Three Gershwin Compilations Released for His 1999 Centennial

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I played through three compilations of jazz versions of George Gershwin songs, including Blue Gershwin – a Blue Note anthology of jazz versions of Gershwin that I bought on cassette and later dubbed to CD along with a scan of the original j-card I used as a cover, along with Rhapsody in Blue and a separate CD of great jazz singers doing Gershwin, which I think was part of the same series as the CD I got of the great jazz singers doing Hoagy Carmichael. The Rhapsody in Blue CD duplicated two of the same tracks as Blue Gershwin, one great – Thelonious Monk’s marvelous 1947 trio recording of “Nice Work If You Can Get It” – and one terrible, “I Got Rhythm” as rearranged into somnolent boredom by pianists Bill Evans and Bob Brookmeyer. Brookmeyer was usually a valve trombonist, and he and Evans playing a piano duet systematically drained this song of everything that makes it great: rhythmic snap, phrasing, texture, whatever. When I first heard this version of “I Got Rhythm” I wondered why it had been included on Blue Gershwin – “Surely,” I thought, “the Blue Note catalogue must have had a better version of ‘I Got Rhythm’ than this!” – and its repetition on the Rhapsody in Blue CD is even more inexplicable.

The Rhapsody in Blue CD began with a recording of the title piece by the Billy May Orchestra – actually a studio band he assembled to make 10-inch LP’s for Capitol with titles like Big Band Bash! The exclamat21 seconds (remember that Leonard Bernstein said you could cut just about anything out of Rhapsody in Blue and do nothing to the work except make it shorter – though given how terrible Bernstein’s own recording of this piece is, it’s arguable he never really understood it) and a really nice arrangement of the Piano Prelude No. 2 (the slow, bluesy one) credited to flutist Bud Shank but also featuring acoustic guitarist Laurindo Almeida. Then we get to the meat of the collection: the jazz versions of Gershwin’s songs – plus one ringer: the familiar “I Can’t Get Started,” with lyrics by Ira Gershwin but music by Vernon Duke, here credited to pianist John Lewis with his Modern Jazz Quartet comrade Percy Heath on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums; Ira and Duke collaborated on this song and others for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 revue – produced by Ziegfeld’s widow, Billie Burke, in association with the Shubert brothers, Ziegfeld’s hated rivals, four years after Ziegfeld’s death. So it was not surprising that Vernon Duke got the job to complete the score for The Goldwyn Follies, another revue-type show George Gershwin had been working on when he died.

Actually only four of the original 18 tracks were recorded for Blue Note: the others came from the catalogues of Capitol Records and the other labels EMI gobbled up (Pacific Jazz, World Pacific, Liberty, Aladdin, United Artists) before it was itself merged into Universal Music (with their classical catalogue spun off to Warner Music because European Union officials claimed that Universal buying up EMI’s classical catalogue would have given them a virtual monopoly – we haven’t taken antitrust enforcement seriously in this country since Ronald Reagan became President in 1980 and never forgave the U.S. government for having broken up the major studios and thereby ending his film career, but in Europe they still enforce the antitrust laws). We can tell that because so many of the musicians here were based on the West Coast and Blue Note was an East Coast label. Among the standout tracks here are Chet Baker’s “But Not for Me” (I’ve grown to like Baker’s voice over the years even though it was thin, a pale imitation of Mel Tormé), a haunting version of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” by singer Julie London (who was much better as a jazz singer than her middle-of-the-road reputation), a nice, bluesy rendition of “Summertime” by pianist Hank Jones (with brother Elvin on drums), and “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” by the Bill Potts Big Band (also a session group that includes Bill Evans on piano; Art Farmer, Harry “Sweets” Edison and Charlie Shavers on trumpets, Bob Brookmeyer and Jimmy Cleveland on trombones and Phil Woods, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn on reeds; this was one of the many albums of songs from Porgy and Bess to capitalize on the Sam Goldwyn film version of 1958, most notably the masterly one by Miles Davis and Gil Evans).

There are also tracks from the Bob Cooper Octet (“Strike Up the Band”) and “The Man I Love” by a pickup band from Blue Note credited to trumpeter Louis Smith but really a feature for the quite remarkable Sam Jones on bass. After “S’Wonderful” in a version co-starring trumpeter Lee Morgan (at his sweetest) and organist Jimmy Smith (who pioneered the ur-sound of jazz on the electric organ: a Hammond B-3 organ with Leslie speakers that gave the instrument a vibrato), there’s a wonderful version of “Bidin’ My Time” by Nat “King” Cole. His slower than usual and lovingly phrased treatment of this song may not be as we’re used to hearing it, but so what? The song was recorded with Billy May as arranger/conductor in 1963, when years of smoking had already taken a toll on Cole’s voice and given him the lung cancer that would kill him two years later, but once again, so what? Cole’s remarkable instinct for phrasing carries him over May’s typically overwrought arrangement and triumphs.

The remaining songs are “Someone to Watch Over Me” from the sextet Coleman Hawkins led in Los Angeles in 1945; Hawkins had started his career in the early 1920’s but, unlike most musicians of his generation, he not only praised bebop, he played it! Also on the album are “Do It Again” by singer Nancy Wilson (when I was growing up in the 1960’s I couldn’t stand her mannerisms – I called her “Nancy Echh” – but her voice started to grow on me when I heard her cover of “Ode to Billie Joe” and now I like her even though she was hardly the greatest female jazz singer of her time), “How Long Has This Been Going On?” by tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec (not only a first-rate musician in his own right but the man who talked Blue Note’s founder and CEO, Alfred Lion, into signing Thelonious Monk) with the rather funereal organ of Earl Vandyke; and Art Pepper’s “take” on “Fascinating Rhythm” for Aladdin, one of the many short-lived record labels EMI’s predecessor companies absorbed over the years.

The other CD was rather awkwardly titled The Great Jazz Vocalists Sing the Gershwin Songbook, and it began with the mighty Nat “King” Cole from a 1957 trio session with guitarist John Collins and bassist Charlie Harris doing a brilliantly phrased version of “Embraceable You.” Then I was startled to hear the unmistakable voice of Carmen McRae from 1976 doing “The Man I Love.” I was wondering when McRae had recorded for Capitol, and it turned out she hadn’t: this was a Blue Note recording. Then we got a repeat of Chet Baker’s “But Not for Me” from the Rhapsody in Blue CD, and after that the first of a couple of songs by Sarah Vaughan, “I Got Rhythm.” Sassy’s other contribution here (she’s the only singer represented by more than one song) is the intriguing novelty “Blah Blah Blah,” written by George and Ira Gershwin in 1931 for their first film score, Delicious. It was at a time when Ira in particular was upset that lyrics he’d written in the hope no one would copy them were beng copied right and left; in “S’Wonderful” he had come up with the line, “You’ve made my life so glamorous/You can’t blame me for feeling amorous.” He thought he was being quite creative getting the rhyme “glamorous” and “amorous” into a song; the next thing he knew so many other songwriters had copied it that “glamorous/amorous” had become as hackneyed as “moon/June.” So the Gershwins wrote a song called “Blah Blah Blah” in which the lyric was a spoof of the way lazier songwriters wrote the most hackneyed rhymes imaginable and filled them out with nonsense syllables until they could work out the rest: “Blah blah blah blah moon/Blah blah blah above/Blah blah blah blah June/Blah blah blah blah love.” To my knowledge Sarah Vaughan is the only singer who ever recorded this song out of context – and she did it at least twice, first on her Gershwin songbook album on Mercury (which wanted to compete with Ella Fitzgerald’s Gershwin songbook album on Verve) and then this version on Roulette.

Then we get Annie Ross – the marvelous “vocalese” singer who did a great adaptation of Wardell Gray’s “Twisted” that was later covered by Joni Mitchell (to less effect) – showing with “I Was Doing All Right,” one of the last songs Gershwin wrote (the script for The Goldwyn Follies hadn’t been set yet but George and Ira both knew the formulae well enough that the film’s plot would feature somebody in love with somebody else, so they wrote generic love songs like this one, “Love Walked In” and George Gershwin’s last song, “Love Is Here to Stay” – the verse was supplied by Vernon Duke after George’s death and the clash between the rather staid verse and the artful refrain is the difference between talent and genius), that she could handle a normal version of a song as well as she did vocalese. Nancy Wilson does “Someone to Watch Over Me” at the height of her rather affected style (she’s backed by a full orchestra here, not a jazz combo as on “Do It Again” from Rhapsody in Blue, and the orchestra brings out the worst in her). There’s a nice “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” from June Christy (the ex-Stan Kenton ballad singer who became a solo star in the 1950’s; one of her albums was called The Misty Miss Christy, and that’s a good description of her voice). The definitive versions of this song are by Billie Holiday (her two 1937 versions, the studio one with Buster Bailey’s sensuous clarinet and the live aircheck with Count Basie), Fred Astaire (for whom the Gershwins wrote the song, from the 1937 musical Shall We Dance) and Frank Sinatra (shortly before Sinatra died writer Bill Zehme published a tribute book about him and gave it the title The Way You Wear Your Hat, after the first line of this song), but Christy’s version is estimable and worth hearing.

Beverly Kenney, who just made it to my attention when her rendition of “It’s a Most Unusual Day” was featured in a commercial, does a quite remarkable version of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” mostly backed only by conga drums. After a dull version of “They All Laughed” by David Allen, there comes “Do Do Do” by a great male singer, Mel Tormé. Then we get “Aren’t You Kind of Glad We Did?,” lovingly caressed by Peggy Lee; this song was from the Gershwins’ posthumous score for the 1946 film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, written nine years after George Gershwin died. What actually happened was that Ira Gershwin and George’s musical director, Kay Swift, went through his surviving notebooks looking for scraps they could turn into full-fledged songs. Then Dakota Staton does a ballsy version of “A Foggy Day” (good, though if you want to hear this song in that style the nearly forgotten Margie Anderson did it even better), and Johnny Hartman does an O.K. rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” (Hartman’s glory session was the album he recorded with John Coltrane in 1962, five years after he made this selection – and one wishes he could have had Trane’s austerity behind him instead of Rudy Traylor’s big band.)

Abbey Lincoln does “Love Walked In,” but once again she’s done in by an overwrought orchestration; jazz great Benny Carter is credited but, though he did some great arrangements on other occasions (most notably Ray Charles’ 1963 recording of Leroy Carr’s blues classic “In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down”), here he drowns this sporadically interesting singer in the usual treacle. The final song on the collection is “Summertime” by Nina Simone, who has a long set of choruses as a piano soloist before she opens her mouth, and backed only by Jimmy Boyd on bass and Albert “Tootie” Heath (brother of saxophonist Jimmy and bassist Percy) on drums, she gives us quite a remarkable rendition of this song that reflects its mood as the opening number of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess but also ties in with the rest of the opera’s plot and in particular with the song “I Loves You, Porgy”, which had been Simone’s first big hit.