1924 Centuries of Sound

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“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating to a composer (I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise) that I suddenly heard–and even saw on paper–the complete construction of the Rhapsody from beginning to end. …I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America–of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” – George Gershwin
“As to the true origins of the cakewalk, it is believed to have begun at about the same time as minstrelsy, around 1840, with slaves parodying the formal dances of their masters. These burlesques came to be mimicked in minstrel shows. After the Civil War, when blacks entered minstrelsy, they assumed parts in the minstrels’ cakewalk. As Terry Waldo puts it in his book This Is Ragtime: “By the time the ragtime era began in 1896, the cakewalk was being performed by blacks imitating whites who were imitating blacks who were imitating whites.” I’m sure that the gist of this wonderful little observation can, without much squinting, be applied to the whole of popular culture” – Nick Toches ‘Where Dead Voices Gather’
I have two people for you to look at today, two white men (one of whom is actually a Mr Whiteman) who stood on the shoulders of black musicians to get a clear view of the outline of the American 20th Century (or at least its first half.) One is, rightfully, remembered as an epoch-defining composer, the other remembered less well, and even then often with a mild embarrassment or outright dismissal. Both, though, were important pieces in our puzzle, and it’s in 1924 that their paths meet, and they make the astonishing recording which holds this mix between its two sections.
Born in a second-floor tenement in Brooklyn to Russian / Lithuanian Jewish parents, George Gershwin was named after his grandfather, a Russian army mechanic from Odessa. Growing up in the Yiddish theatre district, George and his three siblings were exposed to music from an early age, and four all took it up, either as a hobby or as a career. Leaving school at 15, George found work as a song plugger, promoting music at a music publisher by playing it on the piano. He soon began composing his own songs, and in 1919 had a massive hit with ‘Swannee’ – made popular by Al Jolson, another New York Lithuanian Jew, and by now perhaps the most popular non-opera singer in the world. At the start of the 1920s, he began writing successful Broadway musicals with his brother Ira and the established writer William Daly.
Though Paul Whiteman was almost a decade the senior of George Gershwin, his career was then at an earlier stage. Born in Denver, he played without any great distinction in a couple of orchestras before joining that ever-surprising source of musical mimicry and innovation, a US Navy marching band. While his band took less in the way of plaudits than that of James Reece Europe, he nevertheless finished the First World War as a successful band leader and within a couple of years had brought his own Paul Whiteman Orchestra to New York to begin recording for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
An important thing to remember is that Gershwin was no more a classical composer than Whiteman was a classical musician. Both were New York music business operators, working on their next project. The fact that they broke out of the expectations handed down to them is perhaps the most astonishing thing about Rhapsody in Blue.
Whiteman and Gershwin had this in common &#8