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.
