Output details

Rhapsody in Blue Live

This digital release encapsulates for a wider audience the insights that were developed and shared in a concert undertaken by the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra (SNJO), conceived by and featuring the researcher.

Rhapsody in Blue Live offers new insights into the music of George Gershwin and its reconception and reworking by contemporary jazz musicians. The researcher arranged the music, and it is performed by him, with Brian Kellock (piano solo) and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra.

Rhapsody in Blue Live explores Gershwin’s familiar thematic material in a new work that preserves most of the original solo piano part but totally reconceives the orchestral accompaniment. The result is a creative commentary on Gershwin’s original and on the repeated transformative reworking of material that is one of the key features of the jazz idiom, undertaken in and through the researcher’s compositional and performance practices. As Rob Adams writes in the sleeve note: ‘while the music departs significantly from the original script, its spirit seems entirely, even eerily in keeping with the overall theme of the 1924 concert that introduced Rhapsody in Blue to the world: An Experiment in Modern Music’.

For the purposes of this submission, the additional 'co-author' of this release is Brian Kellock, piano solo.