Pauline Alpert

February 22 - 29, 1 9 9 6

**** Pauline Alpert

KEYBOARD WIZARDS OF THE GERSHWIN ERA, Volume I

(Pearl)

One of my favorite streetcorners is the intersection of high art and pop culture, where George Gershwin lives. Record producer Artis Wodehouse had a big hit a couple of years ago with a recording of Gershwin piano rolls, and last year she produced an album of Gershwin playing tunes by other composers. Now she's started a series that features other pianists of the period: Zez Confrey, Billy Mayerl, Frank Banta, and Roy Bargy (who made a famous recording of Rhapsody in Blue). They're known as "novelty" pianists because of the wit and playfulness of their arrangements. No one could make these complicated riffs sound so effortless without considerable classical training, and though what they play is as carefully written out as a Beethoven sonata, everything sounds as if it were being improvised on the spot. The first album in this new series is devoted to recordings made some 50 years ago by Pauline Alpert, "The Whirlwind Pianist," "The First Lady of the Keyboard."

These 27 selections come from a wide variety of sources: show tunes by Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, Youmans, Arlen, and Berlin; movie songs ranging from "Whistle While You Work" to "The Continental"; old chestnuts like Paul Lincke's "The Glow Worm" (in a particularly freewheeling version); patriotic medleys; novelty numbers like Raymond Scott's "Toy Trumpet"; a couple of Alpert's own tunes; and, among my favorites, jazzy arrangements of classical or semi-classical pieces, like Rimsky-Korsakov's "Song of India" (which quotes Scheherazade) and Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody.

Although the pieces all tend to sound the same, the technical virtuosity is full of surprises, the jokes are funny, and the rhythmic drive is irresistible. I keep listening to this album over and over. Addictions, after all, come not from a desire for change but from a need to keep repeating one's pleasures.

-- Lloyd Schwartz