2024 marked 100 years since the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue. Concerts around the world celebrated this milestone, honoring a piece that, for many, helped define the sound of American music. For fans of Gershwin it was a thrilling time to revisit the genius, heart, and sheer inventiveness of the work.
But not everyone saw it that way.
Pianist and writer Ethan Iverson stirred up a lively debate with a New York Times piece titled "The Worst Masterpiece: Rhapsody in Blue at 100." In it, he described Rhapsody as "a guaranteed success" that still brings audiences to their feet—but also called it "naïve and corny," claiming it "clogs the arteries of American music." To Iverson, the piece overpromised a fusion between jazz and classical music that never fully arrived. Its immense popularity, he suggested, may have even discouraged deeper innovation.
"If Rhapsody in Blue is a masterpiece," he wrote, "it might be the worst masterpiece."
As you might imagine, the musical corners of the internet lit up. Some praised Iverson for articulating what they’d long felt; others were outraged by what they saw as an unfair takedown of a beloved classic.
I had mixed feelings.
Iverson’s article is smart, thoughtful, and worth reading. But the tone rubbed me the wrong way. It felt a little smug—like if you still get goosebumps during the opening clarinet glissando, you’re not in on the joke.
But more than the critique of the music itself, what stayed with me was the implication that Rhapsody is made up of "borrowed" ideas from Black musicians who went uncredited—and that Gershwin’s artistry is therefore suspect. That bothered me. Because I’ve lived on the receiving end of similar assumptions.
Every once in a while, I’ll get a message accusing me of being a white Jew "imitating" Black artists. It’s painful. And untrue. And frankly, it echoes a very old and very dangerous anti-Semitic trope: that Jews are merely imitators. That trope has been used to discredit Jewish composers for generations—Wagner among the most vocal.
But I’ve never felt like I was mimicking anything. If anything, hearing Black jazz musicians helped me find myself. Helped me access something already in me—something I didn’t know existed but instantly recognized. Their music didn’t give me a costume. It didn’t offer me a mask, or a role to play. It gave me a mirror.
When I first heard Ahmad Jamal, for example, I felt like I was hearing myself in the future—if I practiced. It was the first time music felt like a home I hadn’t yet moved into.
Looking back, that moment taught me something powerful: anyone can authentically feel anything. As Sidney Bechet once said, "No music is my music. It’s everybody’s who can feel." Or, in the words of Jewish pianist Ben Sidran: "Intuitively, I grasped that these musicians were related to me in some essential way. When I found out that Horace [Silver] and the others were Black, I understood that we were all basically alike."
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that every great artist—whether in music, writing, or any creative field—isn’t trying to conform to a genre. They’re just trying to express who they are: a blend of everything they’ve felt and absorbed, stirred together in their own blender.
So when I listen to someone, I try to hear what makes them them —not just whether they’re "playing jazz." And I encourage others to do the same.
I’ve never seen Rhapsody in Blue as "authentic jazz"—whatever that even means. When I’m in the mood to hear what jazz means to me, I wouldn’t put it on. But that’s not a knock. I see Rhapsody as a deeply personal portrait of Gershwin’s world. A musical gumbo made from his own ingredients. In that sense, Rhapsody isn’t jazz—it’s Gershwin. And sometimes, when I want to step into that unique world, I put it on gladly.
Let’s not forget: Rhapsody in Blue premiered in 1924—three years before the release of The Jazz Singer, which marketed itself around jazz but didn’t feature any music most of us today would recognize as such. Definitions were still forming. Boundaries were still blurry. And yet the influence was already undeniable.
That said, we do need to tell the full story. And I suspect that part of what bothers people like Iverson is a recurring pattern in American music: Black musicians create a sound, and then white performers come along to make it more "acceptable" for white audiences—often watering it down in the process and profiting far more than the originators ever did.
If I have a problem with anyone in this story, it’s not Gershwin—it’s Paul Whiteman, the so-called "King of Jazz" who commissioned Rhapsody. One of Whiteman’s goals for the now-famous Aeolian Hall concert was to "make an honest woman out of jazz." In his eyes, jazz needed cleaning up—refinement—before it could be considered legitimate.
Or as conductor Walter Damrosch put it:
"Lady Jazz, adorned with her intriguing rhythms, has danced her way around the world. But for all her travels and sweeping popularity, she has encountered no knight who could lift her to a level where she might be received as respectable."
Whiteman positioned himself as that knight. But let’s be real—he was more like the Pat Boone of the jazz era. Talk about corny.
We do need to tell the full story. We need to give Black innovators the credit, platforms, and reverence they’ve always deserved. We need more Ellington in the concert halls. More Mary Lou Williams in the textbooks. More Tatum, Waller, Morton, and Strayhorn.
But we don’t need to do that instead of honoring Gershwin. We can do it while honoring Gershwin. In fact, we can understand Gershwin more fully because we acknowledge who and what inspired him—and how much beauty he created from that inspiration.
A couple of weeks after Iverson’s article came out, Béla Fleck responded with a beautifully personal reflection called "We Must Face Harms Done." He recalled falling in love with Rhapsody in Blue as a 7-year-old in a New York theater and acknowledged the harm done by systems of exclusion. But he resisted the idea that influence itself is inherently problematic:
As a white man playing the banjo, an essentially African invention falsely branded as a white-bred instrument as it traveled through the 1900s, everything I do moves within the problematic nature of the harm done along race lines throughout American history. I wouldn’t want to segregate ourselves further by dividing musical inspiration along race lines before it even emerges into musical composition.
Did Gershwin actually “steal” the basic concepts from Black musicians of the day? Perhaps in today’s world he would have been ostracized or “canceled” for doing so. But is that fair? Is it wrong to be so inspired by music from another sphere that it leads one to transcend and create something truly unique? Must an artist create not only the work but all the source material as well? Can’t inspiration happen in a variety of ways?
The sources should certainly be acknowledged, in my opinion, but I do believe Gershwin did that.
Making art is firing at a moving target, and in my opinion, building a set of rules for what is and isn’t an acceptable way to do it seems antithetical to creativity. If it’s wrong for Gershwin to be inspired and influenced by great black music of the day, would it also be wrong for Charlie Parker to be inspired by Hindemith and Prokofiev to grow jazz into more of a twelve-tone music? Would Coltrane no longer be acceptable, because he drew considerable inspiration from Indian music, African music, and Stravinsky? Was Chick Corea wrong to be deeply inspired by Bartok, or is that fine because they are both “white”?
I couldn’t agree more with Fleck. Art doesn’t live in a vacuum. And neither do we.
I’m not trying to recreate something that’s not mine. I’m trying to be who I am: a Jewish kid from Atlanta who heard something in jazz that felt like home. I don’t play it out of imitation. I play it out of gratitude.
And that doesn’t mean the conversation ends here. We still have work to do. We still need to elevate marginalized voices and tell fuller stories of how American music came to be.
But let’s not mistake inclusion for subtraction. We don’t have to diminish Gershwin to make room for Ellington. We can do both. We must do both.
Because this music—this whole rich, tangled, miraculous body of sound—doesn’t belong to any one person or group. It belongs to anyone who feels it. And to everyone who’s ever heard a sound that felt like home—and answered by adding their voice to the chorus.
And with all that in mind, I’m super excited to hear Béla Fleck perform Rhapsody in Blue with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on June 11. How about you?