From the beginning, George Gershwin felt that a song he and Ira had just penned for the film Shall We Dance had, in his words, "distinct potentialities of going places." The song was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and he was right: the film (starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) wasn't even released until May 7, 1937, but between March and June of that year, everybody who was anybody was already recording it: Ozzie Nelson, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Carl Fenton, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie with their respective orchestras....and, of course, Fred Astaire with Johnny Green and his Orchestra.
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"They All Laughed" has long been one of my favorite Ira Gershwin lyrics, perhaps because of the sneaky way it turns out to be a love song. I think I also connect with it because when Mark & I started specializing in vintage vocal styles and I began doing note-for-note transcriptions of the accompaniments, many people told us we were crazy. At times, in the midst of some particularly thorny arrangement, I still do — but back to the song: it was one of the first George and Ira wrote for the 1937 RKO film, Shall We Dance. Ginger Rogers sings the verse and chorus in a chic art deco club, then she dances with Fred Astaire, at the end of which he tosses her up onto a white piano and then joins her himself.
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It's been an exciting week: Robert Friedrich has been mixing the tracks on our second album, "Retrophonic Gershwin" all week and just finished the final mixes last night, or rather early this morning. The first recording session at Oberlin with the two Steinway behemoths was July 7, 2012, and getting the arrangements ready took months before that, so it's really been a long haul, with, I must say, a staggering amount of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction hurdles. The second session was January 6, 2013 but Mark had a head cold, so we had to record all of his vocals later in our home studio, which took more than two years after that and involved such adventures as learning how to replace the vacuum tubes on our Avalon preamp (thank you Keifer Wiley, who reassured me that I could really do it myself), getting all the last bits recorded at home, editing everything on ProTools, and learning audio mixing from scratch from Lynda.com videos and GearSlutz. Let me repeat: two years of my life and goodness knows how many hours it took for me to learn how much I still didn't know about mixing.
Read MoreWell, that’s the twenty-thousand-dollar question when you are transcribing duo-piano parts note-for-note from 1920s recordings, made before stereo recording was invented. It’s like solving a sonic Rubik’s Cube.
When we set out to put together a fireworks-filled overture for our Gershwin show — I think it was in 2011, and the show was then titled Syncopated City (which was the original title of “Fascinating Rhythm;” yes we know, too obscure!) — I collected all kinds of marvelous recordings of duo-pianists playing Gershwin. Listening to Ohman & Arden, Fray & Braggiotti, Fairchild & Rainger was the fun part.
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