Gershwin, By George

By Michael Walsh

George Gershwin's early years were the heyday of ragtime and the blues, of barroom and bordello "perfessers" in spats and hats, of Tin Pan Alley song pluggers and sidewalk player pianos, whose invisible hands held passersby enthralled with their fascinatin' rhythms. So young George was only doing what came naturally when, at age 18, he sat down to cut a piano roll of his first published song, a frisky ditty called When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em.

That was the first of some 130 rolls Gershwin made between 1916 and 1927, mostly of his own music. For decades the Gershwin piano rolls have largely been forgotten, known only to a handful of collectors who possessed both the rolls and the pianos upon which they could be played. Now, thanks to the enterprise of Gershwin scholar Artis Wodehouse, everyone can enjoy them: Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls (Elektra/Nonesuch) is an extraordinary, ebullient CD collection of 12 Gershwin tunes, including the famous Rhapsody in Blue.

Already No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts, Gershwin Plays Gershwin is not only a superb musical document -- given the composer and performer, that was to be expected -- but also a remarkable example of technology put to the service of art.

Piano rolls were not recordings; they were perforated rolls of paper capable of reproducing sounds that had been either hand-played by a pianist or simply punched by a roll editor, such as Frank Milne, whose spectacular four-hand arrangement of An American in Paris concludes the CD. Early rolls, played by a device called a Pianola, which fit over a conventional keyboard, were primitive affairs, capable of reproducing notes but little else; much depended on the Pianola's operator, who manipulated knobs and levers and pumped a foot bellows to make the contraption work. Later player pianos put the mechanism inside the instrument, and more sophisticated "reproducing rolls," manufactured by the Duo-Art and Welte companies, were able to approximate nuances like dynamics and tempo shadings as well.

The task that confronted Wodehouse was to replicate as closely as possible the sound of Gershwin's own playing. "I spent thousands of hours listening to Gershwin's recordings," says Wodehouse, a Stanford-trained pianist and musicologist who got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1989 to work on the project. Using a rare 1911 88-note Pianola, in conjunction with a new Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of super-player piano that converts a performance into computer information, she was able to realize the earlier rolls. Wodehouse personally operated the Pianola and painstakingly fiddled with the rolls until she was satisfied with the performances. "I put in dynamics and accents," says Wodehouse. "I played the rolls over and over again, maybe a hundred times, and based the final mixes on what we know of Gershwin's playing and whatever was on the roll."

The Disklavier was also used for reproducing the rolls. Two computer programmers, Richard Tonnesen and Richard Brandle, converted the information on the rolls, wrote programs that approximated the sounds and qualities of the old player pianos and stored the results on floppy disks. The disks were then inserted into the Disklavier and played back at the actual, if ghostly, recording session.

"We have this great piece of fate that someone was able to use technology in an utterly musical fashion like this," says Nonesuch general manager Robert Hurwitz. "When people hear it, they don't realize the role of technology, and they don't think it is a piano roll."

Wodehouse's efforts have been cheered by her fellow aficionados. "The ones I've heard have a live feeling, as if Gershwin were there," says Trebor Tichenor, a ragtime pianist and scholar in St. Louis, Missouri, who owns one of the largest private collections of piano rolls in America. Agrees collector Michael Montgomery, whose archives contain 100 of the extant Gershwin rolls: "It is the most careful, scholarly, faithful, high-integrity job that has ever been done with piano rolls."

Indeed it is. What emerges from this complex collaboration is the illusion that, by George, Gershwin is right in one's living room, banging away in his fluid song-plugger style. "Gershwin never played soft," observes Wodehouse. But he did have a consummate technical command of his instrument, which, coupled with the tremendous rhythmic vitality of his playing, gives his performances an irresistible strut and swagger. Two more Gershwin albums are on the way from Wodehouse. 'S Wonderful!

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York