 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: DougR
Date: 2015-10-09 04:47
Thanks, John! I have a friend who's looking at having to play this solo in the near future, and has been kind of sweating it. I just sent this off to her, hopefully it'll give her a little courage to go forward!
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Author: donald
Date: 2015-10-09 14:43
I do believe that Benjamin Kasser was a pianist? This letter is Gerswin advising a pianist (learning Rhapsody in Blue) to copy elements from the Clarinet solo (from the original recording) ON THE PIANO? (ie NOT him advising a clarinet player?). Am I correct in this? The auctioneer seems to be mistaken, but maybe I've got it wrong.
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Author: Ed Lowry
Date: 2015-10-10 08:18
Re Donald's note ....Since Gershwin spoke of running up to B-flat (rather than a C which it would be on the clarinet) it makes sense to conclude he was advising the pianist how to play it, even though he suggests listening to a recording where the run is of course played by the clarinet.
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Author: donald
Date: 2015-10-10 15:56
The letter also refers to doing accents "coming seperately on each hand". Not sure how to do THAT on the clarinet
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2015-10-10 20:34
That there is no one right way to play the opening clarinet solo to Rhapsody in Blue can be demonstrated by listening to two early performances of the piece with Paul Whiteman directing and Gershwin playing the piano part. In the first 1924 recording the clarinitist (was it Ross Gorman?) clearly hams up the solo. After his admirably long and smooth glissando, he does a rather yucky imitation of barnyard animals by tonguing clownishly from the throat. These are not my adjectives; I got them from several very young musicians who were listening to the 1924 performance with me this morning. They supplied the words "yucky," "corny," "clownish," and "barnyard goose articulation." But I can't say I disagree with them.
Give a listen: Pull up 1924 version of Rhapsody in Blue on YouTube.
Just 6 years later, in a 1930 film also featuring Whiteman and Gershwin, the clarinetist is much more suave and sophisticated. All the barn yard animals have been locked up. The glissando is very very long and smooth, and the articulation is not much different from what one hears today from the best performers. To this performance my young listeners attached such adjectives as "cool." "neat," and "awesome."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oadzppD9Rv8.
So which performance is truly representative of the composer's wishes? He played in both of them, first the "jazz band" one and then the symphony orchestra version. As for authenticity, Paul Whiteman was never "king of jazz; he didn't even play jazz, much less command a royal position within that genre of music.
Talking about "authenticity," who authorized the "voodoo drum" preface to the 1930 movie version? And can anything be more wacky ("Hollywood," if you like) than to have the whole orchestra visually reduced to munchkin size so they fit first inside the string box of a grand piano and later appear spead out across the top?
I would say that, at best, the opening clarinet solo to Rhapsody in Blue should be described as "malleable," and subject to stylistic evolution, rather than forever fixed in time.
Post Edited (2015-10-10 21:01)
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Author: JKL
Date: 2015-10-10 22:51
I definitely prefer the 1924 version to the 1930 one! I wouldn´t call the 1930 version "more sophisticated". In a way the 1924 recording is more sophisticated because of its ambiguity: It is not only a Jazz player playing the music like Jazz players would do ist, but for me he plays it like a Jazz player imitating a Klezmer player. So the 1924 recording has an element of parody or irony or spoof which you have to understand and which I like very much, but which obviously was not suitable for commercial purposes - the mainstream of society wouldn´t understand this. So for me the 1930 version is commercially smoothed like the most later recordings.
I like very much the clarinettist of the 1924 recording plays the second run (from F to Bb) - as a glissando as well, which makes much sense to me. (and by the way - for my ears the clarinettist of the the 1930 recording starts the second run (from F) an octave lower than Gershwin wrote it, doesn´t he?)
JKL
Post Edited (2015-10-10 23:07)
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2015-10-10 23:48
JKL, I buy some of what you are saying, which shows there is no one definitive way to play this solo. But historically you are mistaken in thinking that the 1924 clarinetist plays the solo like a jazz player. Maybe it is a jazz imitation (or more like a "deconstruction") of Klezmer (who knows) but it is far from the way jazz players played in the 1920s or anytime since then. Leon Rapollo (who probably influenced both Goodman and Shaw) would have adopted a much more etherial bluesy sound and dispensed with the throaty articulation.
When Goodman (who was certainly a jazz clarinetist) played the solo with Toscanini he saw no reason to inject any Klezmer into the piece; he played it jazzy (squeak and all) throughout. That performance is on YouTube also. I dont know if Artie Shaw ever played it in a public concert, but just thinking of him playing the 1924 way is enough to make anyone laugh--he wouldn't do it, except as a lampoon. (listen to his "Donkey Serenade, where he plays goofty and out of tune") The same goes for jazz clarinetist Barney Bigard, I should think. (He would do very long upward glisses but the remainder would not not be phrased like the 1924 version, though he might throw in some very smooth downward glisses, of which he was a master).
When Pete Fountain played it, it was "smoothed out" all the way, Irving Fazola (another authentic jazz player) style.
But I must agree that if someone wanted to play the thing with the quasi-Klezmer tonal shadings of 1924 today (if that's what they are) Gershwin would probably be all for that interpretation (even if the kids and I do not find it our cup of tea). Then again, wouldn't Gershwin also approve the Benny Goodman version (sans the squeak) and the Pete Fountain one (with the low register opening note, which Fountain plays an octave up, restored), and the Robert Marcellus one with Louis Lane and John Browning, and the Ricardo Morales one, etc?
Evidently serveral clarinetists were involved in early versions of the solo. Ross Gorman is on the first recording. Not sure who is in the 1930s film (could it even be Gorman again with another interpretation?). Ben Kanter went on tour with the piece playing it with Gershwin every night but not exactly the same way as Gorman. For the Los Angeles premier, Glen Johnston (later well known as a mouthpiece guru and repair tech) played the solo, certainly in his own way as well.
Post Edited (2015-10-11 03:51)
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Author: Wes
Date: 2015-10-11 08:06
Yes, Ben Kanter was called down from Boston to go on tour with Gershwin and he told me that it was 27 nights in a row. Ben said that Ross Gorman carried the sections of his horns in a kind of carpet bag and he was not complimentary about Gorman's playing. Grizez was said to have had a heart attack upon playing the cadenza with the National Symphony and dying of it.
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Author: Ed Lowry
Date: 2015-10-11 09:21
Perhaps because it was the first recording I ever heard of Rhapsody in Blue (at age 8), and perhaps because I was mesmermized by the smooth gliss from below the break all the way up, my favorite recording is a 1959 Warner Brothers Symphony performance, conducted by (Ray) Heindorf (identified by last name only), with Bert Shefter on the piano. The album cover is a classic with two satin ribbons -- one black, and the other red. (Later albums had the ribbons printed in a blue and reddish orange color.) Dan Lube is identified as the violin soloist, but there's no mention of the clarinetist. I've always wondered who it was .... does anyone on the list have an opinion ?
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Author: donald
Date: 2015-10-11 13:51
Interesting. I agree that there really is no "one way" to perform this, and Gershwin certainly participated in a number of performances with many variations in the playing of the opening clarinet solo. That said- in this letter he does give a useful instruction for the execution of the trills- pretty much how I like to play them (the latter ones being more "sting like", I really like to make the clarinet trills blend with the trumpet note in the little sf bits)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-10-11 16:42
And all this conversation makes the Gershwin letter even more interesting. It shows that as a "commercial musician," Gershwin was nothing if not a pragmatist essentially saying, "Do it the way it was recorded."
............Paul Aviles
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