7
George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" (1930)

Thanks to Ira Gershwin, we know something about the making of the song "I Got Rhythm." The year was 1930, and the Gershwin brothers were at work on the score of Girl Crazy , their next Broadway show. George had presented Ira with the music for the new song, leaving it to him to come up with lyrics. (Ira once wrote about his craft that since most of his lyrics "were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.")^[1] The chorus of the song George gave Ira, based on a syncopated four-note figure (ex. 30), was cast in standard thirty-two-bar AABA form with a two-bar tag.

Ira struggled with the lyric. "Filling in the seventy-three syllables of the refrain wasn't as simple as it sounds," he later recalled. "For over two weeks I kept fooling around with . . . sets of double rhymes for the trios of short two-foot lines," that is, with the rhyme scheme aaab/cccb. Here's Ira's illustration of the kinds of rhymes he first tried to write:

Roly-Poly,
Eating solely
Ravioli,
Better watch your diet or bust.
Lunch or dinner,
You're a sinner.
Please get thinner.
Losing all that fat is a must.

Yet, no matter what series of double rhymes . . . I tried, the results were not quite satisfactory; they . . . [gave a] jingly

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Example 30.
George Gershwin, "I Got Rhythm," chorus, melody only, 
bars 1-8 (Girl Crazy [1930])

Example 31.
George Gershwin, "I Got Rhythm" (Ira Gershwin),
 chorus, melody with words, bars 1-8

Mother Goose quality to a tune which should throw its weight around more.

Ira solved his problem only after he began to try nonrhyming lines. "This approach felt stronger," he recalled, "and finally I arrived at the present refrain (the rhymed verse came later), with only 'more—door' and 'mind him—find him' [as] the rhymes. Though there is nothing remarkable about all this, it was a bit daring for me who usually depended on rhyme insurance." Ira also explained that he did not write "I've got rhythm" but borrowed the verb's "most colloquial form,"

the one used for the present tense instead of "have," and the one going back to my childhood: e.g., "I got a toothache" didn't mean "I had a toothache," but only "I have" one. . .. Obviously, I've got nothing against "I've got" since the verse ends with "Look at what I've got." [But] . . . the musically less assertive and regularly rhymed verse seems to require the more conventional phrasing.^[2]

In the finished song, Ira used the four-note figure to list life's valued possessions (ex. 31).

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Girl Crazy opened on 14 October 1930.^[3] It told the story of a collection of New Yorkers and San Franciscans, transplanted to the one-horse town of Custerville, Arizona, who succeed in bringing high city life with them, including a bevy of Broadway beauties.^[4] The part of "Frisco" Kate Fothergill, wife of a gambling-room manager, was given to a newcomer, the twenty-one-year-old Ethel Merman, and it was she who introduced "I Got Rhythm" to the public. Although Merman's performance was a high point in the show, she didn't record the song until much later in her career. In a spoken introduction to a commemorative recording, Merman told the story of "I Got Rhythm" and her debut as a Broadway star.

Once upon a time, back in 1930, I stepped out on stage at the Alvin Theater in New York, got hit in the kisser with a big spotlight, and found myself in big-time show business.^[5] It was in a thing called Girl Crazy , which boasted Ginger Rogers, Willie Howard, and the DeMarcos,^[6] and a great score by George Gershwin. One of the songs I did that memorable night was "I Got Rhythm." And as I riveted the second chorus I held on to a high C like it was from Tiffany's, and the last one in the world.^[7] Anyway, it was a show-stopper. It sort of launched me on my way, so I guess you can't blow the whistle on me for saying it's one of my special favorites. It goes like this. And brother, how it goes!^[8]

When Merman published her autobiography in 1955, it was called Who Could Ask for Anything More?

The projection and energy of Ethel Merman's performance was not the only reason "I Got Rhythm" proved a show-stopper in Girl Crazy . For in the Broadway theater of that day, it was customary to turn the pit orchestra loose with hot "ride-out" choruses at the ends of peppy, up-tempo numbers like this one. Among the members of the band that played at the Alvin Theater during the show's run were musicians who must have waited eagerly for such moments and made the most of them when they arrived. The band had been formed by Red Nichols, a twenty-five-year-old cornetist who had already gained a reputation in jazz circles for recordings with the group Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. It also included several others who were soon to make their mark in the world of swing: reedman Benny Goodman (age twenty-one), drummer Gene

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Krupa (twenty-one), trombonist Glenn Miller (twenty-six), and trumpeter Charlie Teagarden (seventeen).^[9] Because Goodman, Krupa, and Merman stayed before the public for many years, they may now be remembered as grandparently figures. It's well to recall how young and close to the beginnings of their careers they were when they first performed "I Got Rhythm"—a fresh new tune by a songwriter not much older than they were.

As noted in earlier chapters, from the time of the eighteenth century, with a composer like Alexander Reinagle, through the nineteenth, with Foster, Root, and others, and on into the early twentieth, American popular music circulated chiefly as sheet music designed for home performers. But in 1920 a printer's strike and a paper shortage caused production costs to triple,^[10] and almost overnight the phonograph recording replaced sheet music as the chief means of popular music's circulation.^[11] Numbers tell the story. During one seventy-five-week period beginning in 1922, a song by Irving Berlin, "Say It with Music," sold 375,000 printed copies—a healthy amount but barely a tenth as large as the 3.5 million sold by Ray Egan and Richard Whiting's "Till We Meet Again" in just a few months of 1918. Berlin's "Say It with Music" was nevertheless a hit. By what measure? By its sale during the same seventy-five weeks of x million records and 100,000 piano rolls.^[12] In 1930, Broadway shows, with their capacity for plugging songs during long runs in New York and through traveling companies, were one of the sheet-music industry's chief moneymaking properties, with publishers investing in shows to obtain the copyrights of their songs.^[13] A Broadway show like Girl Crazy thus aimed at success on two fronts: as an evening's entertainment for an audience in a theater and as a source of songs that could be published, recorded, and marketed individually, regardless of the show's fate.^[14] Thus, as with other Broadway shows of the time, the music publishing and recording industries hovered over the beginning of Girl Crazy in hopes of finding new Gershwin songs they could turn into gold.^[15]

And now a word about the composer.^[16] The career of George Gershwin (1898-1937) as a professional musician began in 1914, when he quit school to work as a song-plugger on New York's Tin Pan Alley. In 1919, he composed his first score for a Broadway show, La, La, Lucille , and the song "Swanee," recorded in 1920, became his first bona fide hit.^[17] In 1924 Gershwin became famous. He did so not by writing successful

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musicals or more hit songs but by composing and performing, with great public fanfare, in a concert organized by dance-orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, a piece recognized instantly as historic. The piece was Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra. Premiered in New York's Aeolian Hall on 12 February, the Rhapsody owed much of its impact to the circumstances in which it was introduced. Whiteman's concert, billed as "An Experiment in Modern Music," had been designed to show that jazz, the new, vivacious, audience-pleasing dance music that most concert musicians and critics of the time associated with poor musicianship, could please cultivated tastes when performed in the "symphonic" arrangements that were the Whiteman band's specialty. And Gershwin's Rhapsody , billed as a "jazz concerto," testified that jazz-based music need not be confined to pieces of pop-tune length. With questions about the identity and destiny of American music very much in the air, with critics like Carl Van Vechten and Gilbert Seldes arguing that the American fine arts of the future would be vitalized through vernacular idioms, and with Whiteman personally inviting prominent classical musicians and New York's leading critics to the performance, the Aeolian Hall concert achieved a sense of occasion.^[18] Gershwin's Rhapsody won the audience's approval and the critics' attention. It also won renown for its composer. No longer simply another talented American songwriter, he was now recognized as a historical figure: the man who brought "jazz" into the concert hall.

After the success of the Rhapsody , Gershwin's life as a composer changed. He continued to write for the musical theater, though at a somewhat slower pace.^[19] But he gave more and more of his energy to concert music; and he continued to study composition, as he had since 1917, his teachers including Edward Kilenyi, Rubin Goldmark, Walling-ford Riegger, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Schillinger. He managed this broadening of his musical activities and interests without sacrificing public appeal or fame. Rather than shrinking from success, Gershwin reveled in it, accepting praise calmly as no more than his due. By 1930, when he wrote Girl Crazy , Gershwin stood unmatched among American composers in his combination of eminence and range, not to mention the power to command resources for anything he decided to compose, and to attract an audience as well.^[20]

"I Got Rhythm" occupied a special place in Gershwin's work. It was the song he himself singled out as best suited for embellished

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instrumental performance. In George Gershwin's Song Book (1932), which contained eighteen Gershwin songs in his own arrangements for piano, "I Got Rhythm" was one of only two songs—"Liza" was the other—for which he supplied two choruses rather than one. In its strict observance of the notated rhythm, Gershwin's arrangement pays tribute to the song's instrumental pedigree. Singers have tended to loosen the declamation to something closer to a half note and quarter note:

. The Song Book version, however, centers on a series of dotted quarter notes in duple time—a standard way of creating instrumental syncopation that dates at least as far back as Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), whose second strain achieves that effect through figuration rather than accented chords.^[21] In 1934, Gershwin returned to "I Got Rhythm," using it as the basis for a set of variations for piano and orchestra. This gave him something new to play along with the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F on a concert tour he took that year with the Leo Reisman Orchestra.^[22] The work contains six character variations in which the tune appears as a hot Broadway number, a waltz, and in other guises as well, including one Gershwin called a "Chinese variation." On his radio show, he told his audience that that variation was inspired by Chinese flutes, "played out of tune, as they always are."

Now let's go back to October 1930. Within ten days of the opening of Girl Crazy on the 14th, three significant recordings of "I Got Rhythm" were made. On the 20th, Freddie Rich, conductor of the CBS Radio Orchestra, recorded it with a group under his own name. On the 23d, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies—all thirteen of them, and including Goodman, Krupa, Miller, and other members of the Girl Crazy pit band, plus vocalist Dick Robertson—made their own version. And on the 24th, one of New York's best black bands, Luis Russell and His Orchestra, recorded another version. Each can be taken to represent the beginning of a different approach to Gershwin's number: (1) "I Got Rhythm" as a song played and sung by popular performers; (2) "I Got Rhythm" as a jazz standard , a piece known and frequently played by musicians, black and white, in the jazz tradition; and (3) "I Got Rhythm" as a musical structure , a harmonic framework upon which jazz instrumentalists, especially blacks, have built new compositions.

Let's begin with the song. I noted Ira Gershwin's struggle to find a rhyme scheme fitting George's tune. But I said nothing about the words

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he finally wrote. William Austin has pointed out that the Gershwin brothers used the word "rhythm" in several of their songs. In 1918 Ira called ragtime "a rhythmic tonic for the chronic blues."^[23] In 1924 he wrote: "Fascinating rhythm, it'll drive me insane";^[24] in 1928, "Listen to the rhythm of my heart beat";^[25] in 1930, "I Got Rhythm"; and in 1937, "Today you can see that the happiest men/All got rhythm."^[26] Austin adds: "I believe the Gershwins are largely responsible for [the word] rhythm entering the vocabularies of millions of people for whom it had previously been too technical."^[27] The two Gershwin songs with "rhythm" in the title are both built on syncopation. "Fascinating Rhythm" from 1924, sung by a character obsessed with an off-center rhythmic pattern, divides its first four bars, in effect, into measures of four, three, five, and four beats. As for "I Got Rhythm," of the seventeen lines in the lyrics of its chorus, thirteen are set to the same four-note figure, a rhythmic cell that hits only one of the four strong beats in the two bars it covers. For Ira Gershwin the lyricist, "rhythm" in this song was tied up with aggressive, accented, syncopated groupings of beats.

But Ira's lyrics are not really about rhythm in the way that those of "Fascinating Rhythm" are. They're an expression of general well-being. Rhythm and music are linked with "daisies in green pastures," with "starlight," "sweet dreams," and being in love. The message here is that "the best things in life are free"—incidentally the title of a hit song from the Broadway show Good News (1927).^[28] Merman's performance was an outpouring of high spirits, saying, most of all, "I feel wonderful! " Her sustained "high C" through the A sections of the second chorus—we can imagine outstretched arms and a multikilowatt smile—is the opposite of a celebration of rhythmic trickiness.

As a show-stopping song and vehicle for a new and vibrant theatrical talent, "I Got Rhythm" could hardly have been more successful. But as a popular song independent of the show, its success was more modest. "I Got Rhythm" called for a kind of vocal energy that few popular singers of Gershwin's day possessed. The first "jazz" recording, made by Freddie Rich with Paul Small as vocalist six days after Girl Crazy opened on Broadway, follows the sheet music straightforwardly and attempts neither to match Merman's exuberant interpretation nor to bring out the snap of Gershwin's syncopation. Its emotional blandness is matched by that of a version recorded the same day by Victor Arden

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and Phil Ohman, a duo-piano team whose orchestras had played in the pit of many Gershwin shows. (Frank Luther sang on this recording.)^[29] A 1938 performance by singer Jane Froman reinstates the full-throated, high-spirited Merman approach with the help of a Schubertian running figure in the violins.^[30] There is a 1943 recording, from a film version of Girl Crazy , in which Judy Garland restores "rhythm" as an issue by conscientiously singing the syncopations that Gershwin wrote.^[31] And when Mary Martin sang "I Got Rhythm" for a reconstruction of the show in the 1950s, the accompaniment in her second chorus was reduced to percussion, supporting the text's first line literally as well as figuratively.^[32]

To these two distinctive approaches to "I Got Rhythm"—the Merman exuberance and the Garland/Martin beat—we can add another that turns the song into a novelty number in a theatrical context far removed from Custerville, Arizona. Vincent Minelli's film, An American in Paris (1951), weaves Gershwin's music into a story of romantic love in the City of Lights. In one scene Gene Kelly, playing a young American, conducts an English lesson on the streets of Paris for a group of French boys. Spoken dialogue leads into the song:

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An antiphonal performance of the chorus of Gershwin's song follows, with students shouting and teacher singing. Armed with their newly learned English phrase, the boys respond individually to Kelly's prompting with eager cries of "I got," often delivered well before the beat. The performance is a reminder that "I Got Rhythm" is a "list song" depending more on incantatory repetition than on rhyme or verbal ingenuity.

(After singing the bridge section, which is free of "I got"s, Kelly asks: Vous comprenez ça? , to which one boy shoots back: Non! )^[33] So the Gershwins' "I Got Rhythm" could be a song about aggressive joyfulness, or syncopated rhythmic drive, or teaching kids how to speak American.^[34]

Now let's consider "I Got Rhythm" as a jazz standard. We've already noted that jazz performers were among those who first played Gershwin's song in public, and Red Nichols's recording shortly after the show's premiere was the first of dozens in the jazz tradition. Table 6 carries a list, taken from Brian Rust's jazz discography.^[35]

In the jazz tradition, we usually speak of tunes, not songs. A jazz tune is defined first and foremost by its structure: by the pattern of

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(table continued on next page)

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(table continued on next page)

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(table continued on next page)

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repetition and contrast in its melodic phrases and the harmonic framework underlying them. Second, it is defined by its ethos: by the mood it projects and the tempo at which it is played. Only third does its melody come into play, for in the jazz tradition the melody is often little more than an entrée into the performance; after being heard, it is usually discarded for free melodic invention by the performers. The chorus of "I Got Rhythm" follows one of the most common Tin Pan Alley song forms: statement, restatement, contrast, and return, with the contrast being called the "bridge" or "release." We could diagram the form as AABA', the first three phrases filling eight bars and the fourth ten, by virtue of the two-bar extension. Gershwin's harmony is as elemental as his melody. The latter is cast in two-bar units, with the four-note syncopated cell moving up, then down, then up again, and then breaking the pattern with a cadence. The harmony supports these gestures with a parallel pattern: three I-ii⁷ -V-I loops followed by a I-V-I cadence.

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Or perhaps it would be better to describe Gershwin's harmonic framework that way, as Gunther Schuller does,^[36] noting that the published song actually employs a more varied and colorful sequence of chords:

B

B

6 | Cm7 F7 | B

6 Edim | Cm7 F7 |

B

B

6 | Cm7 F7 E

m6 | B

F7 | B

C#dim F

Ira Gershwin liked George's tune's ability to "throw its weight around." The "weight" of "I Got Rhythm" as Gershwin wrote it stems partly from tempo and syncopation but perhaps even more from economy of material—from the song's avoidance of tonal complexity or variety. The song's first melodic statement (A) dwells on B-flat; its restatement (A), in what is virtually a note-for-note repetition, does the same; the release (B) jumps to the relative minor, then wends its way back through the circle of fifths; and the return (A¹ ) restates the beginning, again note-for-note, softening the austerity a bit with a concluding tag. The classic simplicity of the song's harmonic design summoned jazz performers' inventiveness, both melodic and harmonic, to a degree matched by only one other structure in the history of jazz: the twelve-bar blues. But even before discussing jazz performances, it is well to recall the impression George Gershwin's music for "I Got Rhythm" made upon Ira Gershwin and Ethel Merman, two people far removed in sensibility from the world of jazz. Ira's response as a lyricist was a list of abrupt, colloquial claims ("I got . . ."); Merman found as a singer that one sustained note could replace the Gershwin brothers' first six bars, to the vast delight of the Girl Crazy audience. Both, in short, discovered in George's music a certain bare, even abstract quality—one that an Alec Wilder might consider as a weakness in a popular song^[37] but that, within the genre of the up-tempo instrumental number, proved astoundingly able to unlock jazz musicians' inventiveness.

From the many available jazz-style performances of "I Got Rhythm," I've chosen three for brief discussion here. The first, from 1937, is played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra (ex. 32). This is Miller's band before it settled into the formulas that were to. make it a huge commercial success; and since Miller had known the tune when it was brand new, his arrangement from seven years later carries special interest. If one accepts

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Example 32.
George Gershwin, "I Got Rhythm," bars 1-8, played by 
Glenn Miller and His Orchestra (9 June 1937, Brunswick 7915)

the premise that a jazz arrangement is a commentary upon—even a kind of analysis of—the original tune, Miller's first chorus confirms his view that Gershwin's melody line leaves something to be desired. Melodic interest here lies more in the reed countermelody composed by Miller than in Gershwin's original, played staccato in the brass. Miller's recording suggests how most jazz instrumentalists performed "I Got Rhythm": as an up-tempo flag-waver, a piece consistently played fast, and hence a kind of test piece, putting the group, and especially the improvising soloist, on trial.^[38] Later in Miller's arrangement is a striking effect that shows his band at the peak of its rhythmic drive. Discarding not only Gershwin's melody but his harmony too, Miller here reduces the first six bars of Gershwin's A section to virtually nothing but rhythm and sound. Twice the band crescendos on one note, played on alternate eighths by the brass and reed sections and sweeping listeners (or dancers) ahead like a canoe in white water.^[39]

A notable recording from the mid-1940s testifies to the place of "I Got Rhythm" in the jazz repertory by that time. The scene was New York's Town Hall on the evening of 9 June 1945. The audience had gathered, but by concert time only two musicians had shown up, tenor saxophonist Don Byas and bass player Slam Stewart. What to do? Give the customers back their money and send them home? Not that night. Byas and Stewart set out on a voyage over some jazz standards, and "I Got Rhythm" was the second number they played. Their performance, up-tempo and obviously unrehearsed, confirms our sense of Gershwin's song as a vehicle for virtuosic melodic play over familiar harmonic ground. After paraphrasing Gershwin's melody (without the original two-bar extension), Byas improvised four fluent inventive choruses,

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stood by while Stewart soloed in his patented style of bowing the bass and singing (through clenched teeth, an octave above), then followed with four additional choruses that explored Gershwin's tune further.^[40]

Also noteworthy is a recording made by pianist Art Tatum with guitar and bass accompaniment at around the same time, and at breakneck speed. Tatum is known for technical virtuosity and unmatched harmonic imagination. He is also known as a melody player—one who respected the original tune and tended to keep it within earshot even during his improvised choruses.^[41] In "I Got Rhythm," however, Tatum flashes only a hint of Gershwin's melody, then gives it up completely in the second chorus. Tatum's recording, from the mid-1940s, also confirms a trend that had already begun in the 1930s in performances of "I Got Rhythm": that of embellishing the ii-V-I chord progressions in Gershwin's A sections with richer harmonies. In his last two choruses, Tatum begins each of the eight-bar A sections on an F-sharp seventh chord—enhar-monically G-flat, or the flat sixth degree—and then moves downward through the circle of fifths in a succession of half notes until, at the beginning of the fifth bar, he reaches the B-flat tonic in which the piece is rooted. (The harmonic progression is: F-sharp7, B7, E7, A7, D7, G7, C7, F7, B-flat.)

Tatum's recording, which drapes Gershwin's scaffold with fresh harmonic material, brings us to the third approach performers took to "I Got Rhythm."^[42] As early as 1932, with Sidney Bechet's recording of a tune he called "Shag," black jazz musicians had begun to invent new melodies on the structure of Gershwin's song, abandoning his tune entirely and renaming their versions as new compositions.^[43] Fletcher Henderson's "Yeah Man" from August 1933 is another example, as is "Stomp It Off," recorded by Jimmie Lunceford in October 1934.^[44] And so is Chick Webb's "Don't Be That Way," from November of the same year.^[45] This tune, by the way, adds to the story of Benny Goodman's relationship with Gershwin's song, for he and Edgar Sampson are named as co-composers. The melody of "'Don't Be That Way," a tune that Goodman played at his Carnegie Hall concert in January 1938, and that began the recording issued long after the event, is shown in example 33.^[46]

The long list of tunes based on the chord progression of "I Got Rhythm" includes recordings by tile best swing bands, such as Count Basie's "Blow Top" from 1940 anti Woody Herman's "Apple Honey"

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Example 33.
Edgar Sampson and Benny Goodman, "Don't Be That Way," bars 5-12, melody 
only, played by Chick Webb and His Orchestra (19 November 1934, Decca 483)

from 1945.^[47] In "Cotton Tail" (1940), Duke Ellington wrote three memorable strains to Gershwin's chords.^[48] First, the lean explosive melody of the first chorus, played by saxes in unison and one muted trumpet (ex. 34a). Second, a sixteen-bar statement for the brass in which Ellington manages, without establishing a predictable pattern, to create a powerful sense of rhythmic coherence (ex. 34b). Finally, Ellington composes a thirty-two-bar melody—not Gershwin's AABA but ABCD—for the sax section in full harmony (ex. 34c).^[49]

The so-called bebop revolution of the early 1940s broke decisively with the swing era in many things. But one tradition it carried on and even intensified was the practice of making new tunes on the chord progressions of older ones. Each of the most prominent black swing bands—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Erskine Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, as well as groups featuring major soloists like Johnny Hodges and Lester Young—had its own version of "I Got Rhythm" as a standard vehicle for up-tempo "blowing." So too did many bebop musicians. The reasons were partly artistic, partly social, but they were also economic. Drummer Max Roach has been quoted as saying:

Of course there are about ten million tunes written on the changes of "I Got Rhythm." . . . This wasn't pilfering. In cases where we needed substitute chords for these tunes, we had to create new melodies to fit them. If you're gonna think up a melody, you'd just as well copyright it as a new tune, and that's what we did. We never did get any suits from publishers.^[50]

Few bebop musicians after World War II played "I Got Rhythm" as a jazz standard. But as a key,^[51] a tempo, a structure, and an occasion for virtuosic improvisation, it was deeply engrained in the jazz repertory, even when its harmonic scheme was embellished with remote chords.

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(a) Bars 1-8

(b) Chorus 4, bars 1-16, rhythm only

(c) Chorus 5, bars 1-8, melody only

Example 34.
Duke Ellington, "Cotton Tail," played by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra 
(4 May 1940, Victor 26610; after Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era [New York, 1989], 127)

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And bebop musicians, like their predecessors, sought ownership in the tradition that Gershwin's show song had begun.

No one in the jazz tradition was more closely identified with the "Rhythm changes" than alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, who returned again and again to the structure of Gershwin's tune throughout his career, composing at least seventeen different pieces based upon it, many of which were picked up, played, and recorded by other jazz performers (table 7). The harmonic structure of "I Got Rhythm" won

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Example 35.
Charlie Parker, "Red Cross," bars 4-12 (15 September 1944, Savoy 532)

Example 36.
Charlie Parker, "Steeplechase," bars 1-8 (September 1948, Savoy 937)

a place in Parker's imagination, much as the theme of the Eroica Variations or perhaps Diabelli's Waltz had in Beethoven's—though Beethoven concentrated his efforts on lengthy, integrated compositions, while Parker's "I Got Rhythm" variations are scattered widely among many performances. Following is a quick trip through Parker's Sax-Übung , pieced together from recordings made between 1944 and 1950.^[52]

Gershwin's "Rhythm changes" inspired Parker to compose several different kinds of variations upon them. The most old-fashioned of the three employs the riff style, in which a melody is built up by repeating one brief melodic motive (ex. 35). Parker's process of abstraction here reduces the A section's harmony, except for bar 6, to a B-flat tonic chord. (In the release, however, a new riff based on Gershwin's chord changes appears.) In 1948 Parker composed a new riff for the A section, leaving the bridge free for improvisation. He called this piece "Steeplechase" (ex. 36).

The riff approach establishes a context of regular predictability as a launching pad for the improvisation that follows. But Parker's second

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Example 37.
Charlie Parker, "Moose the Mooche," bars 9-16 (28 March 1946, Dial 1003)

Example 38.
Charlie Parker, " An Oscar For Treadwell," bars 8-16 (6 June 1950, 
Verve MGV800)

approach does the opposite. "Moose the Mooche," for example, is an invention for unison duet—alto sax and muted trumpet—that is rhythmically asymmetrical, broken into irregular phrases by rests in unexpected places (ex. 37). And "An Oscar for Treadwell" (ex. 38) is built in a similar way, with phrases of four beats, eight beats, fifteen beats, and five beats in its first eight bars. Its bridge is free.

Finally, Parker employed the "I Got Rhythm" chord changes to create a kind of obstacle course that only the best players could negotiate. Bassist Milt Hinton once explained how Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and other bebop pioneers would discourage players who wanted to join their after-hours jam sessions at Minton's in Harlem during the early 1940s

"What're y'all gonna play?" [they'd ask.] We'd say, "I Got Rhythm," and we'd start out with this new set of changes and they would be left right at the post. They would be standing

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Example 39.
Charlie Parker and John "Dizzy" Gillespie, "Shaw 'Nuff," bars 24-32 
(11 May 1945, Guild 1002)

there, and they couldn't get in because they didn't know what changes we were using, and eventually they would put their horns away, and we could go on and blow in peace and get our little exercise.^[53]

"Shaw 'Nuff" (ex. 39) shows this approach. Played at top speed, it also changes harmony every two beats. Intimidation is the name of the game here—intimidation of any neophyte with the gall to try to join such a performance.

From Parker's heyday in the years just after World War II, many bebop players—Thelonious Monk, Art Pepper, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell, and Fats Navarro among them—created their own new tunes on Gershwin's chord changes.^[54] And some of these new tunes themselves became standards. Ellington's "Cotton Tail" totaled more than thirty recordings in the years 1943-68, and Parker and Gillespie's "Anthropology" logged nearly twenty more in the same period.^[55] Moreover, the steady stream of "I Got Rhythm" variants that flowed through the 1950s had the effect of updating the tune so that when, for example, drummer Art Blakey featured the young trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in a performance of "The Theme" in 1981, half a century after "I Got Rhythm" first saw light of day, it did not sound anachronistic.^[56]

Gershwin's song "I Got Rhythm" is an especially good example of what I've referred to earlier as "performers' music": music composed and published with the expectation that performers, rather than being bound by a composer's score, will change melody, harmony, tempo, or

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Example 40.
George Gershwin, "I Got Rhythm," Chorus 2, bars 1-16, melody only, sung by Ella 
Fitzgerald with orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle (1958-59, Verve VE-2-2525)

mood as they see fit, thus putting upon it the stamp of their own musical personalities.^[57] "I Got Rhythm" attracted an unusually wide range of treatments from performers, flourishing in several different traditions of performance. These traditions are documented not in musical notation but in commercially produced phonograph recordings.

It seems appropriate to end this chapter with a comment on a performance that combines elements of the different traditions that made Gershwin's song their own. The singer is Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by a sizable orchestra.^[58] The presence of the verse, which is seldom sung, and a string section, helps to remind us that we're dealing, after all, with a song from a Broadway show by Gershwin . The introduction in the first chorus of a swinging beat and big band sound celebrates the song's pedigree as a jazz standard. But what kind of jazz standard? Ella Fitzgerald, a big band singer since 1935, knew full well the tradition of instrumental performance that lay behind "I Got Rhythm" when she made this recording in 1959. And the beginning of her second chorus (ex. 40) with sixteen bars of wordless scat-singing—clearly the musical

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climax of this performance^[59] —can be heard as a tribute to the countless trumpeters, pianists, sax players, and guitarists, from the time of Red Nichols and Luis Russell, through Ellington, Parker, Gillespie, and beyond, for whom Gershwin's song, or his tune, or his harmonic structure, or all three, marked out a territory in which artistic capacities were tested and honed and realized—a territory in which artistic truth was to be sought and found.

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