Gershwin Rhapsodized

MS MIR

The Gershwins' words and music were blissfully wedded.

BOBBY SHORT

MUSIC

On March 11, BAM will strike up the band with a Gershwin gala marking the fiftieth anniversary of George Gershwin's death. Two weeks of fascinating rhythm by every thrush and warbler with that certain feeling will follow. For the sweet and lowdown, we asked pal Bobby Short to add another chapter to the Gershwin gospel:

One of my all-time favorite Gershwin compositions is a song called "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise." It made its Broadway debut back in 1922 in George White's Scandals— where fifty superbly beautiful Scandals girls danced on two circular staircases while Paul Whiteman's jazz orchestra egged them on from the pit. One might say the piece photographs well. The lyrics for the chorus, written by B. G. De Sylva and Arthur Francis (the latter a pseudonym for Ira Gershwin), began: "I'll build a Stairway to Paradise, / With a new Step ev'ry day. / I'm going to get there at any price; / Stand aside, I'm on my way!"

I caught up with the song twenty years later, one evening at Ira and Leonore's home in Beverly Hills. With typical Gershwin flair, the melody of the verse modulated upward through six tonality changes, slid down chromatically before re-escalating, and finally settled into the chorus, which demanded a jump of one octave between the first two notes! The usual jazz and syncopation were there in abundance; the words and music blissfully wedded (hip orchestrators have always had a ball with such stuff).

In the late forties I had a weekly television show in Los Angeles called Songs of Manhattan, and I used "Stairway to Paradise"—somewhat audaciously—as a signature. I say audaciously because at that time The Student Prince and The Chocolate Soldier were still big out there, and the most important theater in the area catering to musical-comedy tastes was owned by the Baptist Church—a long way from George White's Scandals. But then, in 1951, the film An American in Paris gave this most Gershwin of Gershwin tunes its biggest boost— Georges Gu6tary, the French entertainer, strutted down a staircase before a mob of adoring females and sang it one more time: "1 got the blues / And up above it's so fair; / Shoes, / Go on and carry me there! / I'll build a Stairway to Paradise / With a new Step ev'ry day."

Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Gershwin program, 3118-3129)

BOBBY SHORT