By George! Gershwin rehearses Porgy and Bess (before it's even written)

I've been listening to this incredible recording for years now, and still find things in it I didn't hear before. For one thing, YouTube has it wrong: it isn't "Gershwin on the radio", but a recording Gershwin made for himself, so he could hear how the opera actually sounded. Prior to this it was notes on a page, or perhaps a piano version, but never the full orchestra with the singers. The tapes of this session were lost for decades, then someone found them while cleaning out Ira Gershwin's closets after he died. 

Nobody knew what to make of Porgy and Bess (and here it's called simply "Porgy", the working title), because it was generally believed it would be in poor taste for a white composer to write about black people. Who would be interested in something so primitive (in this case, the unique Gullah culture of South Carolina)? Now it's considered a problem because only a BLACK man is allowed to write about black people. Thus many people still frown on Porgy and Bess and even try to block performances of it.

The fact Gershwin came from a Russian Jewish family who were driven out of their homeland, persecuted and nearly murdered for being who they were, apparently doesn't count. But if George hadn't committed this act of cultural appropriation, Gullah culture might have fallen into total obscurity. I think George knew a thing or two about  prejudice, and in fact he deliberately changed his name from Gershovitz to Gershwin. Doors would have been closed to him if he hadn't. He couldn't even play golf at certain clubs because they were "restricted": a sanitized term for "no Jews allowed". 

What I love about this recording is being able to hear George talking informally. There are very few recordings of George's voice. In the few radio broadcasts he did, it's obvious he is reading from a script. In fact, even recordings of his piano playing are scant, just bits here and there. He shows up even less often in films. Where WAS this man, anyway? Was he invisible? This was the 1930s, when sound recording and film were at a highly sophisticated level. But he left few formal traces, just those memories of incredible parties where he would sit at the piano and play brilliant improvisations for hours, most of it heard for the first and only time.

Strangely enough, and I've written about this before, many people claim to have "seen" George after his death. His brother Ira was so terrified at seeing him sitting happily on a sofa in his studio that he only confessed it on his deathbed. Now you see him, now you don't - but wait a minute, here he is again!  It's as if his energy came from somewhere else, a galaxy far, far away. Most genius is unfathomable, and even George could not explain what spilled out of him like stars in a galaxy, reminiscent of the way  Mozart seemed to take dictation directly from God.

What's intriguing about this rare recording, which was never intended for public consumption, is that you can hear George noodling away on the piano during some of the songs, especially "A Woman is a Sometime Thing". The way the songs trail off makes me shiver: literally, he hasn't finished them yet! That's all he wrote.

The other thing I love - oh, there is so much to love - is George talking to the orchestra (he was conducting at the same time), trying to get everyone on the same page, so to speak. But the BEST part is the opening, where, after the announcer tells us what we're about to hear, George stands at the piano (for some reason I see him standing), playing simple chords with two fingers while singing, "Wah-wah, doo-dah, oh-wa-dee-wah. . . " The chords become more complex bar-by-bar, until the orchestra sneaks in - but with each bar, as the intensity builds and builds, the music becomes increasingly dissonant. 

This is one reason why Porgy and Bess was considered a flop when it was first performed- no one knew how to listen to it. The music sometimes wasn't pretty - with the exception of the lyrical masterpiece "Summertime", it could be rough and even brutal, reflecting the raw nature of the story: love, murder, betrayal! But the fact that it was a "negro opera" may have been the main factor that closed people's minds and ears.

It's worth noting that George had no trouble at all finding brilliant black singers to star in his opera - in fact, they were lining up around the block for the opportunity. When he researched Gullah culture in advance of writing Porgy, he didn't get his information from books. He went down south and lived with African-Americans for weeks, attended their churches, sang their songs, and excelled at the rhythmic "patting juba" that involved playing your own body like a percussion instrument. 

The custom had a long tradition. When African-Americans were dragged away from their homes and forced into slavery, white slave owners did not allow them to play any instrument even resembling a drum, having the deeply racist belief that it was dangerous for slaves to actually try to communicate with each other. So drumming was converted into patting, and the intricate syncopated rhythms were right up George's alley.

They loved him, loved his openness, his exuberance, and his wide-open celebration of their own vibrant culture, which he reproduced as faithfully as he could in his opera. The fact that it never found an appreciative audience until after his death was heartbreaking to him, but as usual he kept his pain to himself. 

"And I'm not gay!": or, begin the innuendo

Ah, those days: the days of  Johnny Larue and William B. and Dr. Tongue and all the other surreal characters taken over by John Candy. For the characters didn't take him over - it was the other way around. He invaded them and became.

Johnny LaRue, the chimney-smoking, booze-swilling, dame-exploiting would-be politician of Melonville was one of my favorites. In this clip he pitches himself as a candidate for City Council, and even that untidy flop of hair is reminiscent of Donald Trump, along with all the ranting bullshit.

But LaRue had a signature phrase he used in every sketch: "And I'm not gay!" I was reminded of this when I opened my email this morning and found a comment from someone about my Alan Gershwin post (which got a good response, believe me, in light of the 13 views I get for some of them). The reader vehemently denied any suggestion that either George or Alan Gershwin was gay. This is typical of the indignant, deeply insulted, even infuriated tone of people who perceive any such suggestion in biographies of famous (and usually it's) men.

Lost and Found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin

No one ever thinks - it doesn't occur to them even for a moment - that their fury reveals the slightest degree of homophobia. But even a suggestion the person in question MIGHT have been gay is automatically seen as vicious slander which has to be vigorously denied and argued into the ground. No, he was NOT "one of those". There is no EVIDENCE he was "one of those". He had hair on his chest, for God's sake! Don't defile his good name like that!

What???

I'm not defiling anything or anyone when I say there were suggestions that Gershwin might have been gay.  Most of his biographers (including Howard Pollack, who wrote a definitive 885-page doorstop) have pondered the fact without coming to any hard conclusions. In Gershwin's rarefied world, being gay or bisexual was not the big and horrifying deal it was in the general populace. Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and many other movers-and-shakers of composerhood were gay, some of them quite openly. It was an arts-saturated environment, and its most celebrated figures seemed to believe they were above convention.

It doesn't matter to me if Gershwin was gay, bisexual or a racehorse (though he was certainly that). But what interests me is the utter fury with which people deny and denounce such "accusations", even if they're stated as mere surmise. I'm apparently attempting to throw mud at an icon, drag him down into the slime.

Hey, wait a minute!

I did a piece on Nietsche not long ago, and the same "accusations" came up in his biographical material, along with that same strident, near-hysterical denial. It's a lie! He had a girl friend in university once and took her to the Philosopher's Ball! The implication is that I'm giving him a black eye just to be spiteful. And, of course, getting my facts wrong. All wrong. This reminds me of that classic Seinfeld episode where, whenever the issue of gayness came up, the mantra was, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Denial of the denial? Let's begin the beguine.

And Cole Porter? Are you kidding? And Noel Coward, let's not forget him. Gay! Gay! Yes, I'm going to ruin their reputations right here and now by saying they loved men (which is obviously a horrific crime - it goes without saying, doesn't it).

Huh??

Come on, people. The suggestion that some great literary or musical figure might have been gay is not automatically slander. In expressing that view, you're revealing a small and very homophobic mind. But your small-mindedness is such that you don't even see it, or at least won't admit it.

"Oh, I knew someone who was gay once and he was a real nice fella." But he's not Gershwin. Or Cole Porter. Or Johnny LaRue.

Imagine these same people were claiming, vehemently and furiously, "he was NOT black!", "he was NOT disabled!', "he did NOT have PTSD!", or any other sensitive categories, and these same people would be horrified. It's OK to be those things now - maybe - supposedly. Or not, but we have to say so, even if we don't believe it. (Though, think about it. A hundred years ago, would it have been acceptable to claim that some important/famous white figure "might have" had black lineage? Think of the outcry, the insistence he was blonde and got a suntan, or something equally ludicrous.)

But why then isn't it OK for Nietsche or Gershwin or any other major figure to be gay or bisexual (bisexual being a category that seems to have been lost in the shuffle, the implication being, for God's sake, make up your mind! Being on the fence like that is oh-so-politically incorrect, even disloyal to the cause.) Sexual orientation still seems to be fraught with confusion. If a man gets married at any time in his life, and (especially) if he fathers a child, he's "not gay". The assumption is, a gay man would not touch his wife with a ten-foot pole. She would remain chaste and pure for 25 years while he pulled out the bodybuilding magazines he kept under his mattress.

People's minds are still in brontosaurus mode. They're stuck, and their thinking is very dusty. Is social change just hurtling along too fast, or what? Is this trapped-in-amber mode of thinking just simple physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Whatever. They piss me off! So Gershwin was gay. Or might have been. Does that take away anything at all from his contribution to music? In some distant universe, not this one, we might even see it as a positive attribute, something that adds to the richness and complexity of that extreme rarity, the blazing miracle of creative genius.

BONUS POST. This is the piece I kept finding during my GershQuest of last year.

gramilano

ballet, opera, photography...

Michael Feinstein’s book on the Gershwins called, sensibly, “The Gershwins and Me” (Simon & Schuster) was published in October. While he was still working in piano bars, Feinstein got to know Ira Gershwin intimately, cataloguing his collection of records, unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in the Gershwin home over a period of six years.

The gay or not gay question has floated about George Gershwin even during the more restrained time when he was a young composer. It is an issue Feinstein tackles in his book. America’s National Public Radio asked him about it:

So many speculated that George Gershwin was gay because he never got married. And somebody once said to Oscar Levant, you know, George is bedding all those women because he’s trying to prove he’s a man. And Oscar Levant said: What a wonderful way to prove it. There have always been rumours circulating about George’s sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it’s important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it’s all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.

Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said.

Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George’s and whose husband Milton Ager was George’s roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay, and Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don’t know anything. But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t talk about it. So it still remains a mystery.

My own theory is that I think that the thing that mattered most to George was his music. I think he could have been confused sexually. I don’t know. I think that he had trouble forming a lasting relationship.

Kitty Carlisle talked about how George asked her to marry him, but she said that she knew that he wasn’t deeply in love with her. But she fit the demographic of what his mother felt would be the right woman for him.

This is an extract of NPR’s long talk with Michael Feinstein.

Photo: left to right, George Gershwin, Michael Feinstein, Ira Gershwin

NOTE: here is the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of innuendo:

(the making of) a ​remark or ​remarks that ​suggest something ​sexual or something ​unpleasant but do not refer to it ​directly: There's always an ​element of ​sexual innuendo in ​our ​conversations.

Here we touch on the interesting issue of "unpleasant" being juxtaposed with "sexual", which opens up a whole new can of worms: that there's something unsavory and reputation-destroying about sex itself, unless it takes place in the heterosexual/marital bed, infrequently, in the missionary position. And only when you want a kid.

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Have We Been Playing Gershwin Wrong for 70 Years?

(The following is a piece from the New York Times which caught my eye, then dragged me right in. It's pretty long, but I had to reproduce it here in its entirety. It illustrates a crucial point about art: remove one element, or change it, and the whole work is changed in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. This whole story reminds me of the famous gaffe by the art gallery that hung a painting upside-down and didn't notice it for 30 years.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/theater/have-we-been-playing-gershwin-wrong-for-70-years.html

Have We Been Playing Gershwin Wrong for 70 Years?

By MICHAEL COOPER   March 1, 2016

It is one of the most famous pieces of American music — but for 70 years orchestras may have been playing one of its best-known effects wrong.

The work is George Gershwin’s jaunty, jazzy symphonic poem “An American in Paris,” and the effect involves a set of instruments that were decidedly not standard equipment when it was written in 1928: French taxi horns, which honk in several places as the music evokes the urban soundscape that a Yankee tourist experiences while exploring the City of Light.

The question is what notes should those taxi horns play. In something of a musicological bombshell, a coming critical edition of the works of George and Ira Gershwin being prepared at the University of Michigan will argue that the now-standard horn pitches — heard in the classic 1951 movie musical with Gene Kelly, in leading concert halls around the world, and eight times a week on Broadway in Christopher Wheeldon’s acclaimed stage adaptation — are not what Gershwin intended.

The finding promises to divide musicians, and could require instrument-makers, sellers and renters — who now offer sets of tuned taxi horns specifically for “An American in Paris” — to consider investing in new sets tuned to the new notes. The change would give a subtle, but distinctly different, cast to a classic score that was influenced by some of the leading composers of its day, and which followed in the footsteps of other works that employed so-called “found” instruments, including Satie’s 1917 ballet “Parade,” which uses a typewriter and gunshots, and Frederick Converse’s 1927 “Flivver Ten Million,” an ode to the Ford automobile, which uses car horns.

This is the version of An American in Paris which has been played in concert halls for decades. Note the sound of the taxi horns in the first minute.

“I have a feeling that percussionists are going to be somewhat put out by this whole conclusion,” said Mark Clague, the editor in chief of the critical edition, who attended some test performances of the revised score by the Reno Philharmonic last month.

The ambiguity stems from how the taxi horn parts are notated in Gershwin’s original handwritten score. To put it in Gershwin terms, we got rhythm: The score shows that the horns play sets of accented eighth notes. But when it comes to pitch, things are less clear. Gershwin’s score labels the four taxi horns with a circled “A,” a circled “B,” a circled “C” and a circled “D.” Those circled letters have been interpreted as indicating which note each horn should play — A, B, C and D on the scale — since at least 1945, when Arturo Toscanini used those pitches in recording the piece with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

This is the original version recorded in 1929 under Gershwin's supervision. Take note of the sound of those taxi horns!

But the new critical edition will argue that Gershwin’s circled letters were merely labels specifying which horns to play, not which notes. Mr. Clague, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, mentioned that Gershwin handpicked taxi horns to buy during his 1928 trip to Paris, and that friends and colleagues recalled that he had been particular about which notes they played. Mr. Clague also pointed to the evidence of a Victor recording of “An American in Paris” that was made in 1929, under Gershwin’s supervision and presumably using his horns: The taxi horns on that recording sound a more atmospheric, more dissonant set of notes: A flat, B flat, a much higher D, and lower A.

Gershwin’s original instruments seem to have been lost. Michael Strunsky, 81, a nephew of Ira Gershwin and trustee of his estate, said in a telephone interview that his father, William English Strunsky, had played the taxi horns when George Gershwin first gave an informal recital of the piece for the family in 1928 after sailing back from Europe.

“I went looking for those taxi horns once,” Mr. Strunsky said. “And somewhere in the moves back and forth, and this and that and the other thing, they disappeared.”

Russ Knutson, the owner of Chicago Percussion Rental in Illinois, who rents out tuned horns for “An American in Paris” and has played them on occasion, said in an interview that he thought that the currently accepted A, B, C and D pitches “fit exactly in the score.”

“The whole country and the whole world have been oriented to doing it with those four pitches,” he said in a telephone interview. “All of the recordings you’ve heard are with those four pitches.”

But Trey Wyatt, a percussionist with the San Francisco Symphony who estimated that he had played the horn parts 40 or 50 times, and who rents out several sets through his company, California Percussion Rental, said that he was intrigued by the finding.

“If this new tuning takes off, I may have to buy another five sets of these horns,” he said.

Rob Fisher, the musical score adapter and supervisor of the new staging of “An American in Paris” currently on Broadway, said that he agreed that the A, B, C and D labels were names and not pitches, but that the show had ended up using the standard horns.

But he questioned whether the pitches used in the Victor recording should be taken as gospel. “I don’t ever want to say what was in somebody’s mind,” he said. “Were those the four horns that made him the happiest that day, when he was picking horns? I just feel like if he’d wanted exact pitches for his horns, he was really good about writing down intentions.”

Mr. Clague said that between the 1929 recording that Gershwin supervised and the 1945 Toscanini recording, which seemed to help establish a new performance tradition, there was great variation in how the taxi horns were played. But he said that his musical analysis gave weight to the idea that the pitches used in the 1929 Victor recording work best. “George was thinking harmonically and melodically with the taxi horns,” he said. “It’s not just a sound effect.”

But he added that there would have been an easy way of avoiding the ambiguity entirely. “I think George would have saved everybody a lot of trouble,” he said, “if he had just numbered them ‘1,’ ‘2,’ ‘3,’ and ‘4’ rather than ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D.’”

Blogger's Observations. I decided I'd do this whole thing by ear, as a sort of auditory blind taste test. I'd try to determine which version was the "true" one: the one we currently hear in concert halls and have been hearing for 70 years, or the first recording ever made in 1929, supervised by Gershwin himself.

I've been listening to An American in Paris since I was a wee tot, and I even remember my mother explaining to me that it used real taxi horns, which I thought was pretty strange. I'm not a musician, but I was saturated in music from the get-go, surrounded by real musicians, and by inheritance came in with the same equipment, meaning a pretty sharp ear. So I sat back and just plugged myself in to the sound, going back in time to that 78 r.p.m. record made in 1929.

The very first blast on the first taxi-horn made me sit bolt-upright and yell, "AAAAHHH!" It was completely different, a totally different sound! The blasts that came after that were even more of a revelation: lower, earthier, more dissonant, with the odd higher note to add harmonics (for Gershwin heard music in noise: he said so all the time). These sounds were just so much more. . . Gershwiny.

I am utterly convinced that these are the taxi horns Gershwin originally used. These are the horns he collected while in Paris, scrounging around in auto shops and junk stores, then picking four out of a couple of dozen to match his score - no, wait. It's bigger than that. THE SCORE WAS MATCHED TO THE HORNS. The two came together like a hand in glove.

You wonder how orchestras could've gotten it so wrong for so long. To write A, B, C and D and circle them is pretty obviously a way to label each horn, not describe the horn's tone. It's just self-evident, isn't it?

Now people are saying they wish Gershwin hadn't been so "ambiguous". He was a genius, people, and geniuses are ambiguous by nature, leaving the rest of us snail-brains in the dust. Now some percussionists, suffering from defensiveness and hurt pride and unable to admit they may have been wrong, are insisting WE had it right all along, and Gershwin had it wrong. Or that it didn't matter. Or that, when making the original 1929 recording, he just picked out the horns he happened to want on that particular day, pulled them out of the junk pile pretty much at random.

DON'T MAKE ME SCREAM.

Gershwin was an utter perfectionist. He never took stabs at things, not even improvising. It was from God's mouth to his ear/fingers. His scores were as immaculate as Mozart's, not a note out of place. He wouldn't just rummage around in his junk drawer and pull out a few taxi horns.

The problem is, he did not happen to consider that people would not know how to reproduce those exact sounds in the years and decades to come. Perhaps he believed it was self-evident and that they couldn't possibly get it wrong. So somebody took a flying-leap guess based on some letters with circles around them on the score (and if the piece is in the key of A, it obviously would have a great big circle drawn around the A. Isn't that how you tell what key something is in?), and thus the whole thing became standardized.

I want to keep listening to that original recording, except that it makes me want to cry. Gershwin went through so much in his short, sometimes very painful life: his masterpiece Porgy and Bess was cut by about a third for its first performance (though most operas more than exceed its original length); the critics slung mud at it and called it garbage. He was a sensitive soul and he DID care what people thought, though artists aren't supposed to. And then he died at 38, and in so much agony, essentially alone.

So for God's sake, people. Get those taxi horns right! It's the least you can do for poor George.

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Love walked in

Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in Black

Since my enthusiasm so often runs ahead of my knowledge, I'm writing this in advance of knowing anything about my subject. Or not much. I have ordered a biography from Amazon called Oscar Levant: A Talent for Genius, one of those 500-page doorstops I love so much, but for this post I'm pretty much winging it.

He was a strange one, and I have strange feelings for him, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Who wouldn't love a man who could play the piano like that? NOBODY could play the piano like that, poetic sensitivity melded with a gangster's rat-a-tat-tat aggressiveness.

Nobody looked like him either, with that sensual, almost Polynesian mouth, the flop of hair that whipped around as he played, the constant manic bobbing and weaving (particularly later in life when he was in the throes of God-knows-what sort of addiction/affliction) reminding me of Michael J. Fox. The grief-stricken, fathoms-deep eyes, the forlorn eyes of an abandoned child, that could quickly flip over into fierceness, to a sense of "yeah, make me", or even blanked-out indifference. 

Oscar Levant was an updated Oscar Wilde without the effeminacy. You knew he wasn't gay by the way he eyed women. Only his personal charm saved it from being a leer. Some glamorous dame would kiss him on the cheek (he played the harmless, charming, eccentric sidekick in all his movies) and he'd lunge at her neck. He got away with lines that would have been censored without that lightning-stroke, oddly monotone delivery: "It's a good thing Marilyn Monroe has gone kosher, because now Arthur Miller can eat her."

Seductive, but somehow - offputting -  as he evolved into a sort of comic hired gun, an outrageous joke-machine that spewed them out on demand. The narrow-eyed, double-breasted gangster demeanour, cigarette constantly dangling from those Filipino lips, deteriorated most awfully over the years as mental illness slowly consumed him. He ended up, no kidding, a real bona fide mental patient, institutionalized, getting shock treatments right during movie shoots so that he had to have himself signed in and out for his scenes (at one point actually playing a mental patient, a part he described as "Pirandelloish").

That's sad. That's sadder, even, than the elderly Dorothy Parker and her poodle called Cliche holed up in her fusty ash-and-bottle-strewn apartment, watching soap operas all day as her friends edged away from her one by one.

Oscar Levant had friends aplenty, but did they keep him around just because he was so entertaining? Did he sit down and think about all those viper-strike lines, actually write them down, or did they just pop out of him like Athena from the head of Zeus?  He had an extremely loyal wife who became a caretaker in later life, and three pretty, vivacious daughters. He had a lively, varied career that most people would envy, considerable fame and adoration, and at the same time the most awful, soul-destroying depression that finally claimed him and sucked him under. It's hard for me to even think about it. 

People sometimes called him a sellout; he did coattail on his close association with George Gershwin, who did Levant a big favour by croaking at age 38. Levant was automatically assumed to be his successor, but who can follow George Gershwin? Not even George Gershwin. Oscar Levant composed, but it doesn't hold together somehow. He's a  sort of Schoenberg on ice, a "look-at-me-I'm-a-composer" performing triple axels at the keyboard. The music is technically good, but it doesn't say anything.

His classic, often-misquoted line was, "There is a fine line betwen genius and insanity. I have erased that line." He constantly joked about suicide and his own craziness, causing an uneasiness and even fear that, for some uknown reason, was viewed as hilariously funny. He was, I think, the first shock comedian.

So, that's what I know, and it ain't much because it's less than what's in the Wikipedia entry. I think his doorstop of a biography (which I will consume in installments propped up in bed before sleeping) will be a wild ride, or else it will be boring, as some biographies inexplicably are.

About these pictures. It was a big disappointment to discover there were very few good photos of him, except for the sardonic, Edward G. Robinson-esque pose at the piano which was a publicity shot for his most famous film, An American in Paris. Others were grainy and dusty-looking, almost mildewed, as if no one had bothered to take care of them.  Contrast this with the hundreds of razor-sharp black-and-white shots I easily found of Harold Lloyd, even going back to pre-1920.

So I took the ones I could find, many of them extracted from old album covers, and because they are in the public domain, and because Oscar said I could, I tinkered with them. Something leaped out at me, a kind of predatory energy. There were so many dimensions to him. He looked different in every shot (and I've excluded some of the later, really painful ones). In a few of them he looked like a young Alan Arkin. 

Out of those ancient grey lithographs emerged  Shakespearian spectres, that is, if Shakespeare had dealt in slighty off-colour wisecracks. And many of the black-and-whites, particularly very dark concert shots, exploded into colour, which as far as I know is impossible (i.e. it's relatively easy to go from color to black and white, but how is it possible to go the other way?). But in every case, no matter how much I altered the original, he was still Oscar. His essence came through every one of the masks. 

People were known to say things like, "Oh! That's Oscar Levant. You know, he could have been. . . " But if hehad "been", as they say, we'd know nothing about him now. He would've had a stellar career as a concert pianist, then sunk out of sight, with only a few musty-smelling LP covers to remind us of who he was.

Instead we have quite a few "sidekick" movies where he's somehow irresistable in his craziness, and a few YouTube videos that are a little disturbing to watch, as he becomes a sort of tame circus tiger on pointless panel shows. He even does a turn on his own show, and the one surviving kinescope is excruciating: he slurs and bobs around like Ray Charles at the piano while his wife sits close beside him like a watchdog, making sure he doesn't fall over the edge.

And he did fall over the edge. What's on the other side of it? Nothing, or a reunion with his pal Gershwin, or celestial piano keys waiting to be played? Considering the chaos of his life, I think oblivion would have been more than enough.

CODA: I'm not sure I'll be writing about Levant again. In fact I kind of hope he won't be another Harold: making an Oscar doll would just be too challenging. But I did find out something about his death, so I'd better get to it now. Too bad he wasn't around to enjoy it, for he was morbid enough that I think he would have found the bizarre circumstances amusing.

Though everyone seems to think he was a complete wreck at the end, like everyone else with serious mental illness he also had his good days. Days when he could noodle around on the piano, talk to his wife June, take a nap. This is what happened: he went upstairs to lie down for a while (for, at age 65, he was already frail from years of drug abuse), to rest up for an interview he'd be having later in the day with a certain fresh-faced young photojournalist.

Her name was Candice Bergen.

Late in the afternoon when the doorbell rang, his wife welcomed Candy in, all bubbly and excited about meeting this living legend. June called upstairs:

"Oscar! She's here!"

No response.

"Going deaf, obviously. Oscar! Come on down now."

"Oh, it's OK, Mrs. Levant, if he wants to. . . "

"OSCAR." She looked at Candy in puzzlement. "What's he up to? I'll be right back."

Mrs. Levant went upstairs and into the bedroom. He was curled on his side in a fetal position, the way he always napped, the corner of a blanket childishly wrapped around his head.

"Oscar."

The silence was profound.

"Oscar." She touched his shoulder, then drew back with a gasp.

It must have been hard for Candice Bergen, being assigned a plum interview like that, an interview withpictures,  to have to report back to her editor, "Uh, sorry, but I couldn't do it."

"Couldn't do it? Why not?"

"He's dead."

"Dead?"

"Dead."

"Oh. Are you - "

"Sure? Yes, I'm sure."

"Oh."

"He's sure, too."

Then they both disgraced themselves - and each other - by collapsing into helpless laughter.

I'm glad, though. Not glad he's dead - I'm not that mean - but glad that such a turbulent, often agonizing life ended in such sweet surrender. It was like the tide going out: his heart stopped; it was time to go home.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I was dredging around for some decent photos of George Gershwin - for my Facebook profile picture, as a matter of fact - cuzzadafact I'm kind of on a Gershwin kick now. The music frightens me, it is so gorgeous and unbelievable, yet in another way it pushes me back. Anyway, as sometimes happens, I found a cool picture of Oscar Levant instead, and it turned out to be on MY BLOG. I got reading the post, and liked it. In fact it's better than most of the shit I post now. . . I confess. . . so I'll rerun it, in hopes I'll get more than 17 views. This time.

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Ripples n' Blues: the Gershwin version

Gershwin, eh? We've been a little obsessed with him lately, especially regarding his close connection with the polymath/Polly-wanna-cracker genius Oscar Levant. I apologize for all the blathering at the beginning of this live performance, but it's the best version I can find, and it includes orchestra which beefs it up nicely. Most of the amateur YouTube performances by young students are too slow and careful, too correct: "Is it ragtime yet?"

Yes, this connects with Gershwin, and his pal Oscar Levant must have played this at least once. It's a mere bagatelle, but charming. But wait until you play the next video! There's a surprise better than the sticky little thingamajig in the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.

Rialto Ripples, Oriental-style

When Ernie Kovacs, the mad genius of early TV, needed a theme song for his mad genius show, somebody did an arrangement of Gershwin's catchy piano piece Riato Ripples Rag (see last video), and retitled it Oriental Blues. Except for the goofy sound effects, the pieces are pretty much identical, so I don't know how they ever got away with it.

Everyone knows Gershwin wrote the original, but why was the Kovacs version called Oriental? Well! Out of some madness, I decided to see what the name Levant means "in English". It seemed sort-of French and I wondered what arcane meanings might pop up.

As it turned out, there were more than I could ever include, and they were getting stranger and stranger. But one of the meanings that kept popping up was "of the Orient," or. . . Oriental.

Levant was still around and fairly vigorous in the 1950s, when Kovacs reigned supreme. He was wasting himself on stupid quiz shows and making $45.50 a week, but surely he must have been aware of Kovacs and his insane brand of humor.  Did someone know and exploit the mystical connection between Levant and Oriental and Gershwin? Maybe it was just a coincidence, but there is nothing even vaguely oriental about this piece.

Then again, is there a Rialto, and why does it ripple? Am I just hallucinating again?

You decide.