Gershwin Goes Surfing

In August of this year, Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson released Brian Wilson Re-Imagines Gershwin, a tribute album to a number of George Gershwin’s most popular songs.   In a press release announcing a public performance of the new album, Wilson noted, “Along with Irving Berlin, Gershwin basically invented the popular song, but he did something more. He had a gift for melody that nobody has ever equaled, yet his music is timeless and always accessible. This is the most spiritual project I’ve ever worked on.”   For some Gershwin fans, the very idea that a former Beach Boy would dabble into the art of Gershwin is almost blasphemous.   After listening to the album, after recognizing Wilson’s own brilliance, and realizing that Gershwin himself was fusing together sounds, I find myself riveted and moved.   The album is genius, and allows Gershwin’s music to live on. 

This is not the first attempt to revive the Gershwin legend.   In 1993, Nonesuch Records—a budget classical label founded in 1964 as an offshoot of Elektra—released an album entitled Gershwin Plays Gershwin to great fanfare.   The album—through the incredulous work of Gershwin scholar Artis Wodehose—translated piano rolls created by the Jewish composer between 1916 and 1927 into an attempted reproduction of the composer’s actual playing style.   While the roles—perforated sheets of paper that captured the notes played by Gershwin for use in early player pianos—sat in isolation for years, new technology enabled musical engineers to recreate them in a new and seemingly authentic form.  In the wake of the album’s release, various concerts were held where a lone piano would sit on stage, with keys magically moving and a live human orchestra and/or vocalist in accompaniment.     For Gershwin’s most avid fans, these live performances were as if the spirit of George Gershwin was brought back to the stage.

Popular as it was, the album and the ensuing interest in utilizing player pianos during live performances led to rather intense debates.   Especially because the pianolo—the first popularized version of the player piano—was not able to capture the complex dynamics of any particular performance, critics began questioning the true authenticity of the new sound.   Many argued that the very manipulation of the rolls—which occurred during original composition and with Wodehouse’s work—degraded its authenticity.

Ironically, the search for the true Gershwin tended to ignore the fact that Gershwin himself—like most composers of his generation and beyond—were themselves great manipulators of music.   Gershwin took music from his own Jewish background, from African-American blues-makers, from the rag-time innovators and a variety of other popular mediums to create a unique new sound that captured America’s attention at a time of great interest in ethnic and cultural fusion.   The new piano rolls were yet another example of taking music and reformulating it for a new audience.   While they aimed to bring Gershwin back in an authentic form, their power was founded in the efforts of those who worked on re-creating them.

In many respects, this is what makes popular music so attractive to audiences.  Through the blending of various musical styles and through technology’s ongoing ability to transform sound, popular composers and musicians have continually reached out to a wide selection of the American public, who hear sounds that are both familiar and foreign coming together in a unique and exciting form.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was a later example of an artist utilizing such musical and technological integration.   Popularized by its association with the early sixties surf fad, early Beach Boys music—first recorded in Brian’s bedroom—was a derivation of doo-wop harmonies from fifties quartets, simple orchestral melodies from blues-men such as Johnny Otis and modern multi-track recording.   Although the lyrics of such songs dealt with the contemporary teenage beach interest, the music was the very same kind of synthesis of styles that had launched so many other careers, including that of George Gershwin.  As Wilson was plagued by substance abuse and depression, his music continued to evolve.   He later became close with Wall of Sound creator Phil Spector, who transformed early sixties pop and Wilson’s later work by layering it with countless instruments and vocals.

For Gershwin purists who still dream of bringing the composer back, Brian Wilson’s latest experiment Brian Wilson Re-Imagines Gershwin can seem almost blasphemous.   The opening interpretation of Rhapsody in Blue is void of the original’s memorable clarinet solo and uses Wilson’s lush vocal harmonies as its dominating theme.    It Ain’t Necessarily So, the sixth track on the album—originally used as both a challenge to and an appreciation of the myths of religion—includes a chorus that is musically poles apart from any Gershwin composition.   Yet the differences between the originals and Wilson’s new versions are ultimately what make the album so rewarding.   Although the listener can still hear vestiges of Gershwin’s melodies and lyrics, they are re-contextualized in a sea of vocal harmonies, catchy melodic re-interpretations and evocative instrumentals.    In fact, the most disappointing songs on the album—I’ve Got Rhythm and You’re Wonderful—bear that disappointment largely because there is little new to appreciate.

Being a diaspora people has meant that Jewish musicians have constantly relied on the diverse musical styles of their changing homes.    The liturgical music of Jewish synagogues is so often representative of the infusion of the evolving musical styles of the worlds in which Jews have lived.   While the majestic music of 19^th century cantorial composer Sulzer derives from Germany’s thriving classical period, the tribal and repetitive music of the contemporary composer Shlomo Carlebach bears Middle Eastern influence. 

The diverse array of sounds that flow throughout many a synagogue is what led early Tin Pan Alley producers to search the synagogues of the Lower East Side, seeking talent and new musical ideas.   These producers understood that Jewish music was full of promise, because it followed the basic premise of the ongoing human journey.   Our past becomes entangles with our present, and is continually renewed, reworked and remade.    It becomes a meaningful part of our daily lives because the original remains amiable to the work of our hands.

Throughout rabbinic texts, there are tales of ancient patriarchs being thrown into contemporary situations.   In one particular midrash, Moses—who cannot be seen—finds himself listening to a rabbinic dialogue that he does not understand.   When a student asks the rabbis where the knowledge comes from, they answer, “From Moses, our teacher.”    It is at this moment that the reader recognizes the beauty of human evolution.    We are the bearers of the past, using it as a way to explore the present and to make sense of our ever-changing lives.    Our musical past in particular is constantly revisiting us, and being infused with new meaning.  Although the original composers might find themselves bewildered (as many parents were when their children starting listening to Rock and Roll), the new music is built upon the drama of the old and simply re-imagining it to ensure that it continues to reach the hearts and minds of the new generation.

This is why Brian Wilson’s new album Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin is such an important and moving album.   It repackages the past in a way that keeps it alive and vibrant.

Rabbi Brian Leiken is the Assistant Rabbi at Temple Shalom in Norwalk, CT.   Over the past five years, Rabbi Leiken has been speaking and studying the role of Jews in the popular music industry with an emphasis on the rise of Rock and Roll.   He collaborated with photographer Janet Macoska on an exhibit and coffee table book entitled Jews Rock.