Ira Gershwin

Although, Gershwin left behind him (at the age of 37), more than one thousand popular songs and more explorative musical obras such as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the opera, Porgy and Bess, much of his music was disdained by classical music critics. On the other hand, Hollywood film producers criticized the opera composer as being “too highbrow.” So runs a dialogue about the two Gershwins—Gershwin the jazz and Gershwin the classical; Gershwin the lowbrow and Gershwin the highbrow. And too, brother-lyricist Ira Gershwin was symbiotically tied to the jazz/classical dichotomy. The Gershwin team wrote “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for their first joint effort, Lady Be Good, in 1924 which also introduced the young brother and sister dancing team, Fred and Adele Astaire.

In that same year, Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), would go to Paris and write music for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, even though it had been George Gershwin who had told him first, “Don’t be afraid to go lowbrow.”

George Gershwin’s own piano recording of his song, “Swanee”

The aspiring songwriter wrote a song called “Swanee” and recorded it on a piano roll. This song was a take off on Stephen Foster’s 1850s song, “Old Folks at Home” or “Way Down upon the Swanee.” It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its time. Gershwin’s 1919 song was written in just twelve minutes with lyricist Irving Caesar at Gershwin’s apartment where a ruckus card game was going on. Sixty young women dancing with electric lights in their shoes tapped along with the song at a Capitol Theater revue called Demi-Tasse in October of that year but it got no notice. Though Foster’s song and this one has since raised haunting racial issues, Foster’s intended meaning was no matter how far we may travel or what sadness comes to us in the world, our hearts yearn for the best memories of childhood and the security of family, parents and home. Gershwin’s song made allusions to the “old folks at home” and “down by the Swanee.” But if home is where the heart is, then perhaps there’s likely to be a life-giving river nearby too.

A few weeks after the song’s revue flop, Gershwin played the song at a piano sing along at a party and Al Jolson was there. He put it in his stage show, Sinbad, and recorded it for Columbia. The song sold a million music copies and a million records. Gershwin was just 20 years old.

And so,  though possessing a potentially negative pedigree in his early life—a first generation American, the son of two immigrants, new homes in different parts of town, a high school dropout—George Gershwin’s ascent began. He was a piano accompanist-song demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley; he wrote songs of his own; he collaborated with aspiring lyricists to bring a fuller form to his songs than simple pianistic versions; he was taken into the service of the Standard Music Roll Company and the Aeolian Company to make player piano rolls; he was a part of the technical innovations in recording when the Aeolian, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon companies introduced their unique reproducing systems; he created arrangements for two and four hands, adding all kinds of inner voices, obbligato counterpoints and codas to embellish simple songs; he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway; he wrote the musical, La, La, Lucille, that ran for 104 nights; and we already know that other singers sang his songs, (Al Jolson).

But there was one society in which he was not popular—perhaps only because of a financial-legal agreement that prevented its coming into existence. This hugely gifted young person wanted to write an opera called The Dybbuk, based on a Yiddish play by S. Ansky which documents some of the folk beliefs and stories of Hassidic Jews. However, when Gershwin found that the rights to the play were owned by the Italian composer, Lodovico Rocca, he gave up. This echoed another situation earlier in his life in the time when he was an admirer of the music of Joseph Rumshisky, one of the main composers in the Yiddish Theater scene on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. Boris Thomashevsky, then the biggest star of this theater, invited Gershwin and to Sholem Secunda collaborate on a Yiddish operetta. Secunda, however, refused to work with an “unproven” song-plugger.

And yet his passion for music (arranging, composing, transcribing, recording) was profound. When he held forth upon stride and ragtime styles, upon the varied harmonies Chopin and Liszt or Debussy had structured; and about what violinist Jascha Heifitz might accomplish, no doubt he created for Vernon Duke—then, a new immigrant to New York—that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity, spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young composer-pianist. So it might have been how Vernon saw him (narrator’s creation):

George was the happy of happiest men, and

I, a looker-on of this fusion of angelic and hellish New Country sounds,

An admirer, noting his ardent interest in each situation where

He and music met each other.

Musicians need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle, who warns, who foresees. It must have been pleasurable for Duke to listen as Gershwin talked and then to cease to listen, to let the insistent, confident voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and improvised a few riffs of his own making in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tightly to accommodate the formlessness of life. So when Gershwin ceased to theorize and commandingly began to play in twenty different “American” styles, sight reading this and that, changing keys easily, instantly, there issued forth ceaseless variations of Russian, German, French, English-Irish and Latin and African musical syntaxes from all corners of the world, forging this new American musical language.

He had achieved being a song plugger as he had achieved being a songwriter and collaborator, as he had achieved being a piano roll recording artist and a Broadway composer, as he achieved, it might seem, in everything he undertook. And he had won the friendship of Vernon Duke and the undying devotion of his elder brother, Ira Gershwin.

And if we ask why we go further back in this particular period of Early Broadway and Blues/Jazz Music than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Tin Pan Alley-Follies-Vaudeville-Broadway play narratives, for all their beauty and glamour, were a very imperfect medium, an over-idealized medium from our view now. It is true that they were almost perfectly capable of fulfilling one of the chief offices of the lyric which is to make people sing, simply and naturally, about ordinary daily life. And yes, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to “I Can’t Get Started” dramatize the age old girl-doesn’t-want-boy even though boy is the perfect boy (Oxford grad., very well off, well connected, etc.). Even more, our narrator lists, in classical list form, flying a plane, conquering Spain, surveying the North pole, starring in Metro-Goldwyn, out-golfing any pro, mingling with all the movie idols of the day as well as political figures—as we will see—Clarke Gable, Greta Garbo, Count Basie, Robert Taylor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Leontyne Price. And though the lyrics are fabulously easy to sing in the shower, we know s/he still doesn’t get the girl/boy. And why does Vernon Duke’s music make him/her seem so upbeat about it? So almost, well, elated?

One question spawns many more: Wasn’t Ira Gershwin, THE George Gershwin’s brother? Why was Vernon Duke composing music with Ira Gershwin? Who was Vernon Duke anyway? How did he meet Ira Gershwin? And just what were these Follies, Ziegfeld and Goldwyn?

The first title for this blog was “Letters to the Line Between Fiction, Non-Fiction, Neither and Both.” Today it is called “A Common Listener.” One title falls somewhere between Rilke and the other Virginia Woolf. Maybe next time it will be a three letter abbreviation CGS.com for “Can’t Get Started.” Anyway, it is all an attempt to begin a stream of thoughts about some of the music from some of the Americas, mostly in the English language but not always.

Thinking it possible to go back seventy-five to one hundred or so years and become in our imagination one of the Ziegfeld Follies, or a singer or composer in Tin Pan Alley could be a fun thing, a funny thing. That such imaginations are only imaginations, that “becoming a Tin Pan Alley-ist”, performing decades old music and poetry as we play our own now is an illusion, is true. “Our own” here is now used for anything past Billie Holiday and the great divide in jazz past the black and the white. Very likely the Early Broadway-ist would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible (Jeanne Lee): our idealized picture of what we might call the life in Tin Pan Alley would make them laugh. Still, the urge that demands we return to them (“we—Billie Holiday, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Jeanne Lee, Hankus Netsky and the narrator here; “them”—Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Eve Arden, Peter Solari,) is so strong and the haunting light-heartedness that blows through the old recordings (and films) are so tantalizing that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being a fuddy-duddy, an old fart.

Rosa asked who was Vernon Duke since there was no link to his name that appeared in the last post’s title. And still not knowing the ropes or the dashboard or the wp content folder in the hosting server, the thought came that in order to get something up, go to Vernon and answer her kind curiosity. The history stretches all the way from Russia to Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s to somewhere near the South Pole in Brazil. (The local beer is called “Antartica.”)

The composer who wrote “April in Paris,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” is the same Vernon Duke of “I Can’t Get Started with You.” If the hope to get a plug-in for audio in the near future can be fulfilled, then we might fly around the world as common listeners.