Jazz at the Philharmonic

George Gershwin

When, on 24 October, APO Principal Clarinettist Gordon Richards rips into the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue, no one will doubt for a second that George Gershwin was a genius composer.

What’s harder to answer is whether what he composed was classical or jazz. Rhapsody is shot through with blue notes and other jazz inflections, and yet it’s a piano concerto.

Ultimately, the question is moot: Gershwin was a composer of music, and drew his influences from the European tradition as well as the popular tunes he inhaled every time he strolled the streets of his hometown, New York.

Besides, in Gershwin’s music the classical/jazz distinction often lies in the interpretation. Take ‘Summertime’, from Porgy and Bess, as an example. When the soprano Cynthia Haymon sings it, in a famous recording with Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s classical. When Billie Holiday’s singing with Count Basie, it’s jazz. It’s a tribute to Gershwin’s ability that ‘Summertime’ sounds completely natural in either setting.

Kurt Weill

The European Twist

It’s a similar case for Kurt Weill, whose left-wing critique of capitalist decadence Die Dreigroschenoper found a home on Broadway as The Threepenny Opera, and is mostly famous these days for Bobby Darin’s cheery ditty ‘Mack the Knife’, which began life as a menacing song about a murderer.

Jazz was all the rage in 1920s Weimar Germany, when Weill wrote Die Dreigroschenoper. It was even more popular in France, where a number of African American musicians found an escape from the racism they faced in their segregated homeland. Francis Poulenc claimed not to like jazz, but his ballet Les Biches does a good job of hiding his distaste. The syncopations of the work’s ‘Rondeau’ and ‘Rag-Mazurka’ in particular show a clear debt to jazz. At a time when Paris was awash with the style, how could it be otherwise?

Francis Poulenc

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), despite eventually living in both Paris and New York, was Russian, and came to jazz from the perspective of an outsider. Even so, as the most rhythmically adept composer of his age, Stravinsky was perhaps inevitably attracted to the dancing pulses he heard coming from America. His most famous work in this vein was the Ebony Concerto, described by its composer as “a jazz concerto with a blues slow movement,” and written for the bandleader and clarinettist Woody Herman. By 1945, when he produced the concerto, Stravinsky had moved to America, but he had been writing jazz-influenced works since the late 1910s. The Soldier’s Tale (completed in 1918 – and to be performed by the APO in 2014) contains a ‘Ragtime’ dance and the same year saw a full work, also called Rag-Time, for 11 instruments.

Treemonisha

Giving Back

The influence didn’t go one way. The king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, wrote a ballet and two operas. The second of them, Treemonisha, has been performed with the soprano Kathleen Battle in the title role and recorded by that most establishment of classical music labels, Deutsche Grammophon.

Miles Davis

By the mid-1940s, Duke Ellington and his musical foil Billy Strayhorn were composing large-scale suites for jazz orchestra, including the ‘jazz symphony’ Black, Brown and Beige (1943).

A touch later, Miles Davis embarked on a series of collaborations with arranger Gil Evans. Among them was the album Sketches of Spain, which contains arrangements of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, which classical fans will know as ‘Cancion del fuego fatuo’, from Manuel de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo. Miles and Evans also got together to produce a partly improvised, partly orchestrated jazz version of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Which is more or less where we came in…

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Notorious in 1920

Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,
And he shows them pearly white
Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear
And he keeps it out of sight.
 – Kurt Weill

During the prohibition era the dealing of outlawed liquor was big business, and the gangsters running the operations had control of whole areas of major cities, often with political influence.

Some of the most famous crime lord’s of the era have become house-hold names.

Al Capone

Al Capone

Alphonse Gabriel Capone is probably the most famous organized crime lord in American history. Capone was the leader of The Chicago Outfit, a prohibition-era crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling liquor and other illegal activities including bribery of government figures and prostitution.

Despite his unsavory occupation, Capone was seen by many as a modern-day Robin Hood and was a highly visible public figure, making large donations to charity.  However, his reputation was damaged beyond repair following his involvement in the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven members of a rival gang were ambushed by Capone’s men and executed.

Capone was eventually imprisoned in 1931, convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to incarceration at the then-new Alcatraz prison. He died from a cardiac arrest following a stroke in 1947.

Squizzy Taylor

Squizzy Taylor

Joseph Leslie Theodore “Squizzy” Taylor was a Melbourne-based gangster whose crimes ranged from pick pocketing and assault to bank-robbery and murder.

Despite being only 5’2” in stature, Taylor enjoyed a fearsome reputation in Melbourne.  He is said to have “piercing, black eyes and a treacherous mind”.
Taylor became a household name in Melbourne, with his exploits making many a newspaper headline, and due to his ability to avoid conviction was regarded as something of a criminal mastermind.  He was a vain man and basked in his notoriety, writing letters to the media whilst in hiding from the police and even staring in a film.

The Australian television series Underbelly: Squizzy is based on his life.

Baby Face Nelson

Baby Face Nelson

Lester Joseph Gillis, better known as George Nelson or Baby Face Nelson has the dubious distinction of having killed more FBI agents in the line of duty than any other person.

Nelson was first arrested in 1921 at the age of twelve for shooting a fellow child in the jaw.  Shortly after his release from the state reformatory, he was arrested again for joyriding and incarcerated for a further 18 months.

Nelson became acquainted with many local criminals whilst working at an oil station in the Chicago suburbs, becoming a member of notorious bank robber John Dillinger’s gang. He was killed in a short but furious gun battle with FBI agents in 1934.

Bugs Moran

Bugs Moran

Another Chicago based gangster, George Clarence ‘Bugs’ Moran is best known for his acrimonious relationship with Al Capone, to whom he lost seven members of his North Side Gang to during the Saint Valentines Day Massacre.

The animosity grew out of a turf war between Capone’s Italian gang based in the south of the city and Moran’s mostly Irish crew, both involved in the illegal smuggling of alcohol, a pastime commonly known as bootlegging.

The competition between the two leaders became personal and cost both of them their friends and reputation.  Moran told the press that “Capone is a lowlife”, claiming that he was a better Catholic than Capone for never engaging in prostitution and refusing to run brothels.

He died of lung cancer in 1957 aged 65.  He was estimated to only be worth $100 at the time of his death and received a pauper’s burial in a prison cemetery.

Dutch Schultz

Dutch Schultz

Born Arthur Flegenheimer, Dutch Schultz was a New York based German-Jewish mobster, who made his fortune bootlegging alcohol.

Schultz fell in with gangster Joey Noe and the Noe-Schultz operation began to flourish in the Bronx area, becoming the only non-Italian gang able to rival the Mafia’s Five Families.

Shultz is most famous for his ‘lost treasure’.  Shortly before his death, Schultz commissioned the construction of a special airtight and waterproof safe in to which he placed $7 million in cash and bonds and buried it somewhere in upstate New York.  Glangland lore has it that Schultz’s enemies spent the remainder of their lives searching for the safe, but to this day it has never been recovered. Treasure hunters meet annually to search for the safe. One such congregation was documented in the documentary film Digging for Dutch: The Search for the Lost Treasure of Dutch Schultz.

Check out our Pinterest board for The Roaring 20s, for more images and video clips