In the last century, George Gershwin and his works have become as American as apple pie.  Even though he was already a prolific pianist in New York at this time, he released his first published work: “When You Want ’Em You Can’t Get ’Em” in 1916.  Following this release, he began to enter the Broadway scene, writing for many shows from 1920-24.  His most famous work, Rhapsody in Blue, which many still consider jazz today, was partially unfinished when he premiered in February of 1924. Consequently, Gershwin improvised much of the piano solo during the performance, and conductor Paul Whiteman had to rely on a nod from Gershwin to cue the orchestra at the end of the solo¹.

Jazz’s cultural position in the early 1920s was in constant flux.  Its naysayers argued that it was a temporary fad with no real compositional basis, while others argued that it was the future of America’s musical identity.  In his 1926 article in Singing magazine, George Gershwin posits a refreshing view of the genre where he answers the question “Does Jazz Belong to Art”² with a surprising amount of foresight.  He opens his article by declaring “No student…can afford any longer to ignore jazz music or to sniff at it as a thing of low estate and of negative cultural value” (Wyatt 94).  Despite how it may sound, Gershwin wasn’t interested in being the face of jazz advocacy, more so he wanted American listeners to understand the genre as American.  He desired to jazz to be studied not as only popular music, but as a serious art music genre.  In an editorial found in Musical America, a writer argued that jazz’s ” natural place is scarcely in the concert room…”³, but today’s Jazz at Lincoln Center would beg to differ.

But if you take the best of our modern serious jazz music and study it, you can come to only one conclusion-that it is, in the words of Madame d’Alvarez: “America’s greatest contribution to the musical art.” – George Gershwin (Wyatt 95)

Gershwin would attribute the attitude in the aforementioned editorial as troglodytic; shunning the new and worshipping the old.  At the time, jazz was a burgeoning genre that was shunned in part due to racism, but also due to a desperate desire to preserve the status quo.  As Gershwin highlights in his correspondence, many of those that condemned jazz hardly knew anything about the genre: “To condemn jazz, for example, because there is much bad jazz in the world, is as absurd as to condemn all music because bad music exists” (Wyatt 95).  There is much jazz in the world.  “Jazz is simple, complex, relaxed, and intense.  There is a style of jazz which sounds like European classical music…there is a style of jazz that sounds like Latin American Music…there is a style of jazz which sounds like East Indian classical music” (Taylor 21)⁴.  There are styles of jazz which sound like various other kinds of music heard in this country and elsewhere in the world.  Gershwin believed that Jazz at its best provides a new field of mastery for classically trained musicians.  Its intense rhythmic focus, along with an emphasis on improvisation provides any classical musician with valuable skills that will only supplement their technique.