Louis Moreau Gottschalk - L'Union
Cole Porter - Night and Day
Henry Wolking - Methenyology and Black Dragon
Dick Grove - El Gamino
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue

Tonight's concert by the JSO dares to feature "classical music" of a different sort. The boisterous, syncopated, earthy music known as jazz is one of the most important cultural developments of the last century. Without question, it is America's most significant contribution to world's music thus far.

Jazz originated in New Orleans and was inspired by a cauldron of influences including spirituals, ragtime, Creole and Cajun folk songs and many other styles. The name, which originated around 1915 as "Jass" and soon changed to "Jazz," was originally a euphemism for sex. But jazz quickly became capable of expressing an enormous variety of emotions and ideas.

Many different styles of jazz developed in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The original dixieland jazz of New Orleans was followed by big band jazz, bepop (or simply bop), cool jazz, free jazz, jazz rock, and a dazzling array of individual styles and approaches. Great jazz artists and innovators include Louis Armstrong, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, big band composers and performers such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Bennie Goodman, and influential recording artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and "The Bird" Charlie Parker.

The hallmarks of jazz include complex harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and elaborate improvisations. Jazz rhythms are virtually never played exactly as they are written down. Players "swing" by stretching some notes and shortening others very freely. Jazz melodies, especially in the blues, involve freely bending of pitches and the lowering of the "blue notes," the 3rd, 5th and 7th notes of the major scale. Another interesting aspect of jazz is the development of scat, that allows singers to improvise in the style of instrumentalists.

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Even before the birth of jazz, the heady cultural mix in New Orleans was producing colorful musicians. The remarkable Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was a legendary virtuoso pianist, and his colorful career took him to many exotic comers of the globe. Recognizing his talent early on, his parents sent him to Paris, where Chopin remarked that the fifteen-year-old virtuoso would become "the king of pianists."

He became the rage of Europe after writing a Louisiana Trilogy which he described as "Creole" music. He toured widely throughout Europe, South America, Caribbean islands and the United States. When he arrived in California in 1865 he estimated that he had given I 100 recitals in America and traveled over 95,000 miles! At the end of his life he was organizing "monster concerts" involving as many as 650 performers in Rio de Janeiro. He collapsed there at the keyboard while performing his composition Morte!! ("Death!!").

The Union was written in 1862 during on of his most hectic tours of the USA. It was very popular during the civil war, and quotes The Star Spangled Banner Hail Columbia and Yankee Doodle

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Success didn't come quickly to Cole Porter (1891-1964), but when it did come it was enduring. Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, and began writing songs before he was a teenager. He attended Yale and Harvard, where he first studied law. Fortunately, he was so-on advised to turn to his first love, music. His earliest shows opened and closed quickly, but by the 1930s he was writing hits one after another. Many Porter songs have remained enormously popular, even though they came from unsuccessful shows. Later Porter wrote many songs for films. Night and Day originally appeared in a 1932 show called The Gay Divorce (a title from a more innocent era!).

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When you watched the opening sequences of the Winter Olympics these past few weeks, you were hearing music by one of tonight's featured composers, Henry Wolking. Wolking was born in 1948, and is an active composer, trombone performer, conductor and author. He lives in Salt Lake City where he is a Professor of Music and Chairman of Jazz Studies at the University of Utah. His nearly 100 published compositions reflect his wide-ranging interests in the jazz and classical fields, and his works have been performed throughout the United States, and by prestigious orchestras including the New Zealand, Warsaw and London Symphonies.

His music has been recorded on a variety of labels, and he has been heard across the United States as a both a classical and jazz trombonist. He has also performed in the famous Telluride, Colorado and Montreux, Switzerland jazz festivals. In 1989, Wolking was given the Alumni Achievement Award by Florida State University, which celebrated the event with three days of performances of his jazz, chamber and orchestral music.

Wolking's contributions to tonight's program include Methenyology, Wolking's tribute to legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, and an up-tempo jazz chart called Black Dragon.

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Dick Grove is a writer, composer and educator in Los Angeles, where he has written, arranged and orchestrated music for some of the most famous people in show business. His credits include names like Andy Williams, Bill Cosby, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Diana Ross, Carol Burnett, Julie Andrews ... (you get the picture!). Oh, and let's not forget - The Osmond Brothers! He has also written music for the Grammy Awards and Golden Globes awards shows. In 1973 he founded the Dick Grove Music School, a unique "school without walls," and he has authored approximately seventy music education books.

El Gamino ("The Street Urchin") has a Spanish air, and opens with a haunting flugelhorn solo. It evolves into a jazz waltz, then a samba, before the poignant opening music returns.

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"No one expected me to write music," George Gershwin (1898-1937) once said, "I just did. What I have done is what was in me; the combination of New York, where I was born and the rising, exhilarating rhythm of it..."

Few composers have ever combined two different styles as effectively as Gershwin, who achieved a brilliant blend of jazz music and classical music styles. Gershwin wrote literally hundreds of songs, and dozens of them have remained enormously popular while many other songwriters of his time have faded into obscurity. In works like his folk opera Porgy and Bess and his concerto in F (heard here in March of 1996), Gershwin proved his mastery of classical style and forms. He was highly respected by many of the finest musicians and composers of his time, and his reputation has grown rather than diminished. Still, I believe he would take greater joy in the popular acclaim that his music has received through the decades.

Gershwin's famous Rhapsody had its genesis at 11 p.m. on January 3rd, 1924, when George's brother Ira read him a story from the Tribune. It said that the famous orchestra leader Paul Whiteman was holding a concert featuring jazz music and had announcing that Gershwin was writing a jazz concerto for the event. Even though the performance was less than a month off, the idea appealed to George and he set to work furiously. The first sketches for the piece were written on a train ride to Boston. As Gershwin finished pages of piano music he turned them in to be orchestrated by Ferde Grofe, the composer of Grand Canyon Suite (which will be heard on the next JSO program in April!).

The concert was held in the Aeolian Concert Hall on 43rd Street on Lincoln's Birthday, Tuesday, February 12th, 1924. Gershwin didn't complete the solo piano part in time for the performance, and improvised long portions of it during the concert. The rhapsody, the twentysecond of twenty-three selections on the program, has become one of the most recognizable and beloved pieces of music ever written.

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