Originally posted by french frank
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Interesting that many jazz musicians didn’t share Ellington’s reservations. Gershwins tunes have been endlessly improvised around : Charlie Parker’s My Old Flame taking a rather syrupy Gershwin ballad into the realms , in my view , of timeless art, They even borrowed Gershwin chord sequences so that if you refer to an I Got Rythmn middle eight jazz musicians know exactly what you mean - it’s used endlessly in 40’s bebop. In turn Gershwin was accused of lifting the four note melody of I got Rhythm from an earlier African American Composer. The truth is it’s almost impossible to work out who’s borrowed / stolen/ copied what from whom. In practice cultural appropriation is simply musicians doing what they’ve always done - I like the sound of that and I’m either going to borrow it, copy it or , in the case of Miles Davis / Gil Evans Porgy and Bess album transform it.
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