 |
 |  |  | | | | Track Listings | | | Manhattan Impressions: Homage to Gershwin (Pizer -1993) | | | 1 Promenade | 4:19 | | 2 Summer Haze | 2:12 | | 3 I Wouldn’t Trade You for the World | 1:54 | | 4 Nightlife in New York | 1:47 | | 5 Rosa’s Rhapsody: A tribute to Rosa Parks† (Schwarz -1993) | 7:09 | | 6 Chroma (Sladek -1993) | 8:38 | | 7 Patriotic Variations (McKinley -1994) | 6:56 | | Concerto for Jazz Piano and Orchestra (Hampton -1994) | | | 8 Urbanoia | 8:14 | | 9 Longing | 7:02 | | 10 Stride | 5:50 | | Total time: | 54:38 |
| | | | | |
| | | | | | American Legacy | | | Our Price: $9.95  | | | | Item Number: MMC2032 | | Audio Format: DDD | | Genres: Orchestral\Popular | | | | Description | | Excerpt from the Liner Notes (by Fred Bouchard)
George Gershwin has kept his velvet grip on the popular musical imagination of Americans for the last two-thirds of the century. His vast songbook has seeped, chapter and verse, into the consciousness of a country where the best love songs have a sophisticated romanticism and their settings an urban intensity. His musicals find constant revivals as working art, not period pieces. His symphonic literature, while small and formally derivative, retains distinctive flavors of the Gotham high life during the jazz age that he himself experienced to the full over his brief life and phosphorescent career.
There’s no need to wait until the centennial of his birth (Brooklyn, NY, September 26, 1898) to hear ongoing reassessments of Gershwin’s power and litanies of composers swayed by his genius. In this, MMC’s most recent anthology of new orchestral works, one or more of the composers utilize:
1. Gershwin’s thematic material, directly or obliquely: Rhapsody In Blue, Fascinatin’ Rhythm (Hampton), Of Thee I Sing (McKinley).
2. “Gershwinesque” orchestral techniques: broadly phrased, expansive melody; urban ambient sounds (rattles, horns, tintinnabula).
3. Harmony and scales, especially those of French impressionists, that influenced Gershwin.
4. Jazz elements: blues scales, “Negro” melodies, syncopated rhythms, instrumental innovations (wah-wah trumpet, clarinet smears.)
5. Habañera, tango and other Latin rhythms associated with New Orleans and Harlem.
6. Piano and trumpet as prime solo or color instruments.
Though all the composers tip their hats to Gershwin to some degree, they’re by no means spin-offs or copy-cats. Indeed, Gershwin’s influence–like Stravinsky’s on Europeans and, later, Americans–may be so imbedded in the American grain as to be practically unavoidable. These men are not content to “let George do it!” As Charles Pizer says, “It’s a big lake, and each man fishes in his own waters.” |
| | | |
|
