Gershwin Plays Gershwin - The Piano Rolls

My dad had a lot of CDs too, and here's an interesting one. It's called Gershwin and friend punch holes in paper tape for money...

Joking, it's Gershwin Plays Gershwin, but it's really Artis Wodehouse recording Gershwin's actual piano rolls of his pieces. Seriously, Gershwin was a piano roll arranger from 1916 to 1927. He made about 130 altogether, arrangements of pop songs and his own pieces. When my beloved vinyl records and the Great Depression killed player piano sales, he just switched right over to studio recordings and radio broadcasts. If you remember your history, Bell invented the needle in water thing in 1876 (they were terrible), Carbon mics in 1886 (slightly less terrible but crap for music even after Neumann's improvements), Wente gave us condenser mics in 1916 and Neumann kept making them better. Then in 1924 Schottke and Gerlach invented ribbon mics and yay we can record music that sounds like it wasn't played inside a trash can! Neumann came out with dynamic mics in 1931, but Gershwin didn't live long enough to see them blossom into actual usefulness (he died in 1937). Point is, player pianos were THE THING, and the story is that George actually learned to play the piano by following the keys at a friend's house. The Gershwins bought a piano for Ira, but George stole the show.

If you thought that explanation was complicated, wait until you hear how this recording was actually made. Some were simpler than others using a Pianola operated by Artis to play a 9-foot Yamaha Disklavier that recorded each performance, but for the hardcore ones they took Gershwin's rolls, scanned them into a computer, actually programmed a simulator to translate them into midi, and played them from floppy discs. Like any recording session, they did a bunch of takes and used the best segments. It's freakin' awesome. It's on youtube if you need some 20s light jazz player piano in your life. Of course you do, and you're welcome.