Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Historical Context
- Part II Profiles of the Music
- Part III Influence and Reception
- 12 The Coverage of Gershwin in Music History Texts
- 13 When Ella Fitzgerald Sang Gershwin
- 14 The Afterlife of Rhapsody in Blue
- 15 Broadway’s “New” Gershwin Musicals: Romance, Jazz, and the Ghost of Fred Astaire
- 16 Gershwin and Instrumental Jazz
- Epilogue: The Gershwin I Knew, and the Gershwin I Know
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
16 - Gershwin and Instrumental Jazz
from Part III - Influence and Reception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2019
- The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Historical Context
- Part II Profiles of the Music
- Part III Influence and Reception
- 12 The Coverage of Gershwin in Music History Texts
- 13 When Ella Fitzgerald Sang Gershwin
- 14 The Afterlife of Rhapsody in Blue
- 15 Broadway’s “New” Gershwin Musicals: Romance, Jazz, and the Ghost of Fred Astaire
- 16 Gershwin and Instrumental Jazz
- Epilogue: The Gershwin I Knew, and the Gershwin I Know
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Summary
More than eight decades after his death, George Gershwin remains an outsize figure in the story of instrumental jazz. “I Got Rhythm” (1930), a popular hit from the musical Girl Crazy, provided an essential template over which swing musicians such as Lester Young etched free-wheeling improvisations during the 1930s. “I Got Rhythm” continued its prominence in the 1940s, when its melody and harmonies were reworked by the likes of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. Over time, musicians streamlined Gershwin’s original composition into a standard form known as “rhythm changes.” This thirty-two-bar, AABA chord progression became a template to rival the twelve-bar blues as a jam-session cornerstone. In the 1950s, Gershwin’s compositions spurred explorations of modal jazz, as on Miles Davis’s and Gil Evans’s album-length reinterpretation of the opera Porgy and Bess (1958).
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- The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin , pp. 275 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019