Switched on Pop - Rhapsody in Blue, Reimagined

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

What do Duke Ellington, United Airlines, and the K Pop group Red Velvet share in common? They've all covered George Gershwin's piano concerto, Rhapsody in Blue. First premiered in 1924, the piece became an immediate hit for the way it blended American jazz with the European symphonic tradition. Gershwin had a number of successes as a composer in his day—his aria "Summertime" from the opera Porgy and Bess is by some measures the most covered song ever—but the staying power of the Rhapsody make it a rare instrumental piece that's instantly familiar. Maybe too familiar. In 2024, there will be many centennial performances of this iconic piece, but pianist Lara Downes wanted to do something more than just the sound the notes of Gershwin's score for the umpteenth time. Downes commissioned Puerto Rican musician Edmar Colon to create a new version of Gershwin's composition, one that brought in the full spectrum of American life in 1924: fiery improvisation, Latin percussion, and dance rhythms. The resultant piece both pays tribute to an American icon while adding a new set of modern counterpoint. Nate sat down with Lara to ask her if she was nervous to rewrite such a canonic piece, why a concerto is like a musical kaleidoscope, and the surprising family connection to Gershwin's musical world she discovered while researching Rhapsody in Blue. Songs Discussed George Gershwin, Lara Downes, Edmar Colon - Rhapsody in Blue Reimagined Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue Gershwin - 3 Preludes: II. Andante con moto e poco rubato Sarah Vaughan - Nice Work if You can Get It Sam Cooke - Summertime Chet Baker - But not For ME Louis Armstrong - Aint Misbehavin Ella Fitzgerald - Blue Skies Red Velvet - Birthday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. This episode, we're going to try something a little different. We're going to talk about a piece of pop music that's 100 years old, and we're going to do it with me flying solo, because I'm going to be talking about one of the most important artists in American music and one of my earliest musical memories. I'm talking about the composer George Gershwin. My grandma, Sally Sanfield, is an incredibly talented pianist, and at 94, she still plays every single day. When I was younger, I was constantly exposed to her playing some of the great classical composer, Chopin, Greig, Bach.

But the music that I always gravitated towards was whenever she would. play the Gershwin piano preludes. These compositions really imprinted on my brain and as I grew older the music of George Gershwin really stayed with me. When I was playing jazz in high school, I would try and learn his brilliantly harmonically complex pop songs like nice work if you can get it. And but not for me. with lyrics by his brother, Ira. And then later I got to see his opera, Porgy and Bess, which features classic songs like Summertime, and was one of the first productions to feature an entirely African-American cast.

But of all Gershwin's works, I think the one that has most embedded itself in culture is his piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue, which premiered 100 years ago in Fourschevue. February 1924. Gershwin was asked to write a jazz concerto that would be performed in New York City's Aeolian Hall. Although Gershwin initially declined, he eventually wrote a piece for two pianos in, get this, three weeks, he then passed the score to arranger Ferdééééééééééé orchestrated it for a full symphony. At the premiere, which was conducted by the band leader Paul Whiteman, Gershwin himself played the piano. He called this piece a musical experiment. Part of what he was trying to do was mash up contemporary and classical music cultures,

different musical traditions. You can hear that in just the opening notes of this piece, a famous clarinet glistando that rises up and up. And as you're listening to it, you're like, what am I hearing? This Jewish Klesmer music, is it African-American? blues? Is it a classical clarinet? It's all of the above at the same time. These characteristics reflect the life and experience of Gershwin himself. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the early 1900s exposed to this melting pot of different cultures all meeting through the mass immigration to the shores of the United States and living shoulder to shoulder in these urban environments, he channeled all that

into this piece. And ever since then, this piece has been inescapable in American culture and in world culture, really. Jazz musicians like Lewis Armstrong would quote passages from Rhapsody and Blue in their solos. Ele Fitzgerald would give you a taste of its melodies when she was scat-sing. Moving forward in time, United Airlines made Rhapsody and Blue the soundtrack of their airline. Performing together with a single United Purpose. That's what makes the world's leading airline. Flyer friendly.

But I think one of the most surprising reinventions of Rhapsody and Blue that I've encountered is it's sampling in the 2022 track Birthday by the K-pop group Red Velvet. despite the longevity of this piece, there's also some serious issues with it. For one thing, a lot of people think of this as a jazz symphony, but is it really jazz at all? There's no improvisation. There's no real jazz syncopation. And if it is jazz, because it does owe a lot to jazz rhythm and melody, then we have to acknowledge that this piece looks a lot like cultural appropriation, that in the eyes of many music historians and even black artists from his time, Gershwin had co-opted this music that was coming out of Harlem, and Rhapsie in Blue was really his effort to make black music palatable for white audiences. So in the 100 years since its premiere,

Rhapsie and Blue has become such a familiar piece of concert music. And on the centennial, I think we're going to be hearing it performed a lot. But will we actually reckon with some of the more complicated history of this piece? Well, there is one musician who is trying to do that, the pianist, Laura Downs. On this 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue, rather than just perform the piece, she commissioned Puerto Rican musician Edmar Cologne to rearrange Gershwin's original score, adding Latin percussion and jazz improvisation to high. highlight the source material between Gershwin's grand musical experiment. The result is a piece

called Rhapsody in Blue reimagined, which Laura recently debuted in San Francisco. I sat down with her to learn why she felt it was time to revisit this American classic. I'm Laura Downs, and I'm a pianist, recording artist, explorer of music. I don't know. How much do we hate the word storyteller? But I think I'm a storyteller of music. We love the word storyteller. Yeah, I think it's not used enough. So let's go to the beginning of this project Rhapsody reimagined. Laura, what was the genesis of this idea? Anniversaries, you know, they are complicated.

And especially in my part of the music world, where I guess I still inhabit this place called classical music. And I have found that sometimes when we have these anniversaries, we don't do them very well, right? like let's play all Mozart all day for a year until everybody's just so tired. I think 100 year anniversaries are potentially problematic because 100 years is, I don't know, is it a long time or is a short time by some metrics, 100 years is a long time. And so now it's time to wrap the thing up and put it in the museum.

Yeah. Century, yeah. I was just kind of cautious about it. I was getting a lot of calls to play the piece and I was really starting to think just for my own well-being. Like, why do I care about this piece? What does this piece mean to me? I've always known that the most important thing to me about this piece, I mean, it's a great piece of music,

but I think Gershwin's inspiration, Gershwin's vision for this piece is really, really special, you know, this phrase that he came up with when he called it the musical kaleidoscope of America. That's just always spoken to me so much. So I guess this whole thing started because I was thinking about what did that mean? What is the musical kaleidoscope? Yeah. As you say, this is such a canonical piece, such a celebrated piece, such a familiar piece,

I totally understand and appreciate your instinct to want to come at it in a new way. Was there also a degree of nerves, maybe, to rethink such an iconic piece of American music? Honestly, no. That stuff has surfaced since we started, because I didn't realize that a lot of people think about the 1924 version that was orchestrated by Ferd de Grosfé as the original version by Gershwin. And I'd really never thought of that because I play very often the solo piano version, Gershwin's original. And so my relationship with the Grofei orchestration is just that. The starting point for me is the Gershwin piano score and then look, well, this is really

interesting and this is great what happened in 1924 because this other guy picked it up and arranged it for the band that they had on his score. hand for this concert. I don't think of it as set in stone. So it's been surprising. Fascinating. So to approach this piece and rearrange it, you don't even see yourself as the first person to do that. You're continuing a tradition of reworking and rearranging this piece. Yeah, I mean, there are countless versions, right? I'm not even aware of all of them, I'm sure, but everybody from Ellington on down, like people have played around with this piece. And I think it's telling that because this piece is claimed by the classical music world.

We want to think of it as having one version because that's how we do things in the classical music world. Whereas everyone else is like, oh, what a great tune. What am I going to do with it this decade? And what's somebody else going to do with it? You know, songs evolve. Every time I'm working with somebody who comes at music from a different training, a different tradition, right?

They're like, you do what? You play the same notes the same way over and over and over again. Why would you do that? So Gershwin, as you said, had Ferdie Gros Faye to arrange this piece. And you have a collaborator, Edmar Cologne. How did you know that Edmar was the person that you wanted to work with on this project? So Edmar and I had met a year or so before this all started. We had met in Boston with the Boston Pops.

We were doing a program with them of Ellington and Strayhorn. I had a new concerto that was done for me by the Pops and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was based on three Strayhorn tunes. But the program opened with this arrangement that Edmar had done of Ellington's caravan. And Edmar is Puerto Rican, and he had taken that song really back to its Puerto Rican roots, because it was co-written by Juan Tiesel, and brought in this whole element of Afro-Caribbean percussion. And it was just this very dramatic statement about this is where this song comes from. And I knew that what I wanted to do with The Rhapsody was not just kind of imagine it into the

present and the future, but also to investigate its roots because I think there's so much in this score that is like Gershwin's 1924 attempt to translate something that is, you know, coming from somewhere else. So I knew that in order to funnel those two things together, I really wanted to work with Edmar. I mean, I literally was picking up the phone to call him as I was imagining this in my head. And it's been a really close and beautiful collaboration. And he knew as soon as I started to speak about this, I think there are lots of people I could have called who would have thought, know, well, that's a cool and nifty idea, you know, to do something cool and nifty. But Edmard understood immediately that what I wanted to do was dig and then, like, rebuild, but

always honoring this central vision of this melting pot thing. How did that vision materialize musically? If someone was familiar with the original orchestration of Rhapsody and Blue, what might be some of the biggest changes that they would encounter in, you're and Edmars Rhapsody reimagined. Well, I think probably the most obvious change is the element of percussion and what we're doing with rhythms. Because what he was able to do is to take these rhythms that, again, I think Gershwin was trying to translate from something, whether that was from black music or from

Latin influences. You know, he's kind of having to reduce them in a way, right? So if you let those reopen again and sort of imagine. their source and the fullness of that source. I think that's the thing that most people will hear at first listen. There's also something about the tone, the color of the piece. I feel like Rhapsody and Blue is kind of a unique piece because it has so many melodies and rhythms that remain so recognizable a hundred years later. Were there any sections that you considered untouchable, I guess it had to remain in your rearranged version.

Well, I mean, of course, the slow theme, right? Yeah. Because there would be a revolt. But you know that actually in the original, that section goes by really fast. I think we're waiting for it, always waiting for it. Then you're like, oh, there it is. And you don't realize that three minutes later, it's over. But if you know Gershwin's piano role recording that he made himself in the 1920s,

Like he doesn't make a huge fuss about that section. Just goes. And we're used to 100 years of this like Hollywoodization, you know, of that theme. So it's a giant and it's all the strings and it's swoony. So I did have thoughts about just let's bring that into a more intimate place, which we have done in this version. Yeah. The opening clarinet glissando is another moment in this piece.

that I think is instantly recognizable. And I kind of love the way you're in Edmars version handles that because the way I heard it was almost like a bit of a tease because you don't know if you're going to get it at first. And it's sort of almost like a game of cat and mouse with the listener.

You hear this trill from the clarinet. It continues. You would think, are we going to get that explosive glistando up to that blue note? And then finally we hear it. Yeah. I don't know if I'm,

I'm putting too much into this interpretation, but I did like that as a way of sort of dialoguing with the original and sort of playing with listeners' expectations a little bit. Yeah, no, that's really well put. I think that was pretty much the idea. You know, the opening, there's more of an extended opening. The sound of that opening, you know, it's kind of rumbly and almost a little bit ominous because of this idea of Gershwin writing this piece in a time that was so politically charged and threatening in so many ways to exactly the existence of the America that he's celebrating in this piece. So we kind of wanted to lay that groundwork.

And then that clarinet, yeah, it emerges from that and now takes us to this place that we know. Wow. Can you say more about that? Is that because of the immigration restrictions that were instituted in 1924, which maybe curtailed this kaleidoscopic melting pot that Gershwin was trying to capture? Yeah, exactly. You know, there's that story about Gershwin finding out that he's supposed to write this piece because there's this article in the newspaper

that says he's writing a piece for a concert that's coming up in three weeks and he's, you know, but I really started to think about what else is in that newspaper. You know, what's on the front page of that newspaper because it was just three months after the first performance of Rhapsony Blue that that legislation, the Johnson Read Act, was passed.

Something here about the speed of American life and assimilation and how quickly things changed generation by generation, but Gershwin was 24 years old and he was a first generation American, and that legislation was directly targeting his parents, you know, his family, his community. So I don't think that he ignored that.

And living in our time when, you know, so much is so wrong. And I think that we as musicians, each in our own way, we're kind of trying to insist upon and celebrate and advocate for the America that we want to live in, I feel strongly that He must have been doing that. And so then that also takes Rhapsody and Blue away from this like harmless, familiar, humable thing to maybe this is actually sort of a little act of rebellion. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absurd of the Caroline Herrera,

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turn to another radical moment to me in the Rhapsody reimagined that has that spirit of

rebellion is the inclusion of sections for improvisation by instrumentalists in the orchestra

something that Gershwin's original didn't have though was inspired by jazz it lacked what

many perceive as a crucial element of jazz, which is spontaneous, extemporaneous improvisation. You've re-injected that into the piece. Why was that important to include? Well, it was an experiment, right? The piece was written for this concert that was called an experiment in modern music. And this whole idea was so new because everything about it was new. Jazz was new. And so the idea that this composer who, I mean, he wasn't one thing or another thing, he was somebody whose roots came from the Yiddish Theater and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. and yes, also orchestral writing.

But for him to, I was going to say absorb, but it wasn't a question of absorb, but it was a really question of like, blend these two big things, this European classical tradition and this black American tradition, which again is in its infancy. And the primary element of that is improvisation.

And it probably couldn't have been done because of the constraints of the setting, you know, and the respectability part, which was to bring this piece into this concert, Hall with ladies in fur coats, you know. But because that is the origin story of the piece, it felt necessary to acknowledge it and yeah, make space for it. Right.

I think Paul Whiteman would say that he was trying to make a lady out of jazz was his line. And there's a lot of gendered and class kind of assumptions in that desire. And it's powerful to the idea of returning this concert work to its roots in improvised music. the kind of settings of nightclubs and saloons where you would have heard that. There's also an element in this piece that is very unique to me and similarly kind of infuses your arrangement with a relevance and an urgency. It's what you call the site-specific element of this piece. Tell us more about that. I mean, America is a really big place. And I think a big part of the equation of American

music is that it can't just be one thing. So the idea here is that as this piece travels, to different communities, different regions. We also want to make space and place for those local histories. So the first performance was in San Francisco. And obviously, a hugely essential part of the history of the West Coast in California is the story of Chinese immigration. So we had an ensemble of traditional Chinese instruments. But as the piece moves around the country,

you know, maybe that section gets given to a bluegrass ensemble or, you know, a blues combo or whatever. just to really link this idea of the musical kaleidoscope also to specific, what do you call the things that are in the kaleidoscope? I don't know, the little shapes in the kaleidoscope. You've stumped me, Laura. I have a PhD, but I'm utterly bewildered by that question. A listener will tell us.

The context of this piece being written in 1924 in this landscape of changing policy, and a sort of battle over American identity, this is not just kind of an abstract history for you. You also have a personal connection to this moment and to this anniversary. Yeah, I don't have a PhD, but I've learned so much through the process of examining this piece. So again, back to the Johnson-Reed Act,

no more immigration from Asia that got completely shut down. Nobody from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the common denominator here being anybody who wasn't pretty white, right? So northern Western Europe, and especially if you were from Great Britain, please come in, because clearly you are white. And they just sort of forgot about the British West Indies. So I had always known that in the 20s and 30s, there was this huge wave of immigration from places like Jamaica where my family's from. But I didn't know the why of that. And this is the why of that because you could have a visa as a British citizen and come.

from the islands. And so in the process of digging into that, I found that my grandfather had come to Harlem from Jamaica in 1924. I joke about that, and I really do think it was just kind of a loophole and an oversight. But there's so much about that time that just is feeling to me so connected to our time. Right? All the good things that are happening. I mean, there's a lot of good that's happening in our culture.

When you talk about American identity, we have this whole re-investigation of identity, and we are making huge changes culturally in our society. And at the same time, this giant, ugly pushback against it. Yeah. There's so many pieces of classical music that, whether Rhaps Dean Blu is a piece of classical music or not, I shouldn't just say that. But certainly it's a piece of concert music. And often these works, I think, sort of exist maybe as memes or as, as, I shouldn't just say that. But certainly it's a piece of concert music. And often these works, I think, sort of exist maybe as, memes or as little snippets that you find in Saturday morning cartoons. Rhapsie and Blue has a remarkable longevity. It's something that you hear sampled in a K-pop song in

2022. It's something you hear quoted by jazz musicians and their solos. It's the musical tag for United Airlines and the actor Sean Hayes performed it nightly on Broadway in a celebrated turn where he was playing the pianist, Oscar Levant, and I saw many sort of viral videos of him playing a wonderful rendition of Rhapsene Blue. I'm curious if you have any insight into

why this particular piece might have this lasting power and be something that people continually come back to and try and engage with. I guess this is where I do tap into my relationship with classical music, because you can ask that question about every piece of music that has lasted centuries. And I think it comes down to, yes, the hummable tunes. I was just at a concert of Beethoven's 9th. And there was a guy behind me in the audience who was waiting for the hummable tunes. Like there are these pieces that hold those snippets and you have such a close relationship with those snippets that the whole piece is your waiting room for the snippets. I'm not saying that that's true of Beethoven's 9th, but nobody can hum the entirety of Beethoven's 9th.

So I think there's that. But I also, in my quest to kind of demystify classical music, I'm always talking about the humanity that's in these pieces of music because I do think that that's why we care. I think that's why we do still care about Beethoven. I think that we are, whether we know it or not, we're having a relationship with his struggle and his rage and his living in a time of revolution and war and all those things. It just comes through. And I think the same is true of Chopin. And I think the same is true of this piece. and I couldn't have told you why, maybe, until, you know, I learned more about this moment.

And again, like, you don't need to know the details, but I think it's just something visceral that comes through. And for this piece, for Gershwin, I think also there's just this really obvious energy that is a result of living in this time when everything's moving so fast and this excitement of discovering new things and trying to, like, embrace all of them. I think that's what it is, because plenty of music from the 1920s that does not have the same. Magic. Yeah. Laura, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.

This has been fun. And you didn't ask me any scary musicology questions. No. I can. I'm happy to. We have a few more minutes. I could just get one in there. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz.

This episode was engineered by Bill Lance and edited by Art Chung. Abby Barr does our community management and Iris Gottlieb makes our illustrations. Neshot Kerwa is our executive producer. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of our show anywhere you get podcasts. Go to our website, switchdownpop.com,

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Okay, lastly, exciting episode, alert. We're going to be diving into the music of the premier hip hop festival, Rolling Loud. Our very own Rihanna Cruz was their IRL soaking up the sights, the sounds, the sweat. And Rihanna is going to report back on what we need to know about the state of hip hop in 2024 based on what they saw there. All that remains for me to say is thank you for listening.