A many-media retailer near me stocks the audio CD of this Grammy award-winning collection of Gershwin show tunes in the jazz section of the music department. It consists of twelve delightful, delovely jazz arrangements and one cut of Gershwin playing his own song, digitally remastered from an old piano roll (for more of that, see page 121). Squeezed into an extra-thick jewel box is a long booklet of liner notes, including pianist/composer/entrepreneur Dave Grusin musings.
Meanwhile, in the video section of the same store, you can buy a CD-I version for a few dollars more. So what's the value added?
On the CD-I, the songs come with nicely paced slide shows. Someone had a lot of fun arranging and sometimes lightly colorizing shots of Gershwin and friends at parties, boats leavin' soon for New York, and of other period material. Grusin's musings appear on video, as do the liner notes. You can elect to hear more piano rolls, and recordings of Gershwin from early radio shows.
The one flaw is a typical over-insistence on interactivity. The piano rolls, interviews, and radio shows are 'hear once' or 'hear infrequently' material, things that can be included because the interactive structure allows you not to hear them. Playing this disc should take you directly to the play-all loop of Grusin riffs. Instead you get a cute Broadway marquee interface, and have to make choices. Worse, if you don't choose anything (or just press 'play' on the CD-I with the TV interface off) an annoying help message appears to belabor the obvious, rattling on about the wonders of interactivity.
The CD-I version has nevertheless become one of the most-played discs in my household, along with others in a similar format (a World Beat collection called "Earth Rhythms," "A Revolution in Color" on early 20th-century Russian painters and composers, and "Simple Gifts," pairing Aaron Copland with images of folk art.) They're nice for social situations, offering something to watch at will that doesn't dominate the room the way television usually does. Sometimes all you want is multimedia lite.
The Gershwin Connection: US$24.98. Philips CDi: (800) 845 7301, +1 (310) 217 1300.
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