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. 

Go home, George (and take Ira with you)

Review of George Gershwin's masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, by fellow composer Virgil Thomson: "One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business he wanted to learn."

George Gershwin: the graceful ghost

A few more intriguing bits about Gershwin’s work, indicating he must have had a deep interest in Jewish mysticism:

In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk (Yiddish: דיבוק, from Hebrew word meaning adhere or cling) is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person.

A migrant soul?! And perhaps Ira, raised in the same tradition, was subconsciously thinking of the same thing, his soul merging with his brother’s.  I don’t see GG as a dybbuk at all – he was a gentle soul and everyone loved him, though I also think he was extremely lonely and was completely disoriented after his death. And yet, if you strip away the evil connotations, a dybbuk is just an unhappy camper like a ghost, frustrated or feeling incomplete or not listened to. This is why Chanon in the story is “reduced to practicing evil rites,” because he felt so powerless.

I am very surprised, but perhaps I shouldn’t be, that the writer of I Got Rhythm and Rhapsody in Blue could be so interested in dark Jewish ritual, but he did after all grow up bilingual, i. e. speaking Yiddish, so the stories were there.  You look at this and think: George Gershwin? Mysticism, migrant souls, WHAT? Then you dig up all this stuff. Instead of developing The Dybbuk (the rights were tied up), he wrote Porgy and Bess which was also about a marginalized and powerless black community. There is a chilling song in it called The Buzzard which is about a vast dark bird waiting to  swoop down and feed on Porgy’s flesh:  he tells it, “Ain’t nobody dead this mornin’!” This is like something out of classic myth.

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Porgy and Bess: Gershwin's melodramatic trash

You know, it ain't that much different from high school. Maybe what happens there is what happens always. You have a great idea, nobody notices, or you're even seen as a freak. I look at my "views" and it's pathetic, because everybody else I know who keeps a blog has hundreds of views a day. I have almost none. It's not supposed to matter, and if I push it out my mind (hard, and each day), maybe it doesn't.

But am I putting anything out there at all that is of any use to anyone, besides me?  If I ever dare ask anyone, they tell me I'm not hustling enough or writing the kinds of things people want to read. I'm making the dire mistake of expressing my feelings and views rather than bartering: I will praise your work, not because it's any good but so that YOU will praise MINE, and thus we can reflexively call each other good writers (whether we've even read each other's stuff or not) and thus drum up sales. That is how it is done, and I'm not doing it, so once more I am fatally out of step. After writing "real" reviews for what now seems like a dismal and futile 30 years, it's dismaying, to say the least. And I won't do it, and so, the results, which I must live with. 

What got me going on all this? George Gershwin. Lately I have been obsessed with his death, which is too bad because it wasn't representative of his boyish, buoyant life. It was an awful way to end it, suffering alone from a horrible condition that everyone seemed to think was a form of attention-getting. He had cancer of the brain, which is not a condition given to malingerers.

And even Porgy and Bess - an opera that STILL creates controversy whenever it is produced anywhere, because nobody seems to be able to square three white guys writing a masterful opera about poor blacks in the South - he was trashed for it, though that didn't keep the crowds away.

I listened to this recording from 1935 today and just caved in, collapsed in tears. I don't know what it is. At first it was the sheer beauty and sheen of the voices, and the way they were being used; then it was the sense of pledging, of vows dearly made and nearly kept. There are aspects of music that can never be put into words, of course. Gershwin was speaking something never spoken before, in a language he invented as he went along. We notice the freshness, vitality, but also a profound sadness, and yes, a Hebraic quality that caused Oscar Levant to label it "the best Jewish opera ever written". You can layer the two on top of each other and see a lot of overlap, the core of it being the pain of exile.

All this takes me to an incredible, even jaw-dropping review in a new book I have on Gershwin. Vergil Thomson was a composer himself, a failed one who wrote scores for industrial films. One year he made $300 from composing, which is $300 more than I ever earn, let me tell you. Anyway, the review - I have to transcribe it out of the book here, but I'm going to take a crack at it, not just because it makes me feel better, but - because it makes me feel better.

"One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. . . The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. . . His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form. of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. . . It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business of he wanted to learn. . .His efforts at recitative are as ineffective as anything I've heard. . . I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor plum-pudding orchestration." 

Other choice words from critics included "tripe", "lamp-black Negroisms", and "melodramatic trash", and there were even anti-semitic references to "gefilte fish". Oscar Levant muttered during the intermission, "It's a right step in the wrong direction."

Dying seems to be a good career move for many. Only a couple of years after this recording was made, Gershwin's head exploded and he was gone. Only then did everyone begin to sing his praises, to recognize his greatness. Bickering over Porgy goes on even today, and maybe it's a good thing - keeps the edge on it, keeps people talking. Can three white guys write an opera full of black stereotypes and get away with it? Only if they're brilliant enough to see beyond race and social standing, rip off the veils of pretension to find the human souls beneath. These aren't pretty people, but neither are the thugs and prostitutes of Mahagonny.  They aren't there to prove a point, but to sing their lives, to let us hear. 

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REVEALED: Bob Dylan wrote all of Gershwin's songs!

The Truth Revealed: Bob Dylan wrote all of George Gershwin’s songs!

Sooooooo! You think George Gershwin was an original, do you? You think he was the genius of that place, y’know, that alley with all those tin pans lying around? You think he wrote hundreds-a great songs like Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’, Shortnin, and Mairsy-Dotes? WRONG. He stole from everybody, just like every legendary composer who ever lived.

This exposé will intersperse my unique revelations about Gershwin and his times with comments from that unassailable fountainhead of true lies, Wikipedia. The author uses it all the time to lend an aura of veracity to her completely fictitious essays and to casually bend facts to her own inclinations. Pay attention!

Gershwin was influenced by French composers of the early twentieth century. In turn Maurice Ravel was impressed with Gershwin's abilities, commenting, "Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves. I have heard of George Gershwin's works and I find them intriguing.” The orchestrations in Gershwin's symphonic works often seem similar to those of Ravel; likewise, Ravel's two piano concertos evince an influence of Gershwin.

Gershwin asked to study with Ravel. When Ravel heard how much Gershwin earned, Ravel replied with words to the effect of, "You should give me lessons”. It was never made clear what kind of lessons he meant.  In fact, there is little evidence that Gershwin even understood French and had no idea what Ravel had just proposed. “To me,” he was quoted in the press, “it all sounds like Hinky Dinky Parley Voo.”

In spite of the fact that their attempt to meld their talents failed, the composers had something in common: they both died of brain tumors. This is proof that extended periods of composing causes the brain stem to harden into a hockey puck. Either that, or medical science is wrong and tumors are catching.

Some versions of this suspicious "you should give me lessons" story feature Igor Stravinsky rather than Ravel as the composer; however Stravinsky confirmed that he originally heard the story from Ravel, at one of those salons where they waved at each other and went, “Wooooo-hooooo!” Other accounts differ. In fact they differ so wildly that, as with most musical anecdotes,  it probably never happened at all.

Some claim that Gershwin was a time-traveller who showed up in Bob Dylan’s closet in 1962. Dylan's early faux-rockabilly style was a complete failure in Dinkytown,a very small pioneer settlement in Minnesota where none of the residents were more than 2 inches tall. At the time, Dylan was playing a pink plastic electric guitar with gold sparkles in it that he ordered out of the Sears catalogue.

“I want to study with you,” stated Gershwin, citing his complete lack of expertise in writing popular song.

“Hey man,” Dylan replied (though it is doubtful these are his exact words: citation required). "We can't study together. I already dropped outa high school."

“I don’t have any hits,” Gershwin claimed.

“I don’t either, man.  I'm still singin' Buddy Holly songs."

"Sing one for me, o legend of your times."

"Goes kinda like this.

I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
For the harder I work the faster my money goes

Well I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
Well you won't do right
To save your doggone soul

"I note that the tune is somewhat monochromatic."

"Say what?"

"It's all one note."

"Yeah, easier to remember, man. I have to write my changes on my sleeve."

"And the lyric has a certain primitive energy. After all, Cole Porter did allude to a glimpse of stocking."

"Well I ain't makin' a livin' at it yet. Too busy obliteratin' my middle-class upbringing and fabricatin' my image as bum ridin' the rails with Woody. But things are lookin' up. I’m screwin’ this girl named Baez and she's goin' places."

“Maybe I should’ve approached Schoenberg.”

“Yeah. He’s a good plumber, man.”

“Do you mean he plumbs the depth of the human soul?”

“Dig it.”

(This is a good example of how a completely inane remark can be twisted around to reflect future genius.)

But his collaboration with Dylan was not to be (sorry about the title, I changed my mind as I wrote this), nor did he ever work with that other guy whose name is so hard to spell. So he began to steal from other rock legends, notably Bruce Springsteen, whose remarks are not on record.

But the vandalism didn’t stop there. Gershwin's own Concerto in F was criticized for being related to the work of Claude Debussy, more so than to the expected jazz style. The comparison did not deter Gershwin from continuing to explore French styles. The title of An American in Paris reflects the very journey that he had consciously taken as a composer: "The opening part will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and Les Six, though the tunes are original." Others claimed he used the term American to give the piece a veneer of cultural relevance while he sucked all the juices out of the French impressionists. Later Leslie Caron (French!) dumped a bucket of sexuality over the whole thing like whitewash, which is all people remember anyway.

Aside from the French influence, Gershwin was intrigued by the works of Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. He also ripped off Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin (his chief rival, who never learned to play the piano and was in fact tone-deaf).  He also asked Schoenberg for composition lessons. Schoenberg refused, saying "I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you're such a good Gershwin already." Gershwin’s reply was, “Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”  (This quote is similar to one credited to Maurice Ravel during Gershwin's 1928 visit to France – "Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you are a first-rate Gershwin?" He then hit him up for a loan.)

The  “first-rate Gershwin” remark which every composer in human history claimed to have uttered first has in fact been attributed to Gershwin himself, or perhaps his longtime walking companion Giorgg Greshvinn.

Meanwhile, Gershwin’s ghostwriter Mannie Maneschevitz turned out a semi-hit called Second-rate Gershwin, later made popular by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

Gershwin’s dog was also named Gershwin. An Irish setter, the dog caused confusion on Tin Pan Alley, where he often drank from a tin pan, and in the salons of Paris where he had his fur foiled (he was actually a black lab). Gershwin was sometimes heard to exclaim, “Good boy, Gershwin!”, which was mistaken for arrogance on his part. Later one of his rivals George Greshwin wrote in the Henbane Times, “That new song Gershwin wrote is really a dog.”

Then again, there is Oscar Levant’s most brilliant, mind-blowing, searing quip ever, better than anything he ever blurted out on To Tell the Truth or Hollywood Squares: “An evening with George Gershwin sure is boring.”

Russian Joseph Schillinger's influence as Gershwin's teacher of composition (1932–1936) was substantial in providing him with a method of composition. (Author's note: Wikipedia wrote this atrocious sentence, not me.) There has been some disagreement about the nature of Schillinger's influence on Gershwin. After the posthumous success of Porgy and Bess, Schillinger claimed he had a large and direct influence in overseeing the creation of the opera; Ira completely denied that his brother had any such assistance for this work. A third account of Gershwin's musical relationship with his teacher was written by Gershwin's close friend Vernon Duke, also a Schillinger student, in an article for the Musical Quarterly. (And so on, and so on, and so on. Time for a new paragraph.)

Porgy and Bess caused controversy in 1936 when it was retitled The Watermelon Review. Featuring only white actors in blackface, it was raided and permanently closed by the police when the burnt cork melted off the actors’ faces, revealing the shocking fact that white people had appeared in a black opera. Gershwin’s suggestion that the opera be restaged with black actors was met with stunned silence. A modest revival featuring Al Jolson playing all the characters (singing such tunes as Mammy, You is my Woman Now and Sum-sum-summertime) resulted in a record number of rotten tomatoes being thrown at the stage, to a possible depth of 3 feet.  The star of the very first talking picture The Jazz Singer was quoted as saying, “This was another Jolson triumph”, before going off to make a movie called The Jazz Singer II: Yes, It’s Crap, but It’s Got Sound.

During another time-travel episode in 1967, Rolling Stone magazine attempted to analyze Gershwin’s plagiarism but quit after page 3 because they couldn’t get a good cover photo. Oscar Levant kept standing in front of him.

What set Gershwin apart, aside from his overbite, his strange-looking skin rash and a propensity for screaming in the street, was his ability to manipulate forms of music into his own unique voice. He took the jazz he discovered on Tin Pan Alley into the mainstream by splicing its rhythms and tonality with that of the popular songs of his era. In musical circles, this is known as “stealing”.

Although George Gershwin would continually make grand statements about his music, he believed that "true music must reflect the thought and aspirations of the people and time. My people are Americans. My time is today.” Today didn’t last very long because his brain exploded 15 minutes later. He also dissed Toscanini for pretending not to have heard Rhapsody in Blue. “I can’t believe it,” Gershwin remarked. “He must have stuck bubblegum in his ears.” This statement appears in Bartlett’s Quotations on page 96 (citation needed: this whole article is complete bullshit!).

CODA. As usual, screwing around with images is both more fun than writing, and much more time-consuming. Thinking about Buddy Holly and his black-framed glasses, the kind that are once more coming into fashion, I wondered how Gershwin would look with Dylan's eyes, and vice-versa. The results were unsettling.

Of course I never got a perfect match because their facial shape is so different, but what struck me is that the eyes were almost interchangeable in the quality of their gaze, their intensity, focus, and almost scary self-possession. Nothing has ever thrown Bob Dylan, not even being booed for ten years for singing Sunday School songs, and Gershwin similarly knew he was great stuff and that no one could equal him.

Gershwin was tragically cut down at 38, and everyone assumes he would have gone right on pouring out hit tunes and classic operas and things. Such might not have been the case. He may well have been a sort of Chaplin figure, a sad elder statesman unable to adapt to dramatically changing times. Fascinatin' Rhythm wouldn't play well even in the era of Vic Damone and the Rat Pack, let alone today. The people who listen to Gershwin now are mainly senior citizens, or musicologists making yet another one of those dreary PBS specials in which they dust off the progeny of the progeny of somebody famous in the 1920s. Plus a few high school students being required to perform the popular music of a century ago just for extra band credits.

Dylan has just hung on by his teeth, tough as an old lizard, his voice completely shot, but unlike 95% of other legends he's a shape-shifter and won't stick to any particular era. Lots of people still associate him with Blowin' in the Wind and "protest songs", but real fans (and I am not one of them: I gave up after Desire/Blood on the Tracks, which I still think would've made a great double album) appreciate the fact that he is still completely unpredictable. He wins tons of awards now, lifetime achievement things, and each medal slung around his neck seems more like an albatross. But hey. . . there's always the Christmas album.

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