George Gershwin
USA, 1919–1937
American composer (1898-1937) who wrote both for Broadway and the concert hall. Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess apply jazz and blues idiom to large-scale classical forms.
MusicRoots documents 5 artists who influenced George Gershwin and 5 artists George Gershwin influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.
Who influenced George Gershwin?
- Jerome Kern — Kern was Gershwin's greatest early influence - 'I followed Kern's works and studied each song he composed' - and the man who convinced him that popular song could be made of better material.
- Irving Berlin — Gershwin called Berlin America's Franz Schubert and the greatest songwriter who ever lived; Berlin's songs were part of what drew him to write for the Broadway stage.
- Claude Debussy — Debussy's harmony was the classical colour Gershwin poured into American vernacular material.
- Scott Joplin — Joplin's ragtime was the foundation from which Gershwin synthesised his jazz-classical language.
- Duke Ellington — Gershwin and Ellington were mutual influences working to bridge jazz and classical music in the 1920s.
Which artists did George Gershwin influence?
- Maurice Ravel — Ravel turned down Gershwin as a pupil but took from him instead: the Piano Concerto in G of 1931 is long regarded as a kind of homage to Gershwin's jazz-inflected writing.
- The Beach Boys — Brian Wilson heard Rhapsody in Blue at about the age of two, lying by his grandmother's record player, and called it the work of art that set his life going - he returned to it decades later on Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin.
- Michael Feinstein — Not a listener's debt but an archivist's. Feinstein spent six years in Ira Gershwin's house cataloguing the brothers' unpublished sheet music and lost recordings, and has performed that repertoire ever since.
- Randy Newman — Gershwin's American songbook tradition underlies Newman's orchestral, ironic pop.
- Serge Gainsbourg — The other American in his father's repertoire — the jazz-inflected popular song Gainsbourg started from before chanson.