life in America, from job interviews and business meetings to childhood fantasies, retirement expeditions, and all manner of personal and professional relationships.³⁴

Most recently, the company has made Rhapsody in Blue the sonic centerpiece of its “Safety Is Global” campaign.³⁵ In a world where people pay even less attention to the pre-flight safety announcements than they did before the ubiquity of the smart phone, airlines have turned increasingly to creating engaging and gimmicky videos for their federally regulated safety announcements. Designed to make passengers pay attention, even on repeat viewings, the trend toward humor began in 2013 with Air New Zealand’s videos featuring nonagenarian comedian Betty White. Delta soon thereafter followed suit with a 1980s-themed video featuring numerous cameos from celebrities of that decade.³⁶

Under the banner “Safety Is Global,” United produced its own such video in 2014, integrating arrangements of the Rhapsody’s familiar themes while culturally diverse members of the United flight crew provide instructions from a series of specific and generic international locales.³⁷ Certainly, the visuals play a key role in signaling our recognition of these surroundings: the Eiffel Tower and street corner café for Paris, a pagoda in front of Mt. Fuji for Japan, casinos and neon signs for Las Vegas, snow-covered peaks and a ski gondola for the Alps, kangaroos for Australia, a Vespa scooter and Mt. Etna for Italy, Chilean flamingos for the bird sanctuary, and palm trees and white-sands for the tropical beach.

But perhaps most important in drawing out the setting of each scene are the dramatic – if not clichéd – musical arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue. While in France a pair of accordions play the introductory bars of the piece as a pilot welcomes us aboard and reminds us to heed their instruction. A flight attendant hops a cab to Newark Airport (United’s East Coast hub) to the strains of a jazz combo setting of the Love theme. A tenor saxophone improvises lightly around this most famous melody of the Rhapsody while the flight attendant provides instruction on how to use the seatbelt from the bumpy backseat. A gong signals a move to Asia, where the ritornello theme of the Rhapsody emerges from a plucked zither and bamboo flute. The bright-lights of the Las Vegas strip, which go dark to make passengers aware of location lights during power outages, and a James Bond-inspired depiction of the Swiss Alps, where the use of supplemental oxygen masks are introduced, are accompanied by the traditional symphonic arrangement of the Rhapsody. Curious kangaroos learn about life vests as the Ritornello theme is heard on a harmonica punctuated by a didgeridoo and a rain stick. A mandolin plucks out the Shuffle theme while a flight attendant extinguishes a volcano like a birthday candle, indicating that no smoking is allowed. Finally, steel drums transport the viewer to a tropical bird sanctuary just prior to the final beach location and the announcement that the final pre-flight checks will commence. A tenor saxophone plays the Stride theme to a laid-back, quasi-bossa nova groove to help passengers settle in and relax.

While the apparent appeal of this initial safety video has led to annual installments that follow a similar model, the subsequent success of these pre-flight announcements ultimately represents the culmination of a decades-long branding campaign. Yet the ongoing use of the Rhapsody surprises even those who have played an important part in the branding process. This group includes composer and arranger Gary Fry, who created the arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue (titled Rhapsody Ambiance) that has accompanied the neon-tunnel underpass at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport since 1988.³⁸ As someone with nearly four decades of commercial advertising experience, he notes that it is “very smart, but it is very rare in contemporary American business that they do not just revolve into new advertising campaigns with a totally different feel every few months.”³⁹ When the airline first began to use Rhapsody in Blue, this may well have been the plan, but over time, in ways similar to that of musicians such as Paul Whiteman or Duke Ellington, the variable arrangement of the Rhapsody has allowed the company to adapt to changing markets and audience expectations. Although advertising executives were probably unaware of it when they first used the piece in 1987, the musical and conceptual adaptability of the piece has made it one of the most successful corporate musical campaigns of all time. In the process, United has transformed the Rhapsody from a national symbol of success into an internationally applicable anthem for exploration – one that quite literally encircles the globe, non-stop daily.

The Future of Rhapsody in Blue

As Rhapsody in Blue travels the world it remains in continuous flux. It appeared in the 2015 comedic film Trainwreck and the 2017 relaunch of the popular HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. Each encounter with the Rhapsody over the course of the twentieth century and into the new millennium reveals why and how Gershwin’s legacy remains alive – his music is still ripe for interpretation and investigation because much of it was never designed to be heard in a specific way or a specific space. Unless an unexpected major revision of current copyright law appears, Rhapsody in Blue is set to enter the public domain in 2020 – ninety-five full years after its initial publication date according to current statutes. And with even fewer restrictions on its use, Rhapsody will surely continue to be interpreted in multifarious ways by a wide range of artists. What we have witnessed so far, through the lenses of film, jazz, and corporate branding, is likely just the first chapter in the posthumous reception history of the piece. There is no doubt still much to come in the ongoing life and legacy of Rhapsody in Blue.

Songs into Scores

The “new” Gershwin shows adopt several common dramaturgical and musical techniques to turn the old-fashioned materials offered by Gershwin’s thirty-two-bar tunes into larger structures and forms that will satisfy later generations of Broadway audiences for whom the memory of the Jazz Age dramaturgy of this music is entirely unknown. The overarching formal strategy of the “new” Gershwin shows is continuity, identifiable in the domains of staging and storytelling, musical arranging, and clever integration of familiar and unfamiliar song lyrics in new dramatic contexts.

Gershwin’s 1920s musicals employed limited changes of scenery, usually just one set per act. The “new” Gershwin musicals utilize a more flexible approach, refreshing the eye with constant changes of scene. My One and Only begins in what Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer’s script calls “Limbo,” an abstract blue space. During the opening number, a storm (made with projections) cues the appearance of umbrellas in the hands of the dancers, then a railroad station “forms around” the already singing and dancing cast. Easy and visible movement between stylized locales characterizes the entire production. The opening scenes of Crazy for You transition freely from onstage to backstage to the street in front of the fictitious Zangler Theatre, which has the characteristic curved façade of the Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street (demolished 1966). This approach to setting continues after the story moves to Deadwood, Nevada where, over the course of a song and dance, “evening falls.” Nice Work, closest to Jazz Age practices in story and dialogue, moves flexibly from room to room, inside and outside a Long Island mansion. In this case, the many changes of scene are accompanied by musical interludes drawing on Gershwin’s concert music (some are included on the cast recording). An American in Paris took flexibility of locale to an extreme. At the start of the show, the main character, Jerry Mulligan (an American GI turned artist), “looks at the city, begins to sketch, and as HE does, we see it come to life.” The entire production used dynamic, colorful projections, often against moving set pieces, to suggest an artist at work on an artistic representation of Paris. In all four shows, contemporary sets and lighting concepts insured that the period setting and songs moved with an up-to-date sophistication.

Continuity in the musical domain engendered surprising juxtapositions of well-known tunes and rewarded theater-goers familiar with the Gershwin song catalog. In a profligate use of great tunes, Crazy for You transitions directly from “Could You Use Me?” to “Shall We Dance” in Act I, when Bobby and Polly fall in love, and from “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” to “But Not for Me” in Act II when they part. A similar pairing occurs in My One and Only, when a chorus of “Funny Face” erupts joyfully in the middle of Billy and Edith’s long romantic routine to “He Loves and She Loves.” Select cutting and pasting on a smaller scale melds two numbers into one: the chorus girls in Crazy for You stride in silhouette into Deadwood to the jazzy strains of “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” but when the lights come up they sing the verse of “Bronco Busters” from Girl Crazy. (The cowboys on the scene in Crazy for You did not, however, sing the chorus, which carries ironic and reflexive lyrics that would have pulled the “new” show out of its more firmly Western locale. The cowboys in Crazy for You are – as befits a much later musical comedy – more like real cowboys than the chorus “boys” in Girl Crazy ever were.) Nice Work gives its star-featured role, the militant Prohibitionist Duchess Estonia Dulworth, an appropriately grand instrumental entrance: the opening measures of Gershwin’s Concerto in F herald the obscure song “Demon Rum.”

Three “new” Gershwin musicals include mashups that put unrelated tunes into direct relationship. This happens early on in My One and Only: Edith sings “Boy Wanted,” Billy sings “Soon,” then both sing their respective songs together in an arrangement that favors the latter but that sounds convincingly contrapuntal, evoking duets by Irving Berlin such as “Just in Love” and “I Love a Piano.” Nice Work deploys a mashup of “By Strauss” and “Sweet and Low-Down,” pitting the haughty, high soprano Duchess against Cookie, a bootlegger disguised as a butler. He answers her coloratura with tap breaks. The number captures in a new form the enduring Gershwin theme of highbrow versus lowbrow. With a more psychological bent, the complexities of An American in Paris’s five-person love story are expressed musically in a four-song mashup. Determined to forget their romantic disappointments, Milo and Henri sing “Who Cares?” followed by a chorus of “For You, For Me, Forevermore” passed among the principals arrayed in isolation from each other. The intensity of the moment builds on a quick transition into the ballad “But Not for Me,” begun by Adam, with Milo contributing bits of “Shall We Dance” (a reprise from Act I) in counterpoint. At the midpoint of “But Not for Me,” Adam and Milo exchange roles: she takes up “But Not for Me” and Adam sings fragments of “Who Cares?” – the song that started the number. For knowledgeable listeners, this sequence packs four Gershwin tunes into a tight, overlapping space – matching in the musical domain the setting, which the script describes as combining “Three Locations at Once.” Arranger Rob Fisher builds a sophisticated musical theater dramaturgy – a quasi-operatic ensemble – with melodic materials Gershwin never intended to go together.

Constructing an ex post facto continuity between a “new” musical’s plot and characters and the Gershwins’ catalog proves an important strategy, at times served by resurrecting very obscure selections. The tune “What Causes That?,” cut in tryouts from the 1928 flop Treasure Girl, perfectly serves as a duet for two men at a key juncture in Crazy for You. In context, it sounds purpose-composed for the “new” show, but it is, instead, evidence of a deep dive into the Gershwin trunk. Three similarly obscure works serve important structural purposes as Act II openers: “In the Swim” (from Funny Face) for a novelty dance in My One and Only; “The Real American Folk Song is a Rag” (a song for the show Ladies First and Ira Gershwin’s first Broadway lyric dating to 1918) sung to entertain English visitors to Deadwood in Crazy for You; and the posthumous instrumental “For Lily Pons” as accompaniment for an artsy ballet in An American in Paris.

But familiar Gershwin tunes are also candidates for such integrated use, whether by fitting a known lyric to a new situation or by simple substitution of words, just as Ira sometimes did in the 1920s. “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” a combative duet from Shall We Dance, is expanded into an unlikely trio in Nice Work. Jimmy and Billie, pretending to be newlyweds on their wedding night, feign linguistic disagreement to keep Police Chief Berry off Billie’s trail (she’s a bootlegger). Eventually, Berry gets involved in the dispute and sings a few lines himself. (Underscoring in the scene draws on the instrumental “Walking the Dog,” also from Shall We Dance.) Small changes to key words integrate songs in My One and Only (a “race” rather than a “war to be won” in “Strike Up the Band”) and Crazy for You (come to “Polly” rather than “papa” in “Embraceable You”). On her wedding day in Nice Work, Eileen’s fantastic self-regard – as big as her endless bridal veil is long – gets lyrical expression when she sings “I’ve Got a Crush on You” to her groom as “you’ve got a crush on me.” The most substantial such integration came about by chance: the French heroine’s name in the film An American in Paris is Lise; the stage version uses the song “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away)” to recast Lise as an imagined American when in company with Jerry. The racial implications of this fortuitous similarity are discussed below.

But integration is not, in the end, what the “new” Gershwin musicals sell, and there are plenty of moments when a Gershwin tune is simply sung for the audience’s pleasure. Ballads, sung by the heroine, come in for straightforward treatment similar to their original Broadway uses. See, for example, “Nice Work If You Can Get It” (My One and Only) and “But Not for Me” (Nice Work), identically placed just after a rousing Act II opening dance number. “Someone to Watch Over Me” serves two shows in the same way: midway through Act I, the heroines of Crazy for You and Nice Work, Polly and Billie, alike pause to opine about the love they are looking for, in the process revealing the romantic heart concealed behind their respective “denim and rawhide” and “toughest bootlegger in the business” exteriors.

Romance in the Manner of Astaire

Like most 1920s musical comedies, the “new” Gershwin musicals end with a stage full of couples. Crazy for You and Nice Work sort their casts into four pairs; An American in Paris resolves into three (counting Adam: alone at the close, he tells the audience he “got the girl” by “[putting] her in the music where she belongs, for me at least.”). My One and Only ends with the show’s two dancing choruses – black men, white women – pairing off as couples after a lengthy dance to “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” (with two more men than women, the last couple to pair off is two black men, a moment taken in good fun).

All four “new” Gershwin musicals invest in the notion of love at first sight – often music marks the crucial moment. Billy and Edith react identically to their first sights of each other: each sings “Blah, Blah, Blah” as all other stage action freezes with the lovers spotlighted. Crazy for You adopts a similar strategy: Bobby takes one look at Polly and starts to sing “Things are Looking Up” while “in a cloud of adoration.” Bobby completes the AABA tune to end the scene, with stretches of dialogue between each phrase. Given the convoluted plot of Crazy for You, Polly has no similar moment, but near the end of the show her father takes one look at Bobby’s mother and launches into “Things Are Looking Up,” demonstrating the comic economy of the love-at-first-sight-to-a-Gershwin-tune trope. With its dance-driven dramaturgy, An American in Paris uses an expansive opening ballet set to the Concerto in F to show Lise and Jerry’s string of brief encounters on the streets of Paris: he pursues; she retreats.

Given the inevitability of Broderick/Jimmy and O’Hara/Billie’s star pairing, Nice Work holds off on love at first sight. In their first scene together, she lobs sarcastic replies at his always slightly naïve come-ons.

The pair’s first dance duet follows: Jimmy, close to drop dead drunk, sings “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” then pulls her into a dance. Billie says, “Hey, I don’t know nothin’ about no dancin’,” Jimmy replies, “Me neither – then just follow along.” In the dance, Jimmy “keeps nearly toppling over, forcing BILLIE to come to his rescue, which eventually has the effect of sweeping her into the loose-limbed, carefree dance.” Executed by a comic male star and a singing female star, the dance points in a humorous way toward the drunk dance from Astaire’s 1941 film Holiday Inn. The drunk Astaire, with Marjorie Reynolds as a more solicitous partner than Billie in Nice Work, combines comedy with dance and concludes the routine flat on his face on the floor, as does Jimmy. The motif of Broderick and O’Hara re-enacting moments from Astaire’s films in their less accomplished, more relatable (to the audience) skills is established. (Broderick, attired à la Astaire in top hat, white tie and tails, even tosses his hat into the air at one point: failing to catch it, he kicks it instead.)

But the pleasure of Nice Work, as in any Astaire and Rogers film, comes from knowing that despite her protestations, the woman in the story is a sucker for love. In the next scene, Billie even lets Jimmy kiss her, merely as a demonstration, and a familiar bit of Gershwin scores the moment. Billie calls kissing “Five seconds of nothin’.” The five seconds of Rhapsody in Blue that burst forth from the orchestra pit when Jimmy kisses Billie suggest otherwise; as does a second kiss, similarly accompanied, initiated by Billie. By this point, the script reads, “There is electricity between them.”

My One and Only, Crazy for You, and Nice Work all feature lengthy romantic partner dances for their respective principal couples about half way through Act I. In My One and Only, the dance begins in response to Billy and Edith’s first kiss, led up to by a vocal version of “He Loves and She Loves,” the tune that accompanies the dance, which, as with most Astaire–Rogers routines, also includes tap. (Michael Gibson’s orchestration incorporates the two-piano sound of Arden and Ohman, central to Gershwin’s 1920s shows.) The routine ends with the couple in silhouette, posed inside the full moon which hangs over the entire number. A full moon also attends Polly and Bobby’s long dance to the tune “Shall We Dance.” With no tap, Stroman’s choreography does not evoke as directly Astaire and Rogers’s style. Still, Polly and Bobby finish Crazy for You with her in a flowing white gown and him in a tux, posed in a manner that evokes Astaire and Rogers (even as the surrounding chorus girls in elaborate costumes recreate Broadway revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies, another persistent point of reference in the show).

Nice Work proves the most invested in recreating Astaire and Rogers. In their lengthy dance to “’S Wonderful,” Broderick and O’Hara reenact several combinations taken directly from the screen. Dancing in the living room of a mansion, they bound over and on the sofa and step in closed partner position up and over a square table and two chairs, exactly as Astaire and Rogers do twice in their celebratory dance at the close of The Gay Divorcee (1934). “’S Wonderful” also includes the pair sliding down the curving bannister and taking up the tango. This ambitious dance number for two putative non-dancers works to tremendous effect: Broderick and O’Hara are at once cautious and committed. With O’Hara in pants – as Rogers often was for partner dances – and frequently matching each other move for move and stunt for stunt, the pair performs romantic love as an equal partnership. The exuberant charm of the Gershwins’ slangy song, with its many made-up words as well as the gushing line “you’ve made my life so glamorous,” supports these silly, regular folks – also Broadway stars, of course – who dance and dance, as the script says, “buoyantly and joyfully – two people in love.”

Jazz (and Race in Casting)

The principal lovers in An American in Paris follow a tortured path toward dancing together. Lise (tacitly given to Henri, whose family hid her during the war) and Jerry initially agree to meet daily near the Seine river as strictly friends: “In America,” Jerry explains, men and women “do it all the time.” But given Jerry’s dogged pursuit of Lise to this point, the romantic subtext to their time together – and their first dance together – is clear. Jerry re-christens Lise as Liza, a strategy designed to help her escape “that sad girl” and become “that brash happy crazy girl no one but us knows about.” The fortuitous proximity of the name Lise (taken from the film) to Liza (among Gershwin’s only tunes titled with a first name) opened the way for An American in Paris to use the rarely heard “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away)” as the key song for these stage lovers. Indeed, at the close of the show, when Lise chooses Jerry over Henri, the pair dances a short final partner routine to seal their love to a reprise of “Liza.” This ending, a romantic victory dance of sorts, echoes several Astaire films.⁵

The use of “Liza” (from the 1929 show Show Girl) raises the question of how race inheres in the Gershwins’ songs and their reuse. According to George, “Liza” was composed at the request of Florenz Ziegfeld, producer of Show Girl, who wanted “a minstrel number in the second act with one hundred beautiful girls seated on steps that cover the entire stage.”⁶ The sophisticated tune Gershwin delivered – its chromatic rising bass line quickly making it a favorite of jazz improvisers – was conceived for a racially defined routine deeply familiar to its original audience. Ira’s lyric includes black dialect and implies a black voice. Evocations of nature, such as “moonlight shinin’ on the river,” locate the song in the American South as imagined in popular music from the late nineteenth century. The insistently named love object carried black connotations linked to the character Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and phrases like “I get lonesome, honey” would have been heard in 1929 as old-fashioned, ragtime sentiments (echoing use of the endearment honey in songs like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” [1915] and “Hello! Ma Baby” [1899]). Ruby Keeler introduced the song in Show Girl, and her then husband Al Jolson rose from his seat in the audience to sing it with her at more than a few performances. Jolson’s association with blackface performance also shaped the legacy of “Liza.” As used in An American in Paris, “Liza” is stripped of all these associations. The river in question becomes the Seine and the overdetermined racial elements of the lyric sound, in Jerry’s mouth, as simply the way (white) Americans talk. The absorption of black culture as filtered through mass popular culture into whiteness – a process also performed by the Gershwins’ musical comedies in the latter 1920s – is here re-enacted in a twenty-first-century context, where few in the audience likely have any awareness of the racial borrowing going on.

The complete elision of blackness as an element that informs the Gershwins’ Broadway output carries across An American in Paris, including in the show’s two rhythm tune production numbers expressing the exuberance of the American spirit: “I Got Rhythm” and “Fidgety Feet.” The reawakening of jazz in the city shortly after the end of the Nazi occupation proves a theme in both numbers, as described in the script: in the former, the dance involves “PEOPLE exploding with pent-up energy – drunk, sexualized, perhaps some physical violence;” in the latter, “JERRY’s impulsive rhythms and movements begin to infect OTHER GUESTS,” engulfing and ending the pretentious ballet being performed. The narrative context for “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” – an elaborate Act II production number and the show’s most explicit example of Broadway brashness – explicitly raises the specter of jazz. The number represents Henri’s imagined debut at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Adam, his war-wounded leg restored, joins Henri and both lead the chorus in a tap dance that includes the names of specific tap steps, such as the eagle rock (originally an African American dance move). Framing this fantasy is Henri’s actual, less extravagant performance in a Montmartre cabaret where the master of ceremonies, the “VOODOO LADY,” sings the Gershwins’ “Clap Yo’ Hands” (another of Ira’s black dialect lyrics) with her trio. Henri’s staid parents, members of the Resistance during the war, show up at the cabaret unexpectedly, and their son’s performance breaks open the family’s agreement “to say we dislike jazz while under [Nazi] Occupation.” To Henri’s surprise, his parents encourage his pursuit of the stage. Jazz is freedom and release in An American in Paris: using Gershwin tunes, both familiar and unexpected, the show presents the category of jazz as the expressive property of white Americans and as irresistible to the French returning to life after what Jerry calls “that whole filthy war.”

An American in Paris included no visibly non-white performers in its opening night cast, a conventional choice for a period show that deals in serious terms with the past. Crazy for You and Nice Work, alike shows with no intentions beyond entertainment, both incorporated performers of color in a context where their blackness had no dramatic resonance within the show but offered an image of inclusiveness to the audience watching in the theater.⁷ Nice Work’s featured roles even included cross-racial casting: the experienced African American actor Stanley Wayne Mathis as Chief Berry of the Long Island police, a comic character who sings a trio with the white romantic leads and is paired off at show’s close with Eileen (played by white actress Jennifer Laura Thompson). Indeed, when Eileen kisses Chief Berry, “Rhapsody in Blue plays” – and everyone knows what that means.

Only My One and Only, hailing from the early 1980s, attempts to explicitly stage the racial context for Gershwin’s (and Astaire’s) jazz-inflected Broadway and Hollywood music. The show’s interracial cast allows for the white act of slumming to be represented as a crossing of the color line. Segregation in American life and culture, as well as the white urge to emulate black culture, is put on the Broadway stage to the music of Gershwin. The show opens in “Limbo” with jazzy vocal stylings by the young, black New Rhythm Boys. A vocal counterpart to this snazzy group is provided by periodic comic crossovers by the Ritz Quartette, four old rich white men described in a line as “from downtown – way downtown. When our beloved President says ‘The business of America is business,’ it is these very men who are giving America the business.” The white female dancing chorus plays various objectified female types: fanciful nightclub dancers dolled up as suggestive Latin American products (sugar, a bunch of bananas, a cigar); aquacade swimmers dressed as fish; veiled harem girls in Morocco. The leading lovers – Tune and Twiggy – are Texan and British respectively but the central supporting roles of Deacon Montgomery (he runs a mission by day, a nightclub by night) and Mr. Magix are black. The Deacon enters seeking to lure Billy to his uptown club (understood to be in Harlem). Billy asks for help escaping his “hick” appearance and manner, so the Deacon sends him to Mr. Magix’s Emporial, a barber shop (also in Harlem) where Charles “Honi” Coles as Magix dispenses comic romantic advice.

Billy visits Magix once in each act. In the second act, Coles and Tune dance a shared tap routine, with Coles as teacher. Coles was a tap legend. His career reached back to Harlem’s Cotton Club in 1940. For many years part of a double act with Charles “Cholly” Atkins, Coles frequently played the Apollo Theatre and was among the first black dancers on network television. As a solo performer, Coles influenced the growth of tap on the concert stage in the 1970s, especially as spearheaded by the white dancer Brenda Buffalino. As described by tap historian Constance Valis Hill, “Coles had a polished style that melded high-speed tapping with an elegant yet close-to-the-floor style where the legs and feet did the work; his specialty was precision.”⁸ Coles’s only previous Broadway credits were a featured number with Atkins in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) and as a replacement lead in the retrospective black musical theater show Bubbling Brown Sugar (1976). My One and Only made Coles – after decades in show biz – a Broadway star. He won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in a role that put a black man in the position of instructing a white star – and an unusual one at that: Magix comments when Tune walks in, “we don’t get too many 6-foot-6 white tap dancers in here.” Coles’s dance was credited to him as special material in the program. The original and enduring ownership of Coles’s brand of “class” tap as black was reinforced again and again. In a role created to feature a performer with an aura of the legendary about him, Coles, at age seventy-two, played Magix for My One and Only’s entire twenty-two month run.

Coles does not dance in the Act I Magix scene. Instead, he leads Tune’s hick character toward a new, more sophisticated persona that directly evokes Astaire and, by analogy with Tune’s homage to the white film star, represents Astaire’s debt to black male tap dancers. The song “High Hat,” introduced by Astaire with white male chorus in the show Funny Face, features Tune with the black men of My One and Only. Tune and Walsh’s staging of “High Hat” recalls Astaire’s film number “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” (Top Hat, 1935). Indeed, Astaire’s “Top Hat” routine is a screen version of his earlier stage routine to “High Hat.” Thus, Tune recycles the concept one more time and returns it to the stage – this time with an explicit racial dimension. Most of Tune’s “High Hat” is done in unison: white star, black chorus moving together. Astaire’s often aggressive interaction with the men dancing in lines behind him – he shoots them down one by one in “Top Hat” – is omitted. Nodding toward Astaire’s many special effects dances, “High Hat” includes a section using black light, during which only the dancers’ white gloves, ties, canes, and spats are visible – rendering racial difference briefly invisible. In a Broadway trope that practically demands applause, Tune and the black male chorus close the number with a kick line (something Astaire never did and likely never thought of doing). The entire number can be read as a racial coming together among the men in the cast, much as the interracial couples in the finale dance to “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” described above.

Still, the racial politics of My One and Only are naïve at best. The plot and musical numbers reproduce in the happiest of tones the Jazz Age reality of African American musicians teaching and modeling new music, dance, and style for white performers who, rather quickly, absorb black style into a new, updated brand of whiteness. The inclusion of a black “legend” (Coles) and the racially sorted cast telling a tale of slumming represents the color line of the period but not in a critical spirit. Indeed, My One and Only concludes with a big patriotic production number, including the old white men of the Ritz Quartette parading with American flags. This show – like all Gershwin’s musical comedies, whether from the 1920s or “new” – is a feel-good song-and-dance extravaganza.

Brief mention of Gershwin in the black-cast 2016 musical Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed calls out white musicians – specifically Gershwin – for stealing from African Americans in the 1920s. The brief, dismissive number “’Till Georgie Took ’Em Away” explicitly accuses Gershwin of taking the melody for “I Got Rhythm” from William Grant Still, a well-known African American composer, who played in the pit for the original Shuffle Along (1921). As described in George C. Wolfe’s script, “Lights reveal STILL, dancing as he plays a jazz solo on his clarinet, the dancing/music pulses with theatricality, vibrancy and rage.” The angry number twists Gershwin’s familiar tune (which was apparently not licensed by the production) and turns Ira’s lyrics into a description of racial theft: “STEAL THOSE BLACK NOTES! / STEAL THAT RHYTHM! / WRITE A HIT SONG! / WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING – ”⁹ Blackout.

But for Broadway’s strongly and enduringly white audience, the “new” Gershwin musicals do not offer the historical critique of Shuffle Along … and All That Followed. Instead, Gershwin is tied to glamorous romance, often evoking screen memories, jazzy rhythms and bluesy tunes freed of racial conflict, an optimistic realm where kisses spark a song in the heart and infectious, fascinating rhythms are a welcome guest. In typical fashion for all Gershwin musicals, Crazy for You forecloses any deeper matters with a familiar line: Polly asks, “You wanta dance, Bobby?” and he replies, “Who could ask for anything more?”

Why Gershwin?

Before proceeding further, it is worth posing a central question: Why, out of all the Golden Age songsmiths whose work has inspired jazz musicians – Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin – does Gershwin occupy such a singular role in the jazz firmament? C. Andre Barbera offers one direct explanation: Gershwin’s compositions were popular with jazz musicians because they were popular songs, period.² This is certainly true by any metric. Richard Crawford tallies eighty-one recorded covers or reharmonizations of “I Got Rhythm” between 1930 and 1942, and Ted Gioia counts over four hundred jazz covers of “Summertime” (1935) during the 1950s and 1960s.³ Such staggering statistics act as a potent reminder that despite jazz’s gradual drift toward “art music” following World War II, in the first half of the century jazz was indivisible from popular music.⁴

Still, popularity alone cannot account for Gershwin’s central presence in the history of instrumental jazz, and from the start of his career critics have sought to categorize elements of his style as distinctly and inherently “jazzy” in nature. Initially, these were located into two particularly audible aspects: 1) an emphasis on blue notes and 2) an interest in intensely syncopated phrases inspired by ragtime rhythms. “The Man I Love” (1924) offers an example of Gershwin’s blue notes (i.e. playing a minor third, diminished fifth, or minor seventh over a major chord), as the opening melody fixates on the minor seventh scale degree. “Fascinating Rhythm” (1924) has been hailed as a masterpiece of syncopation, in which Gershwin imposes a rhythmic pattern of seven quarter notes onto a 4/4 meter (Example 16.1).⁵ In these instances, Gershwin’s blue notes and syncopation have been cited as distinctive and daring, but as Larry Starr has shown, both techniques already appear in a song that predates Gershwin’s efforts: “Everybody Step” (1921) by Irving Berlin.⁶

Example 16.1 “Fascinating Rhythm,” chorus, mm. 1–4

If Gershwin’s blue notes and metric displacement were “virtually clichés” of 1920s popular song, neither were they particularly daring in a jazz context. Stride pianists in New York City like Willie “the Lion” Smith had been experimenting with metric displacement since the beginning of the decade, infusing ragtime rhythms with an up-tempo verve. A few years after “Fascinating Rhythm” was published, Louis Armstrong began bulldozing those same stride and ragtime rhythms in Chicago cabarets. Although Gershwin’s inventiveness electrified white audiences, his cellular approach to rhythm appeared passé to jazz musicians once Armstrong, in collaboration with innovative, “eccentric” dancers, popularized a more propulsive, linear rhythmic concept.⁷ Amongst prominent Tin Pan Alley composers, Harold Arlen more seamlessly assimilated contemporary jazz practice into his work than Gershwin. As Walter Frisch has shown, not only did Arlen cut his teeth as a jazz pianist in bands like The Buffalodians (Can readers guess Arlen’s hometown?), but he also incorporated lessons from the bandstand into his popular songs. An excellent example is the hit “Stormy Weather” (1933), which uses two-bar “breaks” drawn from jazz in its form, and whose melody begins on a blue third.⁸

The Many Lives of “I Got Rhythm”: Gershwin and Jazz from the 1920s to the 1940s

If Gershwin’s patented blue notes and syncopations have proven to be less distinctive than once thought, scholars like Barbera, Crawford and Scott DeVeaux have identified subtler aspects of harmony and form that made his work especially appealing to jazz interpreters. “I Got Rhythm” offers an excellent site for understanding these aspects of the composer’s craft. For one, “Rhythm” indicates that Gershwin’s popular songs, composed for Broadway and Hollywood musicals, made up the section of his oeuvre most valuable to jazz improvisers. By contrast, Gershwin’s celebrated concert works like Rhapsody in Blue were largely ignored.⁹ Of the Gershwin songs that have reached jazz standard status, “I Got Rhythm” stands out for its ubiquity and durability. Successive generations of jazz musicians re-composed the song so many times that the composition must be seen as one of the great palimpsests in American musical history. While some interpretations would keep the song’s original melody intact, most jazz musicians chose to forego it and instead hang their own melodies and improvisations on Gershwin’s harmonic scaffolding. In part, this rejection of the “I Got Rhythm” melody may be due to the song’s use of a dated ragtime syncopation similar to that found in “Fascinating Rhythm.” As Allen Forte points out, the pairs of dotted quarter notes in “I Got Rhythm” reference the Charleston, a dance that was going out of fashion by 1930 and being replaced with the forward drive of the Lindy Hop (Example 16.2).¹⁰ Musicians exploited the harmony and form of “I Got Rhythm” and increasingly left the song’s melody behind, until “rhythm changes” became part of the lingua franca of jazz from New York to Kansas City, its chords presenting an ideal template for all-night jam sessions. By simplifying or complicating the harmonic progression, musicians could spontaneously and non-verbally create extended improvisations based on a mutually understood harmonic lexicon.

Example 16.2 “I Got Rhythm,” chorus, mm. 1–4

The swing-era approach to “I Got Rhythm” is well illustrated in two takes of the song recorded by Lester Young in 1944 and reissued by Commodore in 1997.¹¹ Together, they give rare insight into the process by which musicians reworked Gershwin’s original tune in loosely structured “head arrangements.” Though these recordings keep the song’s title rather than renaming it, Gershwin’s melody is never heard. Instead, listeners are privy to a group of musicians generating a new arrangement of the song on the fly. Such extemporaneous head arrangements were not always without obstacle. On one take (titled “I Got Rhythm #3” on the reissue), Young unexpectedly starts the song in minor, rather than major. Pianist Joe Bushkin takes a few measures to realize that Young has switched the mode, and a cat-and-mouse drama ensues between the piano accompaniment, which keeps attempting to modulate to major, and saxophone solo, which stubbornly insists on staying in minor. The next soloist, trumpeter Bill Coleman, continues the game, toying with major but staying mostly in minor. Trombonist Dickie Wells improvises using the major mode during his solo, which Bushkin continues in his ensuing piano solo. Following Bushkin’s solo, all the horns re-enter for some collective improvisation over the last eight measures of the form, but the question of mode, temporarily resolved in favor of major, turns out to be still open for debate. Pianist Bushkin, bassist John Simmons and trombonist Wells all play in major, while Young and trumpeter Coleman play in minor. The resultant cacophony ensures this take will never become a jazz classic, but the recording does an excellent job of revealing the extent to which the skeleton of “I Got Rhythm” was open to radical, real-time reinvention.

On the next take, “I Got Rhythm #2,” Young and his bandmates try again. This time, Young starts the song in the major mode, and the ensemble seems to catch fire as they lock into the song’s form. Once they do, Young launches into a series of riffs that demonstrate why “rhythm changes” proved so adaptable for swing musicians. Though Gershwin’s chord progression moves at a rapid pace, changing harmonies every two beats, its simplicity permits a range of improvisational approaches. The song’s A section begins with the sequence (B♭maj7 Gm7 | Cm7 F7), and then repeats those two measures verbatim, an approach Crawford calls “elemental” and presenting a “bare, abstract quality” of which soloists were primed to take advantage.¹² Young sounds the “elemental” aspects of rhythm changes when, during the second chorus of his solo, he unravels a blistering series of repeated notes over the first five measures of the B section (Example 16.3).

Example 16.3 Transcription of Lester Young’s solo on “I Got Rhythm,” 1944, Take 2, 00:20–00:25

In doing so, Young effectively flattens the song’s shifting harmonies into a single tone, sublimating melody into pure rhythmic motion. Gershwin’s original melody is long gone, replaced with the driving, forward propulsion of swing rhythm.¹³ During this era of the 1930s and early 1940s, when jazz bands were often required to play from early evening until dawn, the elemental qualities of “rhythm changes” provided a template that could be endlessly rewritten and retrofitted to the needs of the crowd and musicians.

If Young and his fellow swing musicians valued “I Got Rhythm” for its harmonic simplicity, the generation of bebop musicians that followed discovered in Gershwin’s songs ideal sites for their interest in complexity: harmonic substitutions, chromatic melodies, and angular rhythms. Although bebop’s innovators have been described as representing a radical break from their swing-era predecessors, the musicians still drew from the same well of raw material. Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, and their peers in post-war New York City continued the practice of adapting “I Got Rhythm” and other Tin Pan Alley numbers for their own purposes. “Rhythm changes” provided the foundation for key Parker compositions like “Anthropology” (1945) and “Moose the Mooche” (1946). In certain cases, entirely different Gershwin numbers were smashed together in a kind of harmonic collage. Guy Ramsey identifies one of these “Frankenstein” compositions in pianist Bud Powell’s “Webb City” (1946), which features an A section built on “rhythm changes” and a B section employing chord changes from another Gershwin tune, “Oh, Lady Be Good!” (1924).¹⁴

Thelonious Monk took an especially keen interest in Gershwin material. Scott DeVeaux argues that Monk’s predilection for the Gershwins’ “Nice Work If You Can Get It” (1937) lay in the song’s use of a series of augmented dominant-seventh chords, which resonated with Monk’s “weird,” “tritone-based, whole-tone idiom.”¹⁵ Like his peers, Monk also adapted “rhythm changes” to his own purposes, as on “Rhythm-a-ning,” one of his most-recorded songs. First released in 1958 on the Atlantic LP Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonius Monk but composed some time before, “Rhythm-a-ning” offers insight into how the famed bop pianist went about recomposing Gershwin. Robin D.G. Kelley notes that the song uses a typical “rhythm changes” harmonic scheme but interpolates the melody of its opening four bars from a 1936 big-band chart that Mary Lou Williams wrote for Andy Kirk, “Walking and Swinging.”¹⁶ One can imagine Monk’s title as adding a neologism to Williams’s pair of verbs: “Rhythmaning: the act of improvising or composing over ‘rhythm changes.’ Orig. c. 1940s, Harlem.” While the harmonic changes in “Rhythm-a-ning” may be straightforward, its melody moves in surprising directions. Monk follows his quotation of Williams with four measures all his own, an off-kilter, repeated three-note riff (f′–g′–a♭′). In the B section of the song, Monk reuses this rhythm from the A section (Example 16.4). Monk modulates the phrase to D major (d′–e′–f♯′) in keeping with the first harmony of the B section. But then, on the fifth bar of the bridge, when the harmony has moved to a C7 chord, Monk keeps the phrase in D major, creating a pungent dissonance between harmony and melody. Monk ends this second statement of the phrase with an added extension, continuing the (d′–e′–f♯′) cell with (g♯′–b♭′–c′) and turning the three-note riff into a complete whole-tone scale.

Example 16.4 “Rhythm-a-ning,” B section, mm. 17–24

As challenging and modern as Monk’s melody sounds, it shares Gershwin’s interest in metric displacement. Monk creates a polymetric effect with the B section’s repeated phrase, similar to what Gershwin does in the chorus of “Fascinating Rhythm.” Where “Fascinating” imposed a seven-beat phrase over common (cut) time, Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning” imposes a six-beat phrase over common time. If the ragtime syncopation of Gershwin’s melodies proved rhythmically underwhelming for jazz musicians, “Rhythm-a-ning” shows that the composer’s metric superimpositions were still viable, just in need of updating.

Gershwin and Experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s

While Gershwin’s influence on stylistic developments during the swing and bebop eras is widely accepted, the composer appears to exert less sway over avant-garde jazz that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nevertheless, Gershwin compositions appear on pivotal recordings during this period. In 1958, with a movie version of Porgy and Bess forthcoming, and having just released a successful big-band album arranged by Gil Evans, Miles Ahead (1957), Miles Davis and his record label Columbia decided to record selections from Gershwin’s opera for the trumpeter’s next project with Evans. Porgy and Bess (1959) went on to become one of Davis’s best-selling albums and was met with critical acclaim for the trumpeter’s lyrical playing and Evans’s ethereal arrangements. The album was significant in Davis’s career for another reason: it helped refine his burgeoning interest in modal jazz. Davis had explored this modal approach – improvising over static harmonies using pitches drawn from a single scale, or mode – on earlier tracks like “Milestones” (1957), and he crystallized it on the landmark album Kind of Blue (1959). Mark Tucker argues that the version of “I Loves You, Porgy” on Porgy and Bess represents a transitional moment in Davis’s development of modal technique. Evans’s arrangement of the song erases Gershwin’s original harmonic structure, keeping only the incipit of the song’s melody. As the bass alternates pedaling F and C, brass and strings sound coruscating harmonies drawn from the A Phrygian mode, while Davis solos using the same. For Tucker, the result is a “painterly effect” that “conveys the fresh possibilities for freedom and open space offered by modal jazz.”¹⁷ It can be added that the “open space” Davis and Evans discovered in “I Loves You, Porgy,” was likely inspired by the open nature of Gershwin’s melody, a series of rising and falling thirds that lands on every note in the A Phrygian scale over eight measures.

Gershwin continued to provide instrumentation for jazz experimentation in the following decade. In 1960 Coltrane recorded the album My Favorite Things (1960), which applied his “sheets of sound” improvisational approach and interest in harmonic motion by major thirds to a set of Tin Pan Alley standards. Lawrence Kramer hears Coltrane developing “a new American songbook” with this album by “going against the grain” of the original material.¹⁸ Of the four songs on My Favorite Things, the two on Side B are both composed by Gershwin. Coltrane’s version of “Summertime” is raucous and raw, a far cry from its intended function as a lullaby in the Porgy and Bess opera. This “Summertime,” by contrast, is explosive, searching and anguished, presaging the spiritual meditations still to come on A Love Supreme (1964). Coltrane ends the LP with Gershwin’s “But Not for Me” (1930), like “I Got Rhythm” originally composed for the Broadway musical Girl Crazy. Coltrane reharmonizes Gershwin’s original chord progression with his own third-based “Coltrane changes” (Examples 16.5 and 16.6). Pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Steve Davis avoid playing the root note of each chord, and instead sound out a descending whole-tone scale bass line [B♭–A♭–F♯–E–D–C] beneath each harmonic change. In the next four measures of the song, Coltrane repeats the same set of chord changes, but Tyner and Davis play a new bass pattern, this one tracing another whole-tone scale [E♭–D♭–B–A–G–F]. With these twin descending whole-tone bass lines, Coltrane’s rhythm section collects all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale over the course of eight bars.

Example 16.5

a) Gershwin chord changes, “But Not for Me,” chorus, mm. 1–4

b) Coltrane reharmonization, “But Not for Me,” chorus, mm. 1–4

Coltrane located an ideal vessel for his experiments with harmony and improvisation in “But Not for Me.” Like “I Got Rhythm,” it expresses the “elemental” aspect of Gershwin’s popular songs in its formal symmetry and pliable, three-note opening melody. Coltrane’s re-arrangement of the song’s first eight measures leads his quartet to scalar possibilities that would not have been possible using Gershwin’s original voicings. And if the version of “But Not for Me” on vinyl sounds impressive, one can only imagine what it was like when Coltrane’s quartet performed the song live. Ben Ratliff describes an unreleased, reel-to-reel recording from the early 1960s, in which Coltrane and his quartet unravel a thirty-six-minute version of the tune.¹⁹

Even Ornette Coleman, the most controversial jazz musician of the twentieth century, owed much to Gershwin’s music. Coleman posed as stark a challenge to the norms of jazz as John Cage had to Western art music, stretching the harmonic innovation of Davis and Coltrane even further, beyond modes and chords altogether to a world of “free” improvisation. Still, Coleman anchored his work to jazz tradition by including the Gershwin composition “Embraceable You” (1928) on his 1960 LP This Is Our Music. Coleman’s quartet starts the song with a new introduction, a moody series of descending riffs played by Coleman’s alto sax and Don Cherry’s trumpet while bassist Charlie Haden bows long tones underneath. Coleman then plays a deconstructed version of Gershwin’s original melody over a sparse accompaniment from Haden’s bass and Ed Blackwell’s drums, gradually trailing away from the original melody and chords until he enters a “harmolodic” world all his own. For Iain Anderson, Coleman “changed the entire sound of jazz” with this recording, since unlike Coltrane, Davis and Monk, Coleman does not reharmonize or embellish Gershwin’s original composition but turns it into a blank slate for his avant-garde explorations by gradually erasing its harmony, form, and melody entirely.²⁰ “Embraceable You” was one of the only pieces recorded by Coleman over his long career that was not an original, indicating that Gershwin occupied a special role in Coleman’s practice. Coleman’s relationship to Gershwin extended beyond covers, as well. Like his bebop predecessors, Coleman composed new tunes based on “rhythm changes,” including “Chronology” off his explosive album The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959).

Beyond the 1960s: Rethinking Gershwin

From Coleman to the present day, Gershwin has remained a constant presence in instrumental jazz, though his music ceased to provide the same galvanizing force for innovation that it did from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Gershwin and other Tin Pan Alley composers held less relevance for jazz musicians bent on melding rock and funk into new genres like fusion.²¹ In the late 1980s and 1990s, Gershwin once again emerged as a significant figure with the rise of neoclassical “Young Lions” such as Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis’s conservative approach to jazz rebuked the pop leanings of fusion and insisted jazz’s future could be discovered in its past. Marsalis won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance with his 1987 album Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1, which contained two original compositions and ten jazz standards, including Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” (1937). Smooth jazz also leaned on Gershwin to establish itself as a genre in the 1990s: Kenny G’s hit album Classics in the Key of G (1999) opens with a cover of “Summertime.”

Toward the end of the 1990s, Herbie Hancock released a Grammy-winning tribute album to the composer, Gershwin’s World. Featuring guest vocals from Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, Gershwin’s World represents Hancock’s attempt to situate Gershwin’s music in its historical context while updating his sound to the present. Hancock includes songs written by African American contemporaries of Gershwin, such as W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914) and Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail” (1940) (which is also based on “rhythm changes”). Despite the album’s critical and commercial success, Hancock’s motivations for making the record were largely obscured, and his thoughts on the album’s genesis are worth quoting in full:

Hancock’s candid account of his complex relationship toward Gershwin’s legacy exposes latent tensions in the history of Gershwin and instrumental jazz. The remarkable story of Gershwin and his jazz interpreters recounted above has been hailed as a uniquely American project, an artistic collaboration only possible in a tolerant and forward-looking society. The Jewish, immigrant backgrounds of Gershwin and other Tin Pan Alley composers have only added to the mythos of American popular music as a valiant, cross-cultural exchange, in which “song provided a haven for two marginalized ethnic groups before integration became the law of the land.”²³ This heroic narrative emerged at the beginning of Gershwin’s career, and it was encouraged by the composer himself, who in 1926 wrote an article titled “Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul,” wherein he stated: “the American soul … is black and white. It is all colors and all sounds unified in the great melting pot of the world.”²⁴ Touted as the foremost jazz composer in America, Gershwin was lauded by critics for “elevating” jazz, as in a review of Gershwin’s 1934 concert tour: “Jazz, with its not so very distant heritage of primitive savages beating drums, has become the real music of today. An occasional composer has attempted to lift jazz toward the realm of good music and Gershwin has probably done more of this than any other individual.”²⁵ That critics saw Gershwin as the savior of jazz only added insult to injury for black composers. After all, this was the same composer who held up a blackface performer like Al Jolson as a paragon of jazz singing.²⁶

The more Gershwin was fêted for elevating jazz from its “primitive” roots, the greater the backlash from black jazz musicians and “hip” white critics alike. In 1933 the British musician Spike Hughes dismissed Gershwin as an inauthentic interlocutor, expressing his bewilderment at “the almost universal and distressing acceptance of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ as the apotheosis of jazz … the mere fact that a Gershwin ‘number’ is incidentally used for dancing does not mean that it is jazz.”²⁷ Hughes went on to express his pleasure that “the arrival of Duke Ellington and his orchestra to these shores means that, at long last, the British public will have an opportunity to hear what jazz is really all about.”²⁸ As a result of such reception, Gershwin’s music gradually became “decidedly not jazz,” as Ryan Bañagale succinctly puts it.²⁹ If Hughes was skeptical of Gershwin in 1933, by the 1960s the thought of Gershwin as jazz was outright anathema. Bañagale quotes a 1963 critic who wrote: “Rhapsody in Blue seems to be traditional music dressed in jazz costume and coloring – Liszt, as it were, in blackface, a rented tuxedo, and battered top hat.”³⁰

It is important to note, though, that black musicians’ enmity toward Gershwin often was not directed at the composer specifically, but at how Gershwin’s success symbolized the larger inequity of an entertainment industry that rewarded the white composer’s “jazz mastery” with symphony and opera commissions, critical plaudits, and commercial gain, whereas black musicians rarely had access to such opportunities. Amiri Baraka stated the case in raw terms: “People like George Gershwin, who literally learned at the feet and elbows of Willie “The Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, and Fats Waller, could be named Great Composers and live sumptuously, while his teachers always struggled for recognition, even survival!”³¹

Baraka’s plaint echoes Hancock’s concern that “black musicians … never got the credit, the fans, or the money they so richly deserved,” and points to critical gaps in the history of popular song and instrumental jazz.³² Many appraisals of Gershwin’s role in jazz history frame his work along a binary of authenticity and artifice. Instead, a more fruitful lens to study Gershwin’s jazz legacy is through the politics of race, labor, and power in the American entertainment industry. Metrics of “authenticity” serve to obscure both the heterogeneous quality of early jazz and the structural inequities that catapulted Gershwin to success while leaving his black peers on the margins.³³ Rather than connecting Gershwin’s musical creativity to race, ethnicity or religion, scholars must consider the economic and political forces that shaped his reception. Cultural exchange between Jewish songwriters and black jazz musicians may have offered a “haven” for the two marginalized groups – but how equal was that exchange? For instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, Gershwin was free to go out for a night on the town in Harlem to hear Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway perform at the Cotton Club, but black patrons were not allowed through that venue’s doors. Although marked as a racial other, Gershwin was clearly afforded a different level of freedom in Jim Crow America than his black peers.

An example of how labor, race, and politics can inform Gershwin studies lies in the bebop era and the “rhythm changes” compositions of Monk, Parker, and others. The link from Tin Pan Alley to jazz has been hailed as testament to the unique melting pot of American culture, but the melodic re-compositions of the bebop era were as much a way of avoiding copyright royalties as they were an inevitable musical engagement. Bebop musicians’ desire to re-compose their own material was not without political edge, since “black musicians noticed the royalties were going back to these people, like ASCAP, the Jerome Kerns, the Gershwins,” according to drummer Max Roach, and “the only reason that the music of the Gershwins and all these people lived during that period was because all the black people, the Billie Holidays, Ella Fitzgeralds, Dizzy Gillespies, Charlie Parkers, the Monks, the Coleman Hawkinses projected this music, used this music and kept it alive.”³⁴ Roach had good reason to complain that Gershwin and other white songwriters benefited from an unequal system. As Marc Myers relates, the performing-rights group ASCAP maintained a tiered system in which “high-profile members like Cole Porter and George Gershwin earned significant sums writing catchy songs for Broadway and the movies, which meant sizeable royalties” while “restrictive rules … all but barred a growing number of composers” of jazz and blues.³⁵ Although Gershwin and his estate continually profited from recordings of his music, a jazz composer like Jelly Roll Morton – whose “King Porter Stomp” (1922) became a massive hit for Benny Goodman and other swing orchestras in the 1930s – only earned ASCAP membership in 1939 after five years of unsuccessful applications. Having witnessed their older peers endure this system, bebop musicians signed with rival publisher BMI, determined to rewrite Tin Pan Alley melodies rather than see their labor redound to already-wealthy composers.

Herbie Hancock kept these realities in mind when recording Gershwin’s World, and his consciousness has been sustained by twenty-first-century jazz musicians. Echoing Hancock’s discomfort with the hagiography of white composers from the Jazz Age, modern musicians like Jason Moran have chosen to celebrate figures from the margins of that era. Moran’s 2014 album All Rise: An Elegy for Fats Waller does not aim to recreate the 1920s and 1930s jazz milieu, but instead captures the spirit of that moment by merging it with the sound of contemporary hip hop and R&B. In this way, Moran re-sounds Waller’s music for its original locales: the city streets, nightclubs, and house parties that once provided the soundtrack to dizzy evenings of dancing and socializing. Gershwin will benefit from similar treatments in the new millennium. Modern audiences can handle hearing a messier Gershwin in new interpretations that reflect his fascinatingly messy role in the history of instrumental jazz.

All of us experience moments that permanently change the course of our lives. Mine came when I met Ira Gershwin in 1977. I was twenty, and he was eighty. For years, I had been reading about and collecting everything I could get my hands on regarding the Gershwin brothers. When I finally met Ira, I was well prepared for the encounter.

For the next six years I became blissfully immersed in a long-vanished era, channeled through a survivor with whom I vicariously relived a time that looms large in cultural history. George had died forty years before, but he was still alive and well in Ira’s house. Surrounded by George’s everyday items – his pipe, tie clip, self-portraits, tune notebooks, grand piano, gold bracelet, photos, letters, and passport – I soaked up a sense not only of him, but also of his music and how it evolved and changed through the years. Countless stories were told by Ira and his friends.

As a testament to the inspiration, resonance and durability of his work, George Gershwin’s music still inspires and galvanizes the hearts of many around the world. Curiosity about the man has generated countless pages of biographical material, filling bookshelves year after year. Keeping apace have been the published analyses of his music; and reprintings of the numerous compositions have surfaced, often purporting to be definitive editions reflecting his original intentions. New productions of his musicals are routinely mounted, and occasionally trumpeted as reconstructions using original orchestrations. Among the legions of sound recordings are those offered as authentic emulations of the Gershwin style, sometimes purveyed with the help or blessings of his associates, acquaintances, friends and experts. Many of these efforts are noble and well intentioned, yet there is too much chaff among the wheat. Gershwin factoids and anecdotes have been so long misspoken that as far back as 1945, his friend and musical champion Oscar Levant stated: “Even the lies about him are being distorted.”

What is a Gershwin fan to do?

Granted, it is not the balance of the world that depends on assiduous truth in these matters, but the hunger for the essence of what made Gershwin and his music tick is important to many. In this era of Wikipedia, the distortions of fact and fiction will not permanently dent the halo around George Gershwin’s legacy. But for those, like me, who care about the heart of preservation, it is nettling to see falsehoods about his life and music perpetuated.

In the years I spent working with Ira Gershwin, I met many of Gershwin’s friends. They all carried a little piece of the puzzle, a shard of the full portrait, and I have come to understand certain things about him that have helped me shape my own conception of who he was and how his fundamental nature as a man was tied to his work. Despite all that has been written about him, George Gershwin is still, at his essence, a shadowy figure. Even the biographies, especially the more recent, well-intentioned and wonderfully scholarly ones, do not give readers a full sense of who he was as a man. Thus, the question arises: Why has describing Gershwin proven so difficult? Is it because he was a chameleon? Was he hiding a part of himself? Was he misrepresented by many of his contemporaries because of personal agenda or bias? Is it faulty memory? Or is it simply impossible to contain in any way a force so combustible and vital without his corporeal presence?

All these answers are true in some sense. And since the birth of the internet, and the easy proliferation of information, both true and false, the image of Gershwin the man has become all the more shadowy and indistinct. Even his birthdate is in question. Although his official birth certificate, registered with the State of New York on October 6, 1898, gives his date of birth as September 26, 1898, his mother Rose remembered it differently. In the mid-1940s she claimed that he was born near the stroke of midnight on the 25th, not the 26th. She must have told this to her son, because when he registered for the draft in 1918 he listed his birthday as the 25th.¹ His sister Frankie, born eight years later, lovingly disagreed with her mother and brother. But she was not there, was she? Neither were we. So, it is the birth certificate versus a mother’s memory.

His name has been given as Gershovitz, Gershwine, Gershvin and so on, and even Ira could not remember exactly what the chronology of the names had been before Gershwin permanently became the official family name.

Because Gershwin died unexpectedly, at a relatively young age, his legacy was left in the hands of family members, friends, and collaborators. Although these were the people who undoubtedly knew him best during his lifetime, their memories have often created more confusion than clarity.

Gershwin’s first hit “Swanee” was remembered variously by lyricist Irving Caesar as having been written in about an hour, in forty-five minutes, in twenty minutes, and in only a few minutes. Caesar was even once emboldened to state that George just played a vamp on the piano and Caesar himself came up with the melody that became Gershwin’s first hit song, proving that those who live the longest often end up not only shaping history but also changing it along the way.

Rhapsody in Blue was the musical shot fired around the world, and the debate over the specifics of its fundamental creation is ongoing. Paul Whiteman gave many conflicting interviews through the years and, like Irving Caesar, came to take more and more credit as the ghost of Gershwin receded and legend loomed larger than life. But to be fair, it was that same braggadocio that led to the work’s creation, when Whiteman stated in an interview that Gershwin was writing a piece for the orchestra, taking the young songwriter by surprise when he read it in the newspaper. Ira remembered the story as George told it and said that Whiteman was merely riffing for the press, even announcing that Irving Berlin was also writing a piece for the orchestra, a challenge that Berlin, sadly, did not embrace.

The opening clarinet glissando in Rhapsody in Blue is often credited as being the inspiration of Ross Gorman, Whiteman’s clarinetist. Ira, however, remembered when George came up with the idea for that clarinet glissando, which happened after hearing clarinetist Gorman improvising riffs at a rehearsal.

Credit about the addition of the iconic slow theme is another bone of contention. It was added later in the composing process and was not included in the early draft of Rhapsody in Blue. Ferde Grofé said that he was the one who initially suggested that George include the famous E major Andante motif. But Ira insisted it was his idea and hummed it for George to remind him of it. Ira had remembered the insistent theme, which had been written two years earlier, and felt it was needed for contrast to break up all the syncopated stuff in the score. Perhaps Ira and Ferde were both involved, for each remembered the other’s presence in the workroom on 110th Street.

The first Gershwin biography, published by Isaac Goldberg in 1931, offered an engaging narrative that was read and approved by George, and thus subject to the pros and cons of being vetted by its subject. Ira always felt that editor Merle Armitage compiled the most accurate representation of his brother in the 1938 memorial anthology simply titled George Gershwin. The next major book about Gershwin, David Ewen’s George Gershwin: His Journey to Greatness, appeared in 1956. Ewen was an early proponent of Gershwin’s work, and he had desired to write a book about George while he was alive, but George politely declined. Unfortunately, Ewen’s eventual biography was so riddled with errors that Ira anonymously edited a new edition in 1970. But this did not stop the proliferation of misinformation. Ewen also wrote a biography about Jerome Kern, published shortly before his passing in 1945. Kern once related to Ira a passage from the book, which described how a young George Gershwin used to stand outside the window of Kern’s dwelling to listen to him play the piano. Upon hearing the tale, Ira gently reminded Kern that he lived in a high rise and that George could not possibly have heard him playing. With no small amount of irritation Kern shot back: “But it says so in the book!”

While much misinformation about the composer is spread unwittingly by writers, two biographers, Charles Schwartz and Joan Peyser, engaged in salacious rumor. Both seem to have had unfriendly agendas and played loose and fast with history. This is most clearly seen in their attempts to prove that Albert Schneider (aka Alan Gershwin) was the illegitimate son of George. Schneider bore a striking resemblance to the composer, even giving pause to some of George’s friends. Consequently, he became convinced that Gershwin was his father, and after the composer’s death, he began to make statements that were later disproved. Schwartz and Peyser embraced these claims, despite testimony from friends and family that Schneider’s beliefs were unfounded. Schneider claimed to remember Gershwin taking him to a rehearsal of Porgy and Bess. Todd Duncan, the original Porgy, said that certainly he, or someone, anyone, would have remembered George coming to a rehearsal with a little boy. This back and forth over Schneider’s paternity went on for years until DNA evidence conclusively proved that Schneider was not the son of George Gershwin. End of wild goose chase.²

The theories about the cause of George Gershwin’s illness and death have also engendered fanciful embellishment. Lillian Gish remembered warning George about an electronic contraption worn on the cranium to prevent hair loss and insisted that it caused his brain tumor. Another stated that hitting his head while escaping from a 1933 hotel fire in Chicago had damaged his brain. In 1937 the songwriter Harold Spina had occupied the bungalow at Goldwyn Studios, recently vacated by George where he had labored over his final film score. Spina concluded that the bungalow was so drafty that it caused Gershwin to contract pneumonia, and that that was the illness, not a brain tumor, that eventually felled the composer. Memory is treacherous. Mickey Rooney vividly recalled George Gershwin visiting the set during his filming of Girl Crazy with Judy Garland. When I gently told him that Gershwin had died six years earlier, Rooney bellowed “He was there, God damn it. He was there!”

Gershwin’s last song, “Love Is Here to Stay” has dueling narratives about its creation, one offered by composer Vernon Duke, who claimed he helped compose it, a mistruth that has been propagated as fact. According to Ira, what happened was this: George died before he could fully notate the chorus of the song or write the verse music, leaving it partially unfinished. Oscar Levant was able to notate the chorus of the song from memory, and Duke claimed credit for composing the verse. Ira rebuked that notion, stating that he himself composed the verse music in addition to writing the words, and that Vernon had only written it down. His proof of such was simple. He said: “It has to have been composed by me, because it’s so undistinguished.”

In those final days of George’s illness, it was hell for everyone. Some, like Irving Berlin, insisted that he was only psychosomatically sick. Berlin said: “There’s nothing wrong with George that a song hit can’t cure.” Perhaps that is why Irving’s posthumously written tribute was particularly affecting, to assuage his feelings of guilt. Ira, who was the most affected of anyone, has been described as recovering relatively soon after his brother’s sudden passing, or at least feeling the clouds lifting and getting on with it. Not true. He was in such deep shock that he was not even able to cry until he was face to face with Fred Astaire, whose own grief so overcame Ira that he finally released his own flood of tears. George’s last words to Ira were about Fred, and in the dark days after his loss, it was Astaire’s recordings of their songs that brought Ira a sense of continuum and the understanding that he must go on. But he remained in a deeply depressed state for three years after George died and could suddenly lapse back into the doldrums at any moment if something reminded him of George’s unfair exit at such a young age. Forty years later, it never got easier, even when Ira, who never believed in God, confided that he actually saw George once, but it did not bring a sense of peace or closure.

The Gershwin ego is perhaps the most grossly misunderstood aspect of his personality. Often Gershwin has been described as a self-absorbed, egocentric bore. There was self-absorption, but it was because of his own wonder and fascination with his achievements, almost as if it were an out-of-body experience. There was no false humility. If you were to tell him how much you admired, say, Porgy and Bess, he would tell you that he admired it too. He was a vessel through which the music poured, and he could not explain how it happened, thus he sometimes referred to himself in third person. At the same time, he was a kind man and doggedly faithful to his friends, non-competitive with his co-workers, and often championing the work of other songwriters. His closest friends, though, well understood that he had no contrived modesty, because he was himself as impressed by his creative achievements as others.

It was perhaps the feeling of being a musical channel that got Gershwin interested in metaphysics, having readings by the famous “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce and the palmist Nellie Simmons Meier. He named his publishing companies New World and later New Dawn Music and was fascinated with New Age thought, something he shared with his talented paramour, composer Kay Swift. Both were interested in the Theosophical Society, and George befriended the famed Theosophist Walter Russell, who later created a beautifully wrought sculpture of him.

A picture of happiness and joy is ascribed to Gershwin in his early days, playing piano for hours and living life fully and furiously. That too, while accurate on the surface, belies a confused soul who was conflicted. On the one hand he had the singular ability to express the aspirations and times of a generation; on the other he was unsatisfied emotionally and confused romantically, which became a more serious issue as time progressed. He was prudish with his innocent sister, telling her to pull down the hemline of her skirt, while at the same time attracted to the opposite kind of woman. When it came to marriage, however, only a certain type of woman would do. Proposing to Kitty Carlisle seemed like a perfect solution, because she was Jewish and in the eyes of his mother the right woman for her famously eligible son. Kitty knew he did not love her though and doubted that he understood what love was, citing his rather juvenile and non-romantic “love” letters. The irony of George writing some of the world’s greatest love songs was not lost on her.

Cecelia Ager, close friend of George and wife of songwriter Milton Ager, insisted that George was homosexual. Milton sputtered that such a claim was absurd. Irving Caesar also insisted that George was gay, at least in the early days, and there exists a photo of him in drag from around 1918. Kay Swift described him as the best lover she ever had. Tom Van Dycke, along with a jolly group of drunken friends, claimed to have watched through a keyhole as a “mechanical” George had sex with a French prostitute in Paris in 1928. Simone Simon, a great beauty, later went to bed with George in 1937 and said that he never laid a hand on her. Yet he was also thought to be prolific with females, and in response to the suggestion that he was with so many girls because he was trying to prove he was a man, Oscar Levant retorted: “What a wonderful way to prove it.”

One could use these vignettes to bolster any theory, but that is a dangerous path to take. The complexity of his inner life cannot be revealed in these few stories, and they are shared here simply for the sake of poignant contrast to the rich and clear path he traversed artistically. Perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn from our attempts to know George Gershwin is that his true mistress was music, illustrated by the story of a showgirl sitting on his lap at a party, and when he was asked to play the piano, got up so quickly that the unfortunate chorine was knocked to the ground.

Unfortunately, the reception of some of his compositions has been affected by storytelling, too. The distortions of his music started with Paul Whiteman shortly after conducting the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924. Whiteman decided to add a “luft” pause to the Andante section of the Rhapsody that angered George greatly. It all reached a boiling point at the 1927 recording session for the composer’s second waxing of the work with Whiteman conducting. They got into such an argument that the session was concluded with Nathaniel Shilkret taking the baton from Whiteman in order to finish the recording. Whiteman’s continued distortions of the work included a recording in the 1940s featuring a vocal chorus wordlessly intoning the hymn-like E major theme. After that, a best-selling recording of the Rhapsody made in the 1950s mistakenly trumpeted the name of Whiteman as conductor along with his picture on the record jacket, although Roy Bargy served as the actual conductor. Leonard Pennario, the piano soloist, never met Whiteman.

There are various orchestrations of Rhapsody in Blue mirroring the work’s evolution from its start as a Whiteman band specialty to concert hall staple. Most orchestras today play the 1942 Grofé arrangement for classical instrumentation. More recently the practice of playing Grofé’s original 1924 jazz band instrumentation has gained traction as being the way Gershwin intended it. While it is exciting to hear the original smaller, jazzier lean and mean version, one should note that Gershwin himself always performed the composition in Grofé’s 1926 expansion for concert orchestra, save for an occasional necessary reunion with Whiteman, when, according to Ira, he would grit his teeth and dig into the piano and endure the distortions that “Pops” wrought. Whiteman’s recording of Gershwin’s Concerto in F was equally disliked by the composer, and he was loath to autograph a copy of it for Alfred and Elizabeth Simon, relenting at the last minute, uttering: “What the hell.”

A later recording of Rhapsody in Blue, released in the 1970s, had another secret. The idea was a fun one: recreate the original 1924 Grofé arrangement for the Whiteman band and use the Gershwin piano roll to reunite composer and jazz band orchestration in modern sound. The only problem was that the piano roll was too erratic to properly synchronize with the orchestra, and so virtuoso Stan Freeman was secretly brought in to play various passages of Rhapsody. The attractive cover of the LP features a Hirschfeld caricature showing a ghosted image of George Gershwin at the keyboard with a lithe Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the band. It should have also depicted Stan Freeman at the keys.

One day in 1982, I brought Michael Tilson Thomas to meet Ira Gershwin. He wanted to play for him a cadenza he had crafted for the Second Rhapsody. On Gershwin’s own 1931 demonstration recording of the work, at the passage in question, the composer plays a fragment of a cadenza, perhaps indicating that he included one in his live performances of the work, but which has never been verified. Ira enjoyed the virtuosity of Tilson Thomas’s cadenza, but told him that it should not be included in the recoding he was about to make of the work. Tilson Thomas abided by Ira’s wishes and did not record his cadenza. In 1998, fifteen years after Ira’s passing, Tilson Thomas re-recorded the Second Rhapsody and this time included the cadenza, claiming in the liner notes that Ira had heard and approved of its addition. Since I was present at the meeting in question, I can definitively say: “It ain’t necessarily so.”

There have been recordings and a publication of the complete “lost” Gershwin Preludes that never would have been sanctioned by Ira were he alive. While it is irresistible to want to bring to light any rare and precious piano music by Gershwin, especially since his only published classical piano music consists of Three Piano Preludes, it is a disservice to the memory of the composer to release incomplete works as if they were intended to be heard in such a state.

The “authentic” recreations of many of the Gershwin musicals have contained a great deal of conjecture and guesswork where original materials were not available. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it means the difference between making a score viable and available once again or staying sequestered; and most of these recreations are musically rich and entertaining. It would be appreciated, however, if the new editions fully revealed what is original and what is not. Kay Swift has never been properly credited for ghosting the verse and half of the chorus of “First Lady and First Gent” from Let ’Em Eat Cake. Ditto her harmonization from a lead sheet for “Union League” from the same show. Burton Lane never received credit for newly composing the lost verse music for “Meadow Serenade” from Strike Up the Band, and at the time the producers made a conscious decision not to reveal his contribution.

The question of Porgy and Bess, and what is the authentic performing version, begets another great bone of contention. It was famously shorn of forty-five minutes during the initial 1935 tryout in Boston before coming to Broadway, and some claim that George never got to hear his full masterpiece. Actually, he did hear it, because it was heard in its entirety before the shears started snipping. Director Rouben Mamoulian worked closely with George to make the cuts, and while George was not always happy with them, he was a man of the theater who realized that they were necessary to make his work stronger and more effective. By the time Porgy and Bess opened in New York, Gershwin was happy with it, even though it was a financial failure. Seeing the bigger picture, Gershwin predicted that one day it would be acclaimed as a great work, and he was more than prescient in that proclamation. The many revivals of Porgy and Bess have altered the opera dramatically, firstly in 1942, when it was revived on Broadway as a musical play minus much of the recitative, and in that form, it first started to achieve immortality. The 1950s revival with Leontyne Price and William Warfield also drastically changed the work, but also brought it back into pure operatic form. The 1973 Houston Grand Opera production restored the work to its full running time to great acclaim, and exhaustion of others. Ira, who became the guardian of George’s work after his death, had cannily and carefully approved all of these various permutations of Porgy and Bess, and late in life he insisted that it be performed uncut. He also removed the “N” word from the text, privately stating that if they had initially realized the truly painful connotation of the word, they never would have used it.

Coming full circle, one of the most recent recordings of Porgy and Bess, conducted by John Mauceri, has gone back to the version first performed on Broadway in October 1935, claiming it to be (here we go again) the “definitive” version. I cannot agree. That was a specific moment in time, and had Gershwin lived he would surely have revised the opera yet again, recognizing the need to do so, minus the pressure and deadline of a Broadway opening. He would have tightened and clarified the musical and dramatic arc. But since he is not here, we will never know what his mature vision might have been. Or know any of the other works that were waiting in the wings.

George Gershwin’s mystery, his aura, his lifeblood has imbued a mere twenty years of creative work with an immortality that cannot diminish with time. Regardless of the ever-expanding and wanton liberties currently affecting all art in this digital age, it is odd that on one level it does not matter; for even in its most diluted state, Gershwin’s music is still magic. The mysteries of the man are as unknowable as the sphinx and as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile, but the openhearted gift that came from his soul through his music is for everyone, for all time. The Gershwin I knew was Ira – a trusted friend, mentor, and colleague, whose words of wisdom are as fresh in my mind now as the day he uttered them. The Gershwin I know – not personally, but through his music – is George. If there is such a thing as an American soundscape, it is infused with his spirit. I think that would have made him very happy.