Classical music are (almost) defined as those scored to be replayed. Jazz, on the other hand, blew this wall open by improvisation. This makes jazz infinitely more adaptable. For example, if you swap the French horn part in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 to Oboe, purists might want to put you on a murder list. But in jazz, rewriting, embellishing, and reinventing are celebrated. A pianist can take a popular jazz standard and spin it into a dazzling, virtuosic variation, and nobody bats an eye. (If you want to dive deeper into what makes a jazz standard, see my post here.)
The Gershwin Problem
This flexibility makes Gershwin’s music both magical and… hard to track.
One Gershwin tune gets published, suddently hundreds of adaptations kissing up: big band versions, symphonic orchestrations, Broadway revivals, Hollywood musicals, ballets, and jazz improvisations, pop music, etc. Apple Music Classical Catalogue won’t even bother to try indexing the god-knows-how-many versions of Fascinating Rhythm/I Got Rhythm.
Take An American in Paris, for example. George Gershwin composed his symphonic tone poem An American in Paris in 1928, inspired by his strolls through Paris and the city’s vibrant street sounds. It premiered on December 13, 1928, at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Walter Damrosch.
Fast forward to 1951, MGM turned the idea into the lavish movie musical An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly. While the movie famously features Gershwin’s orchestral piece in its climactic ballet sequence, it also pulls in many unrelated Gershwin songs — like “I Got Rhythm” and “’S Wonderful” — effectively blending Gershwin’s entire songbook into one cinematic love letter.
In other words, the movie is essentially a Gershwin mixtape…
The Critics Were Not Impressed
If you can’t find anything nice to say, sit with me:
At its Carnegie Hall premiere, Gershwin’s An American in Paris was met with… let’s say, mixed reactions. Some thought it was daring and fun. Others sharpened their knives:
An American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it… This cheap and silly affair seemed pitifully futile and inept.
(Herbert F. Peyser, New York Telegram, December 14, 1928)
The honks have it. Four automobile horns, vociferously assisted by three saxophones, two tom-toms, rattle, xylophone, wire brush, wood blocks, and an ensemble not otherwise innocent of brass and percussion blew or thumped the lid off in Carnegie Hall when An American in Paris by George Gershwin had its first performance… For those not too deeply concerned with any apparently outmoded niceties of art, it was an amusing occasion… They found the musical buffoonery of Gershwin’s An American in Paris good fun in spite of, or perhaps because of its blunt banality and its ballyhoo vulgarity… To conceive of a symphonic audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter. Then … there will still be Franck with his outmoded spirituality.
(Oscar Thompson, New York Evening Post, December 21, 1928)
An American in Paris sits at the crossroads of classical and jazz, embodying his vision of a truly American sound — cosmopolitan, energetic, and a little cheeky. In my pov, yes AAiP might be too loud and Rhapsody of Blue might appeal more to concert-hall-ish classical music listeners. But AAiP still is much more classically inclined than Porgy and Bass
But because Gershwin’s work has been repackaged so many times — from Broadway shows to Hollywood musicals to ballets like Balanchine’s Who Cares? — tracing any single composition’s “original” context can feel like chasing a jazz solo through smoky club air… And maybe that’s exactly the point: Gershwin’s music lives because it keeps adapting.