Rhapsody in Blue

A single clarinet glides upward in a wail that is neither classical nor jazz but some impossible third thing — it smears through a full octave and a half in a gesture that in 1924 had never been heard in a concert hall and hasn't lost its electricity since. Gershwin had been asked by conductor Paul Whiteman to write a piece that would demonstrate jazz as a legitimate art form, and what he produced was something stranger than that brief required to contain: a seventeen-minute hybrid organism that is by turns melancholy, brash, sophisticated, naive, urban, and lyrical in ways that belong to no single tradition. The piano — played by Gershwin himself at the premiere — moves through passages that are pure jazz improvisation in spirit if not in notation, stride piano figures and bluesy harmonic language pressing against string writing of almost Romantic lushness. The piece has a loose rhapsodic structure — themes arrive, develop partially, disappear, return transformed — which mirrors the experience of a city: the way attention moves through New York, fragmenting and reassembling. The famous slow theme, when it arrives, has a quality of pure longing that operates independently of any specific narrative, the way a city skyline at dusk can make you feel things you couldn't quite articulate. This is music about being cosmopolitan, about the twentieth century as an experiment, about the specifically American experience of holding multiple cultural inheritances at once and making something new from the friction. It belongs to the early afternoon in a city, to movement and aspiration and the persistent sense that something important is about to happen.