Jazz and the symphony hall don’t always sit comfortably together — not everyone can be Gershwin, who moved between both worlds as though no wall existed between them. So here’s a Gershwin appreciation blog. He’s my favourite target when I retail therapy in record stores.
A Good Pianist
A lot of composers are good pianists themselves, and Gershwin was a compulsive performer. At parties, he’d plant himself at the piano and hold court, spinning out variations on his show-tunes deep into the night. Society celebrities and starry-eyed flappers drap around his piano in Manhattan apartments during Prohibition, cocktails in hand whether they were supposed to be or not. Just as easily, though, it could be Ravel and Prokofiev leaning in across a Parisian salon, or Alban Berg listening intently in Vienna.
A Brilliant Composer with Humour
By his early twenties, Gershwin was already a major figure on Broadway — a ruthlessly practical one who lived inside the material. At rehearsals he’d transpose on the fly to suit a vocalist’s range, reshape a number at a producer’s whim, or quietly salvage a decent song from a flop show and reinvent it for the next one. He treated notes the way a jazz musician treats a standard — sometimes improvise witty detours around his own melodies for hours, apparently just for the fun of it:
‘He was one of the few composers who had a real sense of humour.’ — Burton Lane
‘My People Are American. My Time Is Today.’
In a 1933 article called ‘The Relation of Jazz to American Music’, Gershwin laid out the creed behind his concert works:
‘Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of music.’
It was a bold claim at the time, and it was the engine behind everything from Rhapsody in Blue to Porgy and Bess.
A Genius
Even when Gershwin did sit down for formal study — taking lessons from the American composer Henry Cowell — he couldn’t help himself. A strict Palestrina counterpoint exercise would inevitably get dressed up with what Cowell called ‘juicy ninth chords.’ Those rich, colourful harmonies belonged more to the world of Debussy or Duke Ellington than to Renaissance voice-leading, but that was the point — Gershwin’s ear couldn’t stay inside the lines — ‘I have more tunes in my head than I could put down on paper in a hundred years.’
The story goes that he checked out of a hotel and realised he’d left behind sketchbooks containing around forty song ideas. And he was fine ’there are plenty more where those came from.’
Reference
George Gershwin: he forged a new musical language for 20th-century America | Classical Music by BBC MUSIC | https://www.classical-music.com/features/composers/george-gershwin