George Gershwin

George Gershwin, born in Brooklyn in 1898, wrote music with one foot in Tin Pan Alley and the other in the concert hall. He started out as a song plugger, studied piano with Charles Hambitzer, and began writing for Broadway with his brother Ira and with Buddy DeSylva. Early songs like "Swanee" and "Fascinating Rhythm" that sound as fresh as a subway rush.

Rhapsody in Blue, from 1924, is the big bang, jazz and symphony colliding on the same stage. An American in Paris and the Piano Concerto kept pushing the idea, and the story goes that when he asked Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel for lessons, both turned him down for fear that formal training would sand the jazz right out of him. Standards like "Embraceable You" and "I Got Rhythm" followed, and in 1935 he and Ira wrote Porgy and Bess with DuBose Heyward, an opera that flopped at first and later came to be treated as an American classic, "Summertime" and all.

He went to Hollywood to write film scores and died of a brain tumor in 1937, just 38. The honors kept coming long after: a Grammy Trustees Award in 1986, a special Pulitzer citation in 1998 and a Congressional Gold Medal.

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