You want to hear Gershwin jazz? You want Gershwin film tunes? You want analyses of Gershwin music? You want a whole Gershwin Broadway show?
You got it.
It doesn`t even require a major marketing angle-like an anniversary-for George Gershwin and his brother, Ira, to pop up. The music is its own reason.
”I can`t think of any composer of Gershwin`s time who had his range,”
says Dave Grusin, the jazz pianist and writer whose GRP Records has just released ”The Gershwin Connection.” This is a compilation of familiar Gershwin tunes played by many of the artists on GRP.
”You listen to almost all the other pop songs from the era and they sound dated,” Grusin says. ”Gershwin`s could have been written yesterday. They`re so hip. They sound so fresh.”
”The Gershwin Connection” was born when Grusin was looking for a project that could include several GRP artists. Gershwin, he realized, was the logical common language. ”We knew them all,” he says. ”The challenge was that everyone had played them so often we had to think of a different way.”
The result is intriguing: ”How Long Has This Been Going On?” as a waltz; ”There`s a Boat Dat`s Leaving Soon for New York” with a gospel/R & B flavor.
”So far we haven`t gotten any complaints,” Grusin says with a laugh.
”No one has demanded to know how we could do `My Man Is Gone Now` as a be-bop quintet.”
But then, the Gershwins had that kind of flexibility. ”George was like Leonard Bernstein,” Grusin says. ”He could do serious classical music or opera-yet he also had a touch for Broadway.”
George did all this-Broadway, Fred Astaire movies, ”Porgy and Bess,”
”Rhapsody in Blue”-in less than 40 years. He was 38 when he died in 1937.
(Brother Ira, the brilliant lyricist, lived 48 more years, to age 88.)
The timelessness of Gershwin`s music has always been underscored by the way it keeps returning-when Oscar Levant recorded his brilliant ”Rhapsody in Blue”; when Woody Allen used Gershwin to score the movie ”Manhattan”; in the hit Broadway pastiche ”My One and Only.” Even last year`s shaky Broadway revival of ”Oh, Kay!” did not close for lack of good music.
Now another Gershwin musical-a smorgasbord titled ”Crazy for You”-is scheduled to open on Broadway early this year.
With a fluffy `30s plot about a New York playboy who is sent West and falls in love with the only girl in the town of Deadrock, Nev., ”Crazy for You” blends 16 familiar Gershwin songs with five previously unpublished tunes.
The former group includes ”Embraceable You,” ”Someone to Watch Over Me” and ”I Got Rhythm,” while the latter includes ”What Causes That,”
”Naughty Baby,” ”K-ra-zy for You,” ”Put Me to the Test” and
”Tonight`s the Night.”
The show opened in December in Washington, will start previews at the Shubert Theater late in January and will open in mid-February.
Nor is this the only action on the Gershwin front.
John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra have recorded a collection of Gershwin movie tunes, with vocals by Patti Austin and Gregory Hines-who duet on, for instance, the Astaire-Rogers classic ”Let`s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
The orchestration throughout the disc is rich, full and lush-sounding as much like a Broadway score as a collection of movie tunes.
Meanwhile, for those who would like to study Gershwin in words, two analytic works have been published: ”Fascinating Rhythm” by Deena Rosenberg (Dutton, $24.95) and ”Gershwin: A Companion & Discography” by Walter Rimler (Popular Culture, $55).
Rosenberg`s book draws on interviews with Ira Gershwin, who comes across as charming, modest and witty. If anything, the book doesn`t include enough of Ira`s stories and anecdotes, focusing instead on a show-by-show history of the Gershwins` collaborations with plot summaries, production anecdotes and analyses of major songs.
Rosenberg`s style remains reverent and generally serious, though it`s almost a standup comedy routine next to Rimler`s scholarly tome.
Most of Rimler`s book is devoted to a chronological list of Gershwin works, each analyzed musically and broken down by such elements as key (e.g. E-flat), time (alla breve) and tempo (moderato).
Rimler also discusses the major recordings of each song in terms a non-professional can understand. Because he also tends to play down his subjective judgments, ”Wait a Bit, Susie” is treated with no less dignity than ”Summertime.”
