This month’s centennials include Max Roach, James Baldwin and the pianist and composer George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that premiered in New York City’s Aeolian Hall, in February 1924.
Gershwin proclaimed “Rhapsody,” “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot.” The composer relied on familiar harmonies, melodies, and the colorful early jazz sounds influenced by Louis Armstrong and Harlem stride pianists James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith. Though his performance barely touched these Black musical influences, at intervals the heightened melody of horns, strings and his percussive playing could connote the flamboyancy of a high-stepping Harlem. At the time of his celebrated concert, Blacks weren’t allowed in the Cotton Club unless performing. Remember, this was during the great migration for Europeans and southern Blacks escaping Jim Crow and the KKK, and it was three years following the Tulsa Race Massacre. Most important when celebrating the “Rhapsody” centennial is to be clear that composer and conductor James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra were the first band to play early jazz at Carnegie Hall in 1912, more than a decade before the Paul Whiteman and Gershwin concert at Aeolian Hall.
Over the years, some have accused Gershwin of appropriating Black music, but given his playing style it lacked the fundamental base of syncopated blues and improvisation that Black musicians became known for. At best, he was incorporating their sounds into his repertoire. Paul Whiteman, who promoted the concert as a way to “make a lady out of jazz” was the problem. For me he was anointed “King of Jazz” because he white-washed the new music being called jazz, similar to what Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell did to rock & roll. Seriously, “King of Jazz” in the era of Duke Ellington! This demonstrates that “the melting pot and musical KKkleidoscope” was riddled with holes of political racism. Regardless, “Rhapsody in Blue” is a beautiful composition. It sings the song of where America should aspire to be!
100 years later, pianist Lara Downes reimagines Gershwin’s masterpiece “Rhapsody in Blue” to reflect on a century of immigration and transformation, commissioning a new arrangement by the Puerto Rican composer Edmar Colón, recorded with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra and led by conductor Edwin Outwater. A global digital ESP of “Rhapsody in Blue Reimagined” was released earlier this month on the Pentatone label.
Colón’s arrangement, almost 10 minutes longer than the original, pays homage to a century of immigration shaping American music. Downes’s music is a moving journey of fresh riveting sounds, an integration of Afro Caribbean instruments like the baka, shekere, bongo, and congo drums, and rhythms that symbolize the lasting influence of enslaved Africans on Afro Caribbean music and Latin jazz. The subsequent arrivals from Central and South America, Asia, the Middle East are all represented in moments of enchanting colors that greatly expand Gershwin’s soundscape to reflect the ever-changing sounds of American life. A passage towards the end features Chinese instruments, a representation of San Francisco’s Chinese community (where the piece was first performed). As this new version of Rhapsody is performed, this section changes to reflect the location and the influence that immigrant groups have had on that city. “I wanted to preserve the structure of the piece and piano parts and we expanded on the orchestration.” said Downes. As opposed to the clarinet being highlighted, in this reimagining, the soprano saxophone adds a more intriguing sound.
Downes explores her own family’s immigration years ago along with the era’s social shifts. Shortly after the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the U.S. passed an immigration act aiming to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” and prevent “a stream of alien blood.”. Coincidentally, this inadvertently paved a path for arrivals from the British West Indies, including Downes’s own grandfather, who moved from Jamaica to Harlem in that same year.
Downes, as her “Rhapsody in Blue Reimagined” suggests, is a classical music instigator pushing the music forward with great gusto. In an effort to compensate for the classical music industry’s continued lack of diversity in its programming and personnel, the pianist launched her record label Rising Sun Music that aims to go beyond the newly heightened awareness around social change in classical music.
Drawing from her Black and European heritage, she wants Rising Sun Music to celebrate Black excellence and those classical musicians who weren’t published and rarely performed. “Music by black composers just wasn’t available,” she noted.
Her 10th album, “America Again,” was inspired by Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem, “Let America Be America Again,” and what she describes as “the long and complicated history of race in America.”
Honored as 2022 Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today, she is the creator and host of the NPR video series “Amplify with Lara Downes,” that featured conversations with such eclectic musicians as Gerald Clayton, Terence Blanchard, Robert Glasper, Rhiannon Giddens, Samara Joy, and Allison Russell. She also hosts a classical music show on the Los Angeles FM radio station KUSC.
“Rhapsody in Blue Reimagined” will also be included on a forthcoming full album entitled “This Land,” a reflection on diverse American journeys that features works by Arturo O’Farrill, Kian Ravaei, and Margaret Bonds (Pentatone, Fall 2024).
The book for this week is “The Autobiography of Randy Weston: African Rhythms Composed” by Randy Weston and arranged by Willard Jenkins (Duke University Press 2010), which helps contextualize the true roots of jazz, the importance of this music, and the significant role Weston played in it from Brooklyn to Africa.
The album of the week is Randy Weston’s “The Spirit of Our Ancestors” (Verve 1991).
Weston’s music is a lyrical journey, a percussive piano experience that only Weston can play—the African rhythms, the jazzy melodies, and enticing harmonies. As he would say “all inspired by the ancestors.”
Note: As you may have noticed, my byline now carries my full name…just thought at this date that my parents would have loved to see the name they gave me in print.