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Posts tagged ‘Paul Whiteman’

Apr 8

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The music of Gatsby

The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

Coinciding with the first publication of The Great Gatsby a hundred years ago (April 10, 1925), a new musical version of F. Scott Fizgerald’s masterpiece opens shortly in the West End of London. The trailer for this latest iteration of Gatsby makes it look like an all-singing, all-dancing, good-time entertainment. It would be unfair to prejudge, but the songs by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen certainly sound as though they adhere to the Rice/Lloyd-Webber template for modern musical theatre.

Not much room there, one imagines, for the darker undertones beneath the careless rapture, for the portrayal of the corruption of extreme wealth (and the swipe at racism) that gave Fitzgerald’s narrative a resonance which has kept it alive in the minds of its readers for a hundred years.

The musical aspect of the original novel is hardly its most significant feature, but it does provide the story with an intermittently intriguing soundtrack. Early on, for instance, there’s a band at Jay Gatsby’s house playing something he describes as “yellow cocktail music” — and even though you may not be able to define it, you know exactly how it might sound. And that “stiff, tinny drip”: I can’t hear a banjo in a band playing early jazz without those words — as good as Whitney Balliett or Philip Larkin — coming to mind.

At another of Gatsby’s summer parties on his estate, where “in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” is something titled “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. A composition on a grand scale, we’re told that it was first performed at Carnegie Hall, where it created a sensation. Now it’s delivered on the lawn to Gatsby’s guests by an orchestra that was “no five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.”

Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, doesn’t tell us what Mr Tostoff’s work actually sounds like, at least not in the final published version. In a passage Fitzgerald deleted from a draft manuscript, Nick describes it as “starting with a weird spinning sound, mostly from the cornets. Then there would be a series of interruptive notes which coloured everything that came after them, until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed outside. But just as you’d get used to the new discord one of the old themes would drop back in, this time as a discord, until you’d get a weird sense that it was a preposterous cycle, after all. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head — whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.”

The year before the book appeared, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” had received its première at the Aeolian Hall in New York, performed by the 23-piece Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with the composer at the piano. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were living in Great Neck, Long Island at the time. Whiteman had commissioned the piece, orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, for a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music”. It’s what I imagine Tostoff’s music must have resembled.

A few chapters later there’s also young Ewing Klipspringer, Gatsby’s house guest, roused from his sleep one afternoon and reluctantly acceding to his host’s request to play the piano, despite claiming to be out of practice. He responds with “The Love Nest”, a song by Louis A. Hirsch and Otto Harbach from a 1920 George M. Cohan musical titled Mary, while thunder rumbles and summer rain falls outside on Long Island Sound.

Three years after The Great Gatsby‘s publication, Paul Whiteman would assemble his orchestra in New York to record an arrangement of “The Love Nest”. It’s nothing special until, just before the end, Bix Beiderbecke steps forward for a sublime eight-bar cornet solo that perfectly evokes what we imagine to be the spirit of the Jazz Age.

Finally, when Daisy Fay is enjoying the social life of Louisville, Kentucky while Gatsby, her besotted swain, is making his way back from army service in the Great War, she is “young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dusk.” Written by W. C. Handy in 1917, the song was a hit in 1921 for Marion Harris, who recorded many blues songs and was perhaps the first white female vocalist to achieve success by imitating (rather than caricaturing) the style of black singers.

In a wonderful piece for the FT at the weekend, seeking Gatsby‘s echoes in our present condition, the author Sarah Churchwell concluded that the book “anticipates precisely the kind of society that would find Trumpism appealing: a culture losing its imaginative capacity, surrendering its ideals… The Great Gatsby captures a truth that repeats across generations: the powerful consolidate their control even as the dream of something better gleams ahead. Again and again, those with wealth and privilege fortify themselves against the possibility of a more just or democratic world, transforming progress into another cycle of entrenched power.”

Oh, well. Roll over, Vladmir Tostoff, and tell George Gershwin the news.

* The passage of musical description deleted from a draft of Gatsby is quoted from Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1981.

Feb 13

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‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

The first public performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was given 100 years ago this week, on 12 February 1924, at the Aeolian Hall on West 43rd Street in New York City, by Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra, with Gershwin himself at the piano. Whiteman had commissioned the piece from its composer specially for the evening, which was billed as ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’.

I first heard “Rhapsody in Blue” in childhood, played by the same Whiteman/Gershwin combination, on the 12-inch 78rpm record you see above, which my mother would have bought from a record shop in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in the 1930s. Nine minutes long, it’s split over both sides of the disc. The gramophone — a Columbia Viva-Tonal Grafonola — is the one on which she played it, along with her other 78s.

To mark the centenary, the pianist Ethan Iverson started a lively debate the other day with a piece for the New York Times in which he examined the artistic impact, then and now, of what he called “a naive and corny” attempt to blend the superficial characteristics of jazz with European classical music. If “Rhapsody in Blue” is a masterpiece, he wrote, it’s surely “the worst masterpiece”: an uncomfortable compromise that blocked off the progress of what would later be called the Third Stream, and with which we are both “blessed and stuck”.

Thanks to my mother’s influence, I view it from a slightly different angle. For me, in childhood, it became a gateway drug. I loved the spectacular clarinet introduction, and the shifting melodies and the hints of syncopation, but more than anything I responded to the tonality that reflected its title, expressed in the exotic flattened thirds and sevenths of the blues scale.

It didn’t take very long before I was following a path that led to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, right up to the Vijay Iyers, Matana Robertses and Tyshawn Soreys of today’s jazz. Pretty soon I’d worked out that an ounce of Ellington was worth a ton of Gershwin’s instrumental music*, but I retain a respectful gratitude to “Rhapsody in Blue” and its role as a gateway, just as I do to The Glenn Miller Story and “Take Five”.

A few weeks after the world première Gershwin’s piece, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his young family would set off for France, where he spent the summer knocking the early draft of his third novel into shape. When The Great Gatsby was published the following April, it contained a vivid scene in which the society guests at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties were entertained by a band described by the author as “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and high and low drums.”

The bandleader — who is unnamed, but it’s easy to imagine him as Paul Whiteman, with his tuxedo, bow-tie and little moustache — makes an announcement. “At the request of Mr Gatsby,” he says, “we are going to play for you Mr Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May.” The piece is known, he adds, as “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. I’ve always idly wondered what it would sound like, but I imagine Mr George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, with its bustling bass saxophone eruptions and flamboyantly choked cymbal splashes, is as close as we’ll get.

* A few people have picked me up on this statement, and I tend to agree with them. I was trying to make a specific point, rather clumsily. George Gershwin was a genius songwriter, as any fule kno.

May 5

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Yellow cocktail music

Paul WhitemanWith a handful of phrases in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lets us know that he missed his vocation: he would have made a first-class jazz critic. Consider, for example, his description of the music played by the band during the first of Jay Gatsby’s parties at the mansion on Long Island Sound attended by Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator: “The moon had risen a little higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.” Wow. How many opponents of trad jazz must have wished they’d come up with the lethal precision of that “stiff, tinny drip”?

Even better is this, a couple of pages earlier: “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music…” Yellow cocktail music! Who could not read those words and imagine exactly the sound the author had in mind, or at least its effect?

In Carraway’s words, the orchestra hired to entertain Gatsby’s guests is “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and high and low drums.” Not the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, then, but a more lavish ensemble very much along the lines of the outfit led in the early 1920s by Paul Whiteman, the pioneer of “symphonic jazz”.

The resemblance becomes even more marked when the orchestra leader announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, at the request of Mr Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much admiration at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” The piece, he continued, was known as “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”.

If we are searching for a real-life inspiration for the fictitious Mr Tostoff, we might alight upon the figure Ferdy Grofé, a pianist and composer who met Whiteman in California in 1919 and worked closely with him until 1933. It was he who orchestrated George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, commissioned by Whiteman, for its concert debut at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924, with Gershwin himself at the piano. I still have my mother’s two-sided 12-inch 78 of their studio recording for the Victor label, released in the UK on His Master’s Voice; you can hear and see a later (and rather differently staged) performance here in an extract from the 1930 film King of Jazz.

Fitzgerald began work on Gatsby in 1922 — the year of Gershwin’s one-act opera Blue Monday, which inspired Whiteman to invite him to write a longer work — and made his final revisions in 1925, by which time “symphonic jazz” had become a part of the American music scene. Meanwhile there had been the premiere of Darius Milhaud’s much discussed La Création du Monde, another work which attempted to blend jazz and European classical music. (Milhaud, a French composer who had heard jazz during a visit to Harlem in 1922, later taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, where his pupils included Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach.) Grofé’s Mississippi Suite would come along in 1927, part of a phenomenon that withered in the face of critical disdain but provided a pre-echo of the Third Stream movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Great Gatsby always reminds me of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue: no amount of mishandling can tarnish the essence of a work of 20th century art that comes as close to perfection as makes no difference. So I’m looking forward to Baz Luhrmann’s new film version, released in the UK later this month, with Leonardo di Caprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire as Carraway, and with music by Jay Z, Beyonce, Bryan Ferry and others. After all, Shakespeare survived Luhrmann’s marvellously inventive 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet, with its gun-toting gangbangers and a soundtrack that included Garbage, the Butthole Surfers and Radiohead.

Paul Whiteman, incidentally, earned the undying disrespect of purists who correctly believed he had no right to the absurd “King of Jazz” title (bestowed by a journalist in 1919 but eagerly seized upon as a marketing slogan), at least as long as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and other African American innovators were around. But an unbiased listen to some of his 1920s recordings reveals a man who hired good soloists — including the cornetists Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke and the saxophonists Jimmy Dorsey and Frank Trumbauer — and definitely had some sort of a feeling for jazz.

As for “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”, wouldn’t it be fun if some modern composer with an understanding of the period took it upon himself to imagine the piece into actual life? I’d love to hear it, tinny banjoes and all.

* The photograph of Paul Whiteman’s Ambassador Hotel Orchestra was taken in Atlantic City in 1920; the leader is on the extreme left, a violin under his arm. It is included in the booklet to the CD Paul Whiteman ‘King of Jazz’ 1920-1927, released on the Timeless Historical label.