Dead Germans.That’s what music was when I...

Dead Germans.

That’s what music was when I started out. Seventy years of usherin’ at Carnegie Hall. I tell you, I’ve heard it all.

It wasn’t bad, if you like that kind of thing. Dead German music, I mean. But the audiences weren’t any livelier. Kinda comatose, you might say. Listenin’ so quiet and still, like they were wired to heart-lung machines in their seats. Sometimes I’d think of tradin’ in my flashlight for a shovel. Tips were so scarce I could hardly afford the subway fare up to Harlem, where the jazz clubs were.

Jazz was music, too, and live guys played it--but in smoky dives with gunshots for percussion, not in Carnegie Hall.

It wasn’t serious, the dead-German crowd said. In fact, no American music was serious. Americans didn’t wear wigs, for one thing. You could pronounce their names. And God help ‘em if they wrote something that made your toes tap.

Then came Georgie.

George Gershwin, I mean. He put jazz into classical. He put fun into serious. He put the whole all-American combination up there on the stage at Carnegie Hall, and he made the orchestra play it fit to raise the dead.

Judgin’ by some of the folks I saw clappin’, he did.

A concert of Gershwin’s and Cole Porter’s music will be presented at the First United Methodist Church of Glendale, 134 N. Kenwood St., at 7:30 p.m. Saturday ($10 donation).

And the Glendale Symphony Orchestra will perform more Gershwin at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday; information and reservations (818) 500-8720 ($8 to $45).