Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I played for my husband Charles and I a recording of the complete score for the 1930 George and Ira Gershwin stage musical Girl Crazy, a simple tale of a young rich scapegrace named Danny Churchill whose dad ships him off to a ranch in Arizona to make a man of him. While there, he falls in love with the local postmaster, Molly Gray. Predictably, she has no interest or desire in him at first, but he gradually wears down her resistance. There are also several supporting cast members, including a man named Sam whom Danny knew in New York and whom Molly uses to date in order to make Danny jealous. The original Broadway cast featured Allan Kearns as Danny, Ginger Rogers as Molly, and Ethel Merman as local girl Katie, who stopped the show with the score’s big hit, “I Got Rhythm.” (For the Columbia compilation CD From Gershwin’s Time, released in 1999 to commemorate the centennial of George Ge...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The last thing my husband Charles and I istened to was the extraordinary but also frustrating 1960 album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, an awkward title forced on Roach because two years earlier Sonny Rollins had recorded an instrumental album called Freedom Suite on which Roach had played as a sideman. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite was among the first records n which major jazz musicians addressed the nascent civil-rights movement of Black Americans – though as early as the 1930’s musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday had written, played and/or sung songs dealing with racial intolerance. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite opens with its most powerful track, “Driva Man” (“driva” as in “slavedriver,” the man at the otner end of the whip used to beat recalcitrant slaves and bludgeon them into submission), with a powerful vocal by Lincoln (her last name is all too appropriate here!) and a scorch...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved In lieu of watcvhing one or more Lifetime movies – wth the holidays over they’re back to doing the usual “pussies in peril” crap but I wanted lighter fare – I was inspired to dig out the 1980’s recordings of the complete scores of the George and Ira Gershwin musicals Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let “Em Eat Cake (1933). Of Thee I Sing was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize for best play – the first time it was given for a musical, though since the Pulitzers didn’t give a prize for music for another decade the prizes went to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the book and Ira Gershwin for the lyrics, but not to brother George even though the score is among the Gershwins’ best. > Of Thee I Sing concerns the Presidential candidacy of John P. Wintergreen, whose campaign song featires the refrain, “He’s the man the people choose/Loves the Irish and the Jews.” (One wonders about that line...