George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess met with only middling success when it debuted in 1935, but stagings in the 1940s and 1950s ensured its place in musical history. With Hollywood poised to make a motion picture of the opera in the late 1950s, a number of musicians recorded jazz interpretations of the score, ranging from an ambitious Bethlehem record label project to a small-group version by guitarist Mundell Lowe. We’ll hear from those artists as well as Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Hank Jones, and Bill Potts on this edition of Night Lights; “Porgy and Bess: the 1950s Jazz Revival.”
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Archived Audio and playlists for the previous week's program are posted each Monday morning.
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