[Dixielandjazz] FW: Ira Gershwin

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This interesting article from our Australian Dance Bands list.
Kind regards,
Bill.


The Word Guy: George's Brother Ira

by David Hinckley
New York Daily News, April 15, 2005

In the musical collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin, Ira wrote
only the words -- which is like saying that in the Gershwin
brothers' car, he was only the transmission.

George composed the music, for which he was rightly acclaimed as a
genius. George plucked the ethnic rhythm off the New York streets
and married it up with classical music, jazz and the songs of Broadway
and vaudeville, creating enough splendid music in 38 years to fill
10 lifetimes. 

But in an era whose lyrical craftsmen were as skilled as Irving
Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein, as facile and clever as Cole Porter
and Noel Coward, Ira Gershwin could sit at the table with all of them.

It is possible that only Ira among them had the style and panache to
get away with a song whose all-important chorus contained virtually
no words. 

"Blah Blah Blah," this song was called, and the chorus started like
this: 
Blah blah blah blah moon
Blah blah blah above
Blah blah blah blah croon
Blah blah blah blah love

"Blah Blah Blah" began life as "Lady of the Moon," music by George
and lyrics by Ira, intended for Flo Ziegfeld's 1928 Broadway
operetta "East Is West."

But Ziegfeld was running low on cash and operettas were expensive to
produce, so he asked the Gershwins to instead write songs for a more
traditional musical, "Show Girl."

He also wanted the songs fast, so Gus Kahn joined the Gershwins and
the three of them ground out 27 songs -- including a revised version
of "Lady of the Moon" retitled "I Just Looked at You."

Ziegfeld eventually crammed 14 songs into "Show Girl."

"I Just Looked at You" was not one of them. There just wasn't any
room left after several numbers by Duke Ellington, several more by
popular crooner Nick Lucas, some Jimmy Durante vaudeville and the
ballet "An American in Paris," which ran 15 minutes at the start of
the second act. 

So George and Ira took "I Just Looked at You" and tucked it away for
the future. 

The Gershwins were two of the most prominent among the many music
men who emerged from the late 19th and early 20th century wave of
immigration to the lower East Side. Ira was born Israel Gershovitz
on Dec. 6, 1896, at Hester and Eldridge Sts. By Sept. 26, 1898, when
brother Jacob was born, the family had changed its name to Gershwine
and moved to 242 Snediker Ave. in East New York, Brooklyn.

Ira loved words from the moment he learned to read them, and by 12
he was keeping a record of books he read. In 1913 he and his pal
Isadore Hochberg, later a songwriter himself under the name Yip Harburg,
began a column called "Much Ado" in the Townsend Harris Hall
literary magazine. 

Jacob, renamed George, became a song plugger, then began composing
himself. In December 1917 Ira dutifully noted in his diary that he
had written lyrics for a George composition called "You Are Not the
Girl." 

Those lyrics have never been found, but in February 1918 the
brothers teamed up again for "Beautiful Bird," whose chorus started thusly:
Beautiful bird,
Your plaintive piping I've heard
No bird can sing me a sweeter
Melodious meter than you...

It was a modest start, but both George's music and Ira's lyrics
became more sophisticated as time went by:
Don't mind telling you, in my humble fash,
That you thrill me through, with a tender pash ...

Ira would rhyme "rumba" with "Septumbah," "Schopenauer" with "sour."
He could write "Birds love and bees love and whispering trees love."
He could do a fast turn like "I'll pay the piper / When times are
riper," or a brilliant mouthful like "In your arms I find love so
delectable, dear / I'm afraid that it's not quite respectable,
dear." 

He and George composed regularly for Broadway through the late '20s.
But with the development of talkies, that musical axis developed a
Western spur, as Hollywood courted the composers who had given
Broadway such a golden age.

In November 1930, then, Ira and George boarded a train for
California to write the music for a new all-singing, all-dancing,
all-talking film called "Delicious."

After listening to a string of the maddeningly repetitious and
unimaginative love songs that seemed to punctuate early musical
talkies, Ira dusted off "I Just Looked at You" with the idea of
turning it into what he called "a mild spoof."

The chorus would have no lyrics, just nonsense syllables wrapped
around the cliches heard in every movie love song.

Tra la la la tra la la la merry month of May
Tra la la la tra la la la 'neath the clouds of gray

It has been argued that this was more clever of Ira than
his "satire" remark let on, because "Blah Blah Blah" was perfect for a swain
so enchanted he had lost all his words.

But Ira's own sentiment may have been better reflected by the fact
he also wrote the "Russian Refrain," in which he prefaced the buzzwords
with random references to Russia.

Voice one: Tolstoy, Pushkin -
Voice two: Love. 
Voice one: Lenin, Trotsky
Voice two: Croon. 
Voice one: Chaliapin -
Voice two: Above. 
Voice one: Volga boatmen -
Voice two: Moon. 

The "Russian Refrain" was ultimately cut from "Delicious," leaving
only the "Blah Blah Blah" chorus. That was still enough to let
Hollywood know what a couple of New Yorkers thought about its idea
of musical art.