ALL RIIIIIIGHT! This may just be the BEST two minutes in all of YouTube. Here Jack Gibbons plays the HELL out of Gershwin`s first hit song, Swanee. Though it`s now negatively associated with minstrel shows (especially Al Jolson, who made this a hit with an excruciating blackface performance), Gershwin did not write those lyrics, and may well have had no idea it would be so darkly transformed. But pay attention to the slam-bam exuberance, the crystalline accuracy, the sheer blinding SPEED of this, the "great heady surf", as one Gershwin associate described his exuberant influence - and note the sheer joy emanating from Gibbons as he allows the song to take him over. The fact he just sat down at a New Years party and played this thing echoes the way Gershwin would sit at the piano and take over the room, and all the people in it.
Right in the middle of all that madcap tumble of notes, Gershwin suddenly quotes that "other Swanee": Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, also known as "Way down upon the Swanee river. . ." No sooner have we recovered from that shock of brilliance than he suddenly starts playing a different tune with each hand: his left hand bops and thunders away at Swanee, while his right deftly quotes a delicate spill of notes from Listen to the Mockingbird.
This song harks back to Gershwin's early days toiling away on Tin Pan Alley, writing and demonstrating songs to various artists who soon realized that this brash young man was on to something. Gershwin's story is bittersweet, because his life was tragically short and his death nothing short of horrifying. He was a kind of Mozart of the Jazz Age, the songs tumbling and spilling through his hands and his brain faster than he could capture them on the page.
He was just beginning to hit his stride as a serious classical composer - the thing he had always wanted to be - with his astonishing masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, which most critics panned because they had no idea what he was doing. But he did. And then, racked with bizarre symptoms, with agonizing headaches that even in those primitive times fairly screamed "brain tumor", he was allowed to die with little or no treatment, in isolation, separated from the family because his behaviour had become so embarrassing.
So every time I listen to Gershwin - and, like Dylan, I keep circling back around to him because he seems to speak not just TO my soul, but FOR it - I feel this melancholy, even anger, that he had to die that way, beloved of the world but abused and mistreated by his own family, and let down by doctors who should have known better. At any rate, I will never stop listening to this because it is a golden performance which I believe strikes closest to the way Gershwin would have played it himself.
I have listened to this a thousand times, and never get tired of it! Gibbons is considered the master of Gershwin's piano pieces, mainly because he meticulously restores the original piano score from all the myriad arrangements of Gershwin's tunes. Kicking the Clouds Away swings in a way that is both primitive and extremely elegant, and Gibbons plays it with the kind of gusto that George must have exhibited. He'd sit there at parties and just play, and play, and play. Much of it was improvised, so we will never know what it sounded like, but this captures the lighting-bug under glass for a few minutes, giving us a hint of what it must have been like to sit around the piano at those parties.
This piece is like a pocket version of Rhapsody in Blue, encapsulating so much of his edgy, urban, heady elegance with that incredible underlying urgency and drive. Gershwin said that Rhapsody in Blue was conceived while he was on a train and mesmerized by the steady chug of the engine, the hypnotic click of the wheels on the rails. You and I would hear that, and probably fall asleep, while he sat there conceiving a work of pure genius. And here it is all condensed down into a few minutes, while losing nothing of the fizzy joy of the original.
The second tune is one of my all-time favorites, Love Walked In, an exquisite arrangement which brings to mind the impressionist chords of Debussy. The lyrics are perfectly married to the tune: simple, achingly heartfelt, a universe of emotion which fits inside a thimble. Simple like Einsteins's formula, e=mc2.
Jan. 23, 1936 One Thirty-Two East Seventy-Second Street New York
Dear Elizabeth - After much patient waiting I finally was rewarded with an epistle (a very well typed epistle I may add) from you. I find its a very good idea to write letters so seldomly as it works up a been desire, almost amounting to pain in the receiving person, and its a swell idea unless of course the person happens to die waiting.
It's nice that things whizz for you out where beauties play my music. On the 9th February I'm playing the same frogs with the Washington Sym. - your mother has asked If she could give me a party in Wash. on that evening and I answered a quick "yes". I wish you were there.
Ira's Follies opens in town next week & it reminds me of a year ago when you had that lovely dress on & we went to the opening of 8:40.
Hope now you are in the pink, physically, mentally & professionally & affectionately & that you'll write soon to
George
& talents go to earn an honest dollar. When life whizzes by, one is really living, so drink it in, honey.
The Mexican trip was fun & educational. No, I didn't fight with Eddie or even the Doc. We all got along 'splendid'. Much sightseeing, travelling for 10 days at an average height of about 7500 ft., seeing all the churches (but no synagogues) looking, but in vain, for the Mexican beauties one hears about, listening to the music but finding difficult to get anyone to play anything away from 6/8 time. Spent a great deal of time with charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera. Made color pencil portraits of them both.
Here I am back in old New York again, freezing cold. It's 10 above zero today. Night before last I played in Philly with the Philadelphia Symphony, the concerto & a suite from Porgy. It was a major thrill to hear that band
Though it's pretty easy to find samples of GG's handwriting, the most interesting thing about these samples is his reference to meeting "charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera", the latter now celebrated as an artistic genius in her own right by her real name, Frida Kahlo.
I have to confess that some of this was a little hard to transcribe. That reference to "playing the same frogs" must, surely, be "songs", unless one of the songs was "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal". I am not sure who Elizabeth is, or was, and the Mexican letter consists of only page 2 and 3. What interests me - and maybe this was as casual then as an email, who knows - is how open he is about handwriting/answering letters from interested people and "fans". It must have been a thrill to get a handwritten note, not just from a secretary but from the great man himself.
By the way, he refers to playing with the Washington Symphony on February 9. No coincidence, is it, that the date happens to be my birthday?
What can you say about a piece of music you've fallen wildly in love with? Having barely recovered from discovering the Makoto Ozone version of Rhapsody in Blue (and yes, his name really is Ozone), I now encounter one of the most rapturous, madly life-loving things I've heard in a long time. Or ever. As my Gershquest continues, now taking me through the rather lumpy and formerly scandalous Peyser biography, his music deepens and takes on new dimensions for me. I want to SING his stuff, I want to be draped across a piano in a smoky room. Would I have wanted to know GG? Who wouldn't want to know a genius?
When I try to take apart and figure out this strange phenomenon of the early 20th century, I find a lot of interlocking puzzles in three dimensions. In his mad social circle of drunken and underaccomplished codependents, he was more addictive than all the champagne in the world. He seemed glued to the piano at these events, or maybe his body grew up out of it, centaurlike. One of the most oft-quoted descriptions of GG's seductive charm came from somebody named Sam Behrman (who also wrote an agonizing description of GG's horrendous last days): "I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."
This is as good a description of an addictive drug as I have ever seen, but it is also charged with an erotic longing that dares not speak its name. "Was Gershwin gay?" is still a favorite parlour game among musicologists, as if such a complex man could not be both gay and straight at the same time (which I believe he was: he was simply too beautifully androgynous and dressed too impeccably to be more than 75% straight). And he was a good dancer. My God. I begin to think I am writing about a musical Harold Lloyd.
But this piece, this Cuban overture which was largely overlooked when he wrote it: at first listening you might think, that's not Gershwin. It's just a standard rumba, Latin music writ large. But give it another chance, and another, and you'll hear the dissonances, the bluesiness, the chord progressions which could only be early 20th century (Petrushka, anyone?). He was in with those big guys, the elite composers, but that isn't what stands out here. It's the sheer heat of it, not something you expect from an urban dandy with seventeen summer suits who seldom peels himself away from the piano. Latin music informed a lot of his stuff, including the Rhapsody, but here he wades right in and is consumed. And when I listen to this, I feel an indescribable ecstasy, I want to scream with it! Largely overlooked? Were they crazy? Is everybody NUTS?
Kay Swift, one of GG's longsuffering sort-of-girl-friend-non-fiancee-longtime-lovers, believed Cuban Overture was "Gershwin's finest orchestral composition and also his sexiest. But it went all but unnoticed then, and it has never caught on." I don't know about that. The book I'm quoting from was written in 2009. When you look up the piece on YouTube, there are seemingly dozens of versions, which I have combed through to find (I think) the best. As happens to most artists, Gershwin was a victim of his own success, and once Rhapsody in Blue had everyone in thrall, they didn't really want to hear anything else.
I haven't even begun to probe the enigmatic miracle of that unit, Georgeandira, surely the most codependent songwriting team ever. I once did a line-by-line analysis of the seemingly-simple The Man I Love, a microcosm of a song that would bookend nicely with The Man That Got Away (tune by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira). Don't ever think you can do this stuff, because you can't. "The winds blow colder/Suddenly you're older." That's dangerous. It leaps on you like the predatory animal a great song can be. Ira was George's inverse, his shadow, his verbal self. It worked, until that great prismatic glass splintered into shards, and the universe had to do without him.
I am making my way through a long essay from a medical journal about George Gershwin's psychoanalysis and his death from an agonizing undiagnosed brain tumor. The psychoanalyst was a charlatan and a sadist who enjoyed dangling people and messing with their minds. He had sex with Kay Swift during their appointments, convincing her it was a necessary part of the treatment. Incredibly, this psychiatric fiend was convinced, and convinced everyone else, that blinding headaches, hallucinations, falling down, being unable to eat or play the piano, and having all manner of bizarre behavioural seizures was merely the result of "hysteria". For one thing, it bollixes my mind that a man could be diagnosed with hysteria - I thought that it simply didn't happen. But the real horror of it is, they killed George with neglect. By the time the medical community came to the conclusion it should have drawn years before, he was dead. But I just had this thought now - this second - George played into it too, because for all his fiery genius, he was paradoxically a don't-make-waves sort of person, almost passive, so eager to be liked that he buried his anger and went along with whatever attitude prevailed. OK, so it's psychosomatic. Now what?
This excerpt is from a much longer, and at times kind of tedious, bio of George Gershwin. The best part of it is the way they use paintings as "animated stills" which the camera pans across and zooms in on. I especially loved the bit where George, addled by a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumour, takes a handful of chocolates and smashes them into his chest. It was a horrible death, made that much more horrible by medical ignorance and the denial of his friends and family, who chalked up his weird symptoms to "love troubles" and struggles with his new boss, Sam Goldwyn.
In fact, one of the last things George ever said - miserably - was, "I should live so long as to hear Sam Goldwyn say to me, 'Why can't you write hits like Irving Berlin?'" It's true - George COULDN'T write hits like Irving Berlin because he was too busy skating rings around him, and everyone else in the competition.
So everyone, "friends" and doctors alike, ignored the fact that George was spilling his food, falling down the stairs, stumbling in his piano playing, saying nonsensical things, and pushing his chauffeur out of the driver side of a moving car. Love troubles, you see. Then he collapsed in the bathroom during one of his agonizing headaches, fell into a coma, and died, but not before they cracked his head open and "discovered" a grapefruit-sized tumour. Brain surgery wasn't what it is now, but some now believe that he could have been at least granted a reprieve, or had the worst of his agony relieved.
So what happened? George just WASN'T a sick person, he wasn't - and part of this ludicrous denial was his own myth of invincibility. It's ironic, because he suffered from chronic digestive problems for his entire life which could also be agonizingly painful. Some believe the chronic gut pain may even have been related to the cancer which eventually ate his brain.
George's story is sad, and sweet, and not like anyone else's. He was a Mozart in his time, flaming out in a brilliant streak across the sky. No one knows what he would have achieved had he lived, but it is not a sure thing that he would have kept producing at the same phenomenal rate. Some artists are products of their time, and never quite make the transition. Harold Lloyd is an example of someone whose character would always and ever be "a youth", a young man either totally unskilled in the ways of the world, or (in a few cases) a spoiled and ridiculously-entitled rich kid.
By the time the talkies came around, he was still playing "youths", as in Movie Crazy where he played a 40-year-old virgin still living with his parents and setting off for a great adventure in Hollywood. It wasn't just that irritating, dithering nasal voice of his, which still drives me crazy. Not everyone beat the cull. Garbo could talk like a man, but not Tallulah Bankhead. It was his 1920-ness, the way he embodied a certain era which would never come around again, and his inability to evolve into someone or something else.
In Gershwin's case, only death stopped him. It seems that nothing else could.
This is without a doubt the most hell-for-leather, no-holds-barred, almost pornographic version of Gershwin's Swanee you will ever hear, a real rip-snorter played at a New Years party by the master Gershwin interpreter, Jack Gibbons. This is proto-Gershwin, restored like an Old Masters painting to its original brilliance, with all the sudsy layers of arrangements stripped away. He makes meticulous transcriptions of original Gershwin piano scores, and I suspect uses the many piano rolls GG made himself (the conventional recordings are mostly poor quality, and shockingly scarce). Piano rolls are kind of like listening to a ghost, which I guess we are in a way, since I've written before that George's ghost still roams freely. We get some information from them, keystrokes, tempo, etc. - but there just isn't a sense that anyone is there. Gibbons has rushed in to fill the void. It's like he's possessed by the spirit when he plays, and who knows? George is like that.
What's so freaking brilliant about Swanee (a juvenile piece that became an unexpected hit when Al Jolson brought it to the stage - oh God, Mammy, all that stuff. . . but still, he made George famous, so we'll forgive it. I guess) is that at the very end, with only a few bars left, he works in quotes from TWO Stephen Foster songs: the original Swanee (Old Folks at Home), and - incredibly - Listen to the Mockingbird. This is woven in so deftly that you almost don't notice it - the notes sparkle like evanescence on water. But you feel the delight. It's what GG did best - convey delight, fun, rapture - even though he didn't really have much of it to spare in his short, mostly lonely life.
I'm convinced that it's those genius little quirky quotes that made George a star. At least, it gave him his first big break. But hell, he'd have got there anyway, don't you think?
POST-IT NOTES: I found this rhapsodic (in blue) tribute a few years ago, God knows where, and took a liking to it immediately. I had been trying to chop my way through a 900-page tome on Gershwin's life (90% of it was a minute and detailed dissection of the show tunes he wrote before he became really famous; only one chapter 50 pages long was devoted to "Gershwin the Man".) When I found this, I thought - hey, why not? This fan tribute really gives us the essence of who and what Gershwin was. It's also plain this girl was CRAZY ABOUT THE MAN - mad about the boy - and expressed it in contemporary language that I actually find quite charming. I blew it up here to make the text more readable. I don't know what happened to Astairical after this - haven't been able to find anything on her (at least I THINK it's a her), but this stands as one of the most unusual Gershwin tributes - hell, one of the best tributes ANYWHERE about ANYONE or ANYTHING, period!
As with Dylan, I'm drawn back to Gershwin cyclically, pulled back into his orbit again and again. There were similarities: Gershwin broke all the rules, all the while beguiling his public with a magnetism that is hard to describe. But unlike Dylan, who is still doing amazingly well at age 80, he died horribly of an undiagnosed and agonizing brain tumor at only 38. Because his death on the operating table was so shocking and unexpected, it's possible he did not know he was dead, which can cause a great deal of spiritual disorientation. It's said that his ghost roams freely, and even his brother Ira, who did NOT believe in such things, saw him waving at him from his study shortly after he passed. Ira did not tell anyone about this until he was on his deathbed, afraid people would think he was crazy. But others saw him too: sitting mischievously at a player piano in a town square, hurrying along the street with his head down, his face just visible in a crowd - no, wait a minute, it COULDN'T be.
I myself felt a visitation. I can't prove or disprove this, but it was a gift, so I don't throw it away. Paul Biscop, a former friend and spiritualist medium, had a way of disparaging MY experiences (though his were always bona fide - he had two Masters degrees and a PhD, so anything he said about spiritualism automatically trumped mine, and he often wrote off the experiences I shared with him as "fantasies").
I won't write a lot about how he died, but I had my mojo working on him not long before that: I made a formal request, or spell, or whatever you want to call it, not that he'd die or anything, or even suffer, but that he'd SEE, for once and for all, just how destructive his dismissive behaviour could be, how hurtful to others his pose as a "nice" person who had a very dark heart. I will admit this involved beads, candles, incense, chanting, and even a little Haitian voodoo. Some of it I had learned in a course I took from Paul called The Anthropology of Religion.
Within a few months I received a message from his longtime partner, also named Paul, that he had passed. Later I was to find out that he left Paul (a simple soul who seemed far less mature than his actual age) in HUGE debt, a massive amount of money that he could not possibly repay. He was rendered virtually homeless. Some people from the spiritualist church which Paul had founded (then stomped away from, bitterly, when they refused to do everything HIS way) tried hard to raise some money so Paul could at least figure out his next move. But he had a mortgage to pay, along with other debts he had known nothing about. His memorial was NOT held in the spiritualist church but in the local Masonic hall, and to scrounge some money, Paul's tomes on spiritualism were on sale at a table in the back.
Paul had dissed my Gershwin connection, the powerful sense I'd somehow - I can't explain it - "felt" him steal into the room, wordlessly, longing to connect with someone who would believe in him and deeply listen. I wrote about this in a blog post I've re-posted several times called Gershwin's Ghost.
Gershwin won this struggle, and Paul ended up showing his true colours. DID some of that negative energy bounce back at him, after all? All I can say is that a similar situation happened with Lloyd Dykk, with whom I had some really poisonous experiences, and he too dropped in his tracks at age 60, felled by a stroke, just like Paul.
So what's the message here? Nothing, except that dear George still inspires strong feelings, and he DOES hang around because of the unfairness and confusion of his early death, his head cracked open by ignorant surgeons only to find a grapefruit-sized tumor that had been there for years, causing him agonizing pain and ruining his co-ordination so he couldn't even play the piano any more. Right up until his death, his deterioration had been considered a manifestation of "neurosis". He deserved so much more than that. Incredibly, he wrote the exquisite song But Not for Me very shortly before he died - kind of ironic, considering the circumstances:
"They're writing songs of love, but not for me
A lucky star's above, but not for me
With love to lead the way, I've found more clouds of grey
Than any Russian play could guarantee. . ."
Goodbye, George. We haven't forgotten you. I don't want you to wander the world as some sort of musical orphan. Look what happened to your detractor, the man who scoffed at my vision, my tender connection with you. Not that I want to strike anyone dead, but I am NOT particularly sorry that Paul Biscop no longer walks this earth. How you treat people, especially the ones you are supposed to love the most, says everything about you. George loved and was loved mainly for his songs, and for that he was deeply melancholy. But it's that sadness behind the jazziness that still touches us, grabs us, and keeps him alive in our ears and souls and nervous systems, forever.
Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time). After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around. But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously,in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition.
GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page. Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot.
Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?
Playwright
S.N. Behrman summed up what it was like to be in Gershwin’s orbit: “I felt on
the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the
rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated;
everybody felt it, everybody breathed it.” Another friend recalled, “You cannot
imagine what a party was like when he was expected and he did not appear.” His
death, needless to say, cast a pall over his soiree set. “When George died, a
great many people felt not only sad but bored,” said Kay Swift, a composer and
longtime romantic friend. “People thought that they could never sense that
special joy again.”
