Tribute to an Original

"I feel that you have some good stuff in you," said Tin Pan Alley Publisher Max Dreyfus as he offered the 19-year-old composer a $35-a-week retainer. "It may take months, it may take a year, it may take five years, but I'm convinced that the stuff is there. Just stop in every morning, so to speak, and say hello."

As the publisher of the already esteemed Jerome Kern, Dreyfus did not have to say that to everybody. But then, George Gershwin was not just any song plugger. One morning Gershwin said hello with a little ditty called Swanee.

After Al Jolson got through with it, Gershwin could stop plugging other people's songs. His own style--spirited, harmonically rich, melodically simple but full of pungent surprises--was crystalized in a string of subsequent hit songs (Somebody Loves Me, Stairway to Paradise, The Man I Love) and Broadway musicals (Lady, Be Good!, Strike Up the Band, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing). By his late 20s, when Gershwin sought (unsuccessfully) to take some composing lessons from Maurice Ravel, the popular question was why he would want to be an imitation Ravel when he was already an original Gershwin.

Amateur Painter. This week, on the 75th anniversary of Gershwin's birth, the music, record and publishing worlds are paying tribute to that originality, and to the man behind it. Among the new LPs, the most irresistible is a Nonesuch release on which William Bolcom plays Gershwin's piano pieces, including the composer's variations on songs like Clap Yo'Hands, S'Wonderful and, of course, Swanee. An exhibition at Manhattan's Hallmark Gallery shows Gershwin to have been versatile enough to double as a gifted amateur painter and caricaturist, if somewhat prone to self-portraits. Also in Manhattan, a party at "21" features him as a performer on piano rolls, some of which he made for as little as $5 each and which prove all over again that he was a crackling good pianist. He cascaded over the keys, true to his belief that "the more sharply the music is played, the more effective it sounds."

The new and updated books range from Charles Schwartz's carefully detailed but somewhat precious biography Gershwin, His Life and Music (Bobbs-Merrill; $12.50) to the New York Times's handsome songbook, The Gershwin Years in Song ($14.95). Dominating them all is Atheneum's The Gershwins ($25). Written and edited by Biographer Robert Kimball and Gershwin Intimate Alfred Simon, cleverly designed by Bea Feitler, The Gershwins is an ingenious "scrapbook" containing just about everything in the way of letters, documents, recollections, essays, chronologies, manuscript pages and pictures that one would want to read or see concerning George and his lyricist older brother Ira, now 76.

Most of George and Ira's boyhood was spent on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where their father, a Russian-Jewish emigrant named Morris Gershovitz, was busy buying one business, then selling it for another, rarely with much financial success--restaurants, Russian and Turkish baths, bakeries, a cigar store, a pool hall. Ira was the scholar, George the scrappy, street-fighting member of the family. It came as a surprise that, when the new secondhand upright piano was hoisted through the window--Momma Rose's present for Ira--it was George who twirled the stool down to size and began playing a skillful version of a current pop song.

Unwilling to admit his fondness for music, George had been practicing at a friend's house.

By age 15 George was good enough to land a job demonstrating songs at a Tin Pan Alley publishing house. There he and a young dancer named Freddie used to play piano for each other and dream. "I told George how my sister and I longed to get into musical comedy," recalled Freddie. "He said, 'Wouldn't it be great if I could write a musical show and you could be in it?' " Lady, Be Good!, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, was less than a decade away.

In 1922 Gershwin and Lyricist Buddy De Sylva wrote a one-act opera called Blue Monday. It was a mediocre, somewhat patronizing blackface sketch, but it reflected Gershwin's characteristic fascination with Negro music, especially jazz, with its syncopation and soulful "blue" notes. It also proved to be the first step toward two of Gershwin's finest works--Porgy and Bess and the Rhapsody in Blue. The latter was commissioned by Bandleader Paul Whiteman, who had been in the pit for Blue Monday and had been dazzled by the Gershwin style. From then on, Gershwin was involved simultaneously in the worlds of concert and theater music.

Never Pompous. His serious works --also including An American in Paris, Second Rhapsody, Concerto in F--posed a problem for his admirers and detractors alike. They were colorful and inventive, overflowing with melody, but they were also rambling and essentially immune to the subtleties of classical form. The same could have been said, however, of the flashy, exhibitionistic piano concertos of Franz Liszt. In truth, Gershwin's long-haired music had--and still has--a wondrous improvisational momentum. For all its naivete, it is pure, simple fun, never pompous or overbearing, always strongly individual.

Gershwin was an exuberant extrovert, an irrepressible performer who loved parties, the spotlight and women. Thus it was doubly a shock when, in 1937, he became ill in the midst of performing the Concerto in F with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and suffered a memory lapse. "George, what happened?" cried Pianist Oscar Levant running backstage. "Did I make you nervous or was Horowitz in the audience too?" Actually, it was more serious than that. Although his doctors could find nothing wrong, Gershwin languished, grew moody and depressed. In the next few months, headache attacks began to mount in frequency and severity, and his coordination began to fail. One night he fell suddenly into a coma, and within 48 hours was dead--of a brain tumor. He was 38.

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