Thelonious Monk, from Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington , Hacken- sack, New Jersey, July 27, 1955
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, from The Great Summit , New York, April 3, 1961
Nina Simone, from Nina Simone Sings Ellington , New York, 1963
Kenny Burrell, from Stormy Monday Blues , Berkeley, California, June 18–20, 1974 Adam Makowicz, from Adam , New York, 1977
Keith Jarrett, from The Melody at Night, with You , New Jersey, 1998
I Got Rhythm
Composed by George Gershwin , with lyrics by Ira Gershwin
This is the granddaddy of jazz tunes. “I Got Rhythm” stands out as the peren- nial favorite of jam session participants, time-honored and battle-tested. Styles and tendencies may go in and out of favor, but this song never falls out of fashion. Indeed, so familiar is its structure and progression that musicians don’t even need to mention the title in full—the bandleader just calls out “rhythm changes” and counts in a tempo. Usually the fastest one of the evening.
We should give George Gershwin credit for putting such a lasting stamp on the jazz idiom. Or should we? On closer inspection, this song long ago sepa- rated itself from Gershwin’s original conception. “Rhythm changes” are rarely played with the original “I Got Rhythm” melody these days. Instead, dozens of popular alternatives—by Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelo- nious Monk, and others—have become standards in their own right. Gersh- win’s initial structure for the song has also undergone transformation: jazz players found the extra tag at the end cumbersome and jettisoned it from their versions long ago. And even the chords themselves—the “changes” in “rhythm changes”—are so frequently modifi ed and updated by jazz players that these last vestiges of the 1930 song retain only a faint resemblance to what George and Ira wrought.
The song originated in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy , which also produced future standards “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me.” Here the piece not only was performed by Ethel Merman, in her Broadway debut, but her delivery on opening night made her a star—creating such a frenzy of applause that she was required to give encore after encore. “I’ve heard honest—and even intelligent— people describe that fi rst time they heard ‘I Got Rhythm’ as a ‘high point in the theater,’” Merman later boasted in her autobiography, which was named Who Could Ask for Anything More after a line from this very song.
168 I Got Rhythm
Gershwin’s melody, with its short choppy phrases that avoid starting on down beats, must have challenged his brother Ira’s wordsmithing ingenuity, but the lyricist responded with a series of striking four-syllable sentences. And jazz players were charmed from the start, especially by the suitability of the harmonic progression for improvisation. On Louis Armstrong’s hit 1931 re- cording, he dispenses with vocals entirely—a rarity at this stage in his career— and instead exhorts his sidemen while featuring seven of them in solos. Two years later Clarence Hutchenrider stretched out for a much-admired 68-bar baritone solo on the Casa Loma Orchestra’s recording of “I Got Rhythm,” fur- ther demonstrating that jazz musicians valued this song less for what Gershwin wrote and more for what it might allow them to create spontaneously on the bandstand.
Red Nichols and Ethel Waters also enjoyed early hits with “I Got Rhythm,” but after 1931 the song would not show up on the charts until the Happenings, a Paterson, New Jersey, group, enjoyed a surprise success with their pop make- over of the Gershwin song in 1967. Yet jazz musicians never fl agged in their devotion. Wherever they performed, “I Got Rhythm” came along, fi tting in with equal ease at ballrooms and nightclubs, jam sessions and private woodshed- ding workouts, in concert halls or on overseas tours. When Benny Goodman performed at Carnegie Hall in his historic 1938 concert, his quartet—composed of the clarinetist, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa—off ered a whirlwind version of “I Got Rhythm” to their enthusiastic audience, but uptown in Harlem this same song would soon fi gure as a regular part of the after-hours proceedings at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House where the new bebop style was forged.
“I Got Rhythm” was especially popular at all-star aff airs where jazz icons fraternized and jousted. The Metronome All Stars lineup that recorded the song in 1942 featured Goodman again, but this time joined by Count Basie, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Cootie Williams, and J. C. Higginbotham. But an even more impressive roster showed up to play “I Got Rhythm” at the 1944 Esquire All Star concert, where the luminaries on stage included Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Red Norvo. Equally noteworthy, a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert recorded at the Embassy The- atre in Los Angeles on April 22, 1946, presented a historic encounter between Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, again with “I Got Rhythm” on the agenda. Those who dismiss Young’s post–World War II work as inferior simply must hear him in this setting, where Prez bests his celebrated rivals with a spirited solo that has the audience cheering phrase by phrase as he powers his way through his fi nal chorus.
Alas, the song’s chords became so famous that they eclipsed the composition itself. I have a half-dozen diff erent fake books in front of me as I write, and none of them include “I Got Rhythm” while every other jazz standard I can name