Rhapsody in Red, White and Blue

The 100th Anniversary of an American Classic

As part of this week’s First Anniversary celebration of Sanity Clause—and in commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue, I’m reprinting something I wrote here last summer, before most of you had joined the Sanity Tribe. It’s about George Gershwin, my family and the miracle of American music. I hope you don’t mind the redundancy, but I thought it worthwhile on this special day:

A few nights ago, Sanity Goddess and I sashayed across the alley to the Cape Playhouse and saw an absolutely wonderful production of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. The acting and dancing and choreography and sets and costumes were all Broadway-level but better—because the setting was more intimate and the quality such a pleasant surprise. (The costume changes were Herculean.) Twelve musicians admirably did the work of a symphony orchestra but I missed the Gershwin xylophone, strings and extravagant array of reeds, from clarinet to bassoon. Afterwards, I listened to the original, orchestral 16-minute American in Paris suite, and then listened again, and again, with chills and tears. This piece of music was the first record I ever owned; I wore it out (you could actually do that in those pre-vinyl days). And with those personal memories came some thoughts about George Gershwin and American music and how it may be the truest reflection of the American sensibility, which I’ll share here:

My grandfather, Frank Warshauer, was a professional musician. Among other gigs, he was a percussionist with the Paul Whiteman orchestra—although, according to the official notes, he was not on the traps the afternoon of February 12, 1924, when Whiteman premiered Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall in New York. (That centennial should be celebrated in grand fashion next year on Lincoln’s Birthday.) When I was born, we lived in the Warshauer home on Beach 91st Street in Rockaway Beach. It was a house of music. My mother played the piano, dexterously if not sensitively; she was a speed-demon with a heavy touch (which she readily admitted and regretted). My aunt Madeline was an astonishment—she could hear a song on the radio and then play it by ear on the piano; she also toured as a drummer with an all-women’s big band. She had the strongest forearms and wrists I’ve ever encountered. When I survived scarlet fever at the age of four, my parents bought me an accordion. My grandfather taught me to play it. I read music before I read words. Then, sadly, my grandfather passed away when I was seven-years-old. Doubly sad, because I inherited his fabulous drum kit, complete with bells and whistles—literally—and Chinese blocks, a cowbell and Indian-style tom-toms…and so I abandoned the keyboard, the first of many transcendently stupid decisions I’ve made in life. (Happily, I found my way to the qwerty keyboard…but still.)

In the Warshauer house, Gershwin was God. The fact that he was taken from us at the age of 39, of a brain tumor, seemed beyond tragic but oddly appropriate—the furious creativity going on in that brain had to have caused oncological electric tissue-cataclysms and sub-atomic joy explosions. All you had to hear was Gershwin himself playing the piano—the boisterous ecstasy of it—and you knew something otherworldly was going on. Apparently, he played at every cocktail party; he couldn’t stop himself.

And his timing was exquisite: He came along at the moment when American music was creating itself, a genius amalgam of African-American and Jewish Tin Pan Alley styles, with a Cuban-Latin infusion (also in the twenties, singers like the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers incorporated Celtic balladry—and Hawaiian pedal steel guitar, and yodeling!—into the jazzy mix to create country music). Gershwin leaped from Tin Pan Alley song-plugging to more ambitious stuff. Rhapsody in Blue created something new out of jazz, Jewish, classical and mittel-European operetta strains, something magnificent. (The least of these were the schmaltzy operetta riffs which Gershwin resorted to, too often for my taste, when he needed a bridge between themes.)

The snooty classical critics never liked him much. His attempts to classicize jazz were seen as pretentious or pedestrian. When he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel, Ravel refused to teach him: “Why be a second rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?” Indeed. Gershwin responded with An American in Paris, first performed in 1928 by Walter Damrosch and the New York Philharmonic. Gershwin allegedly walked out of that performance, incensed that Damrosch’s tempo wasn’t speedy enough. And then he began work on his magnum opus, the opera Porgy and Bess—to my ear, the single greatest piece of orchestral music ever written by an American. But along came more critics, these largely of the left, scorning the opera as a “cultural appropriation” of the black musical tradition. It was a commercial failure, at first. It has never received the recognition it deserved, though individual pieces of the music—the song, “Summertime”—are embedded in the American canon. I go to see P&B every time it is performed by a full ensemble; the Metropolitan Opera’s recent version was extraordinary.

Which brings me to this thought: American music is not an act of cultural appropriation. It is the very opposite: a triumph of cultural amalgamation. It is the purest expression of E Pluribus Unum—not a “glorious mosaic” or “salad bowl” as some would have it, but a rocking, steaming melting pot, the styles all mushed together creating something glorious, with a compelling synergy that tears at your heart and sets your feet to stomping. There is nothing more American than our music. It is alchemy, turning ethnicity into cosmopolitan gold—an avatar of a magical process by which we, eventually, become our own ethnic group, mixed-breed, dancing mutts.

I am an avid appreciator of all our various ethnic traditions, but I am a flag-waving banshee supporter of the miraculous things we’ve created together, our music, our Constitution, our ethnically interwoven people. I hear the American spirit every time I listen to George Gershwin or Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald or Merle Haggard, Miles Davis or Johnny Cash (or, these days, Rhiannon Giddens and Lin-Manuel Miranda—and, of course, the Austin singer-songwriter who goes by the name of Terry Klein and inherited the Warshauer genes); music like the world has never heard before. It is the sound of improvisation, of wild-ass creativity, the sound of freedom (Just ask any Russian who grew up listening to jazz on Radio Free Europe).

Despite the anger and pessimism of the moment, we live in a better country than those our ancestors came from. And we can sing along with Porgy, as I inevitably do, when he goes off in search of Bess: “Oh Lord, I’m on my way/I’m on my way to a better land…”

The music will take us there.

Last chance to take advantage of our First Anniversary subscription offer: