Gershwin

A number of gentlemen of the press stood in the steel corridor of a trans-atlantic liner and collogued together in low tones. They had come to interview George Gershwin, ringmaster of fascinating ryhthms, who, last week, was commissioned to write a jazz composition for the New York Symphony Society. Critic-composer Deems Taylor had also agreed, at the Society's behest, to compose an orchestral work for its program next season; the august Director, Dr. Walter Damrosch himself, had announced that he would conduct the Society's famed orchestra at the presentation of Gershwin's, of Taylor's, compositions. Inevitably, the pressmen wanted to catch Mr. Gershwin before he sailed for London. They wanted to ask him if he were fond of animals, if he had ever been arrested, what he thought of U. S. women, U. S. traffic laws, U. S. music. The most brazen among them, a goggled fellow, rapped sharply on the door of Gershwin's stateroom. "Come in," drawled a voice:

A dark young man, attired in pajamas of kingfisher-blue silk, smoking, with mannered nonchalance, a brown cigaret, was reclining among the pillows of a luxurious seabed. He responded amiably to their questions. Native American music . . . what did they mean by that? Most people, of course, meant the banal, monotonous ki-yiing of the American Indians--an absurd misconception. Indian music came from Asia. It is in no respect native. The music the rhythms of which are implicit in the movement of modern U. S. life has never been written. . . . Will jazz be its medium? . . . Perhaps. . . .

The reporters, well-pleased, withdrew. As the door clicked behind them, the young man leaped from his couch, began hurriedly to dress. Then he skulked to the deck and vanished down the gangplank. He, nameless practical joker, was an impostor. The real George Gershwin was in the smoking-room.

The Genius of the Comic Strip, which thus presided at his departure last week, was responsible for Gershwin's taking up music in the first place. In 1911, his mother's sister-in-law bought a piano. Because the promptings of that Genius told his mother to keep up with the Joneses, she bought one also. The thing had cost a lot and it was no good unless somebody learned to play it. So the Gershwin family hired a teacher for George, then 13. Came the day when he played for Max Rosen, famed violinist. Mr. Rosen patted him kindly on the shoulder, told him that he had better learn a trade. Another musical gentleman, who had been troubled by hearing his practicing, advised him to study in Europe.

He went to work as a song-plugger for a music publisher. All day he played for vaudeville acts, tintinnabulated most of the night in cafes, earned $15 a week.

His first song hit was I Was So Young, You Were So Beautiful. Others: Swanee, I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Do It Again, I Won't Say I Will, Somebody Loves Me, Fascinating Rhythm. Last winter, he wrote his Rhapsody in Blue. In a jazz theme, announced by full orchestra, the immortal Liszt, with a diamond in his dinner-shirt, collapses, babbling, on a night-club table; instruments fall silent behind piano figurations for a chorus-rehearsal of skeletons with a solo ghoul in a buck-and-wing dip, while the first cat that was ever killed by Care shrinks in affright from the hard, slit eyes, the waiting jowls of Broadway, the Loop, the Barbary Coast. Said Critic Carl Van Vechten: "The very finest piece of serious music that has ever come out of the U.S.''