![]() ![]() Big bands such as Duke Ellington and His Orchestra followed, opting in 1956 to perform it at a more moderate swing tempo. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s 1958 album Porgy and Bess reinterprets the solo aria as a duet, with Armstrong both playing his trumpet and singing in a dialogue with Fitzgerald. In his 1959 recording, Miles Davis arranges “Summertime” for trumpet, and he improvises on the melody over a walking bass line. Though these are among the most famous, over 25,000 recordings and arrangements of “Summertime” have been made since the opera’s premiere, with each artist taking a distinct musical approach.īy the 1960s, “Summertime” found its way outside of the jazz world and into other, perhaps more unexpected genres. The Zombies, an English rock band, released a stripped-down cover of “Summertime” in their eponymous 1964 debut EP. ![]() This version stayed fairly true to the original, with a guitar imitating the opera’s string swells at a driving tempo and only minor alterations to the lyrics. This version’s greatest impact, however, was not its musical innovation, but rather the entrance of “Summertime” into the rock music scene. Like fellow British Invasion groups The Beatles and The Kinks, The Zombies toured in the U.S. in the 1960s and saw great international success. As they garnered a wider audience, songs like their Gershwin cover became increasingly popular in the U.S. bands, The Zombies helped define 1960s rock, and Gershwin’s music further cemented its place in the ever-evolving popular music sphere. Thirty years after The Zombies’ cover, another artist took a new approach to “Summertime.” Ska-punk band Sublime, a ’90s group from Long Beach, California who drew heavily on a wide variety of genres, including hip hop, punk rock, and reggae, looked back to the 1960s for inspiration. Sublime took a liking to an improvised, bossa nova rendition of Gershwin’s aria on jazz flutist Herbie Mann’s 1961 live album, Herbie Mann at the Village Gate. They sampled Mann’s track, mixed the flute melody with drums, and then recorded half-sung, half-rapped vocals over the track. Featuring elements such as record scratches and vocal growls, the song is unmistakably modern in its experimentation and use of technology. Though the lyrics differ from librettist DuBose Heyward’s original text, the first line of the aria is kept relatively intact, as Sublime sings “Doin’ time, and the living’s easy” to the same melody heard in Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Sublime titled their Mann-inspired work “Doin’ Time,” which tells the story of a cheating lover whose treatment makes the singer feel imprisoned (“doin’ time”). ![]()
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