An American in Paris

You hear the taxi horns first, literally — Gershwin scored for three actual automobile horns to establish the urban landscape — and then the orchestra assembles a Paris that is perhaps more American than French, a city seen through the eyes of someone dazzled by its difference from home. The music has a tourist's quality, which is not a criticism: it captures the particular alertness of being somewhere unfamiliar, the way everything is vivid because nothing is habitual. The opening sections bustle and crowd, woodwinds trading French-flavored melodic fragments while brass and percussion keep the momentum urban and percussive. Then, after the bustle, a blues theme arrives — homesickness embodied in sound, a slow, achingly American melody played by trumpet over a simple harmonic backdrop, and the emotional pivot is so clean it surprises every time. The American abroad suddenly becomes aware of being elsewhere, of having left something, and the music swells with that specific bittersweet feeling before pulling back toward the vivacity of the Parisian street. Gershwin visited Paris in 1928 specifically to absorb its musical culture, meeting Ravel and Nadia Boulanger, and came back convinced that what America had was already as sophisticated as anything European — this piece feels like that argument made in sound. The scoring is colorful and inventive throughout, with saxophone given prominent solo passages that sound simultaneously Parisian café and Kansas City jazz club. This is music for airports, for arrivals, for the first morning in an unfamiliar city when everything — the light, the sounds, the smell of the coffee — is slightly different from what you know.