ABSTRACT

There is a sweet scene in A Song Is Born, a Samuel Goldwyn film from 1948, in which a group of musicians present a radio broadcast about the evolution of jazz. A stellar cast of performers—Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa, Mel Powell, Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Bellson, and members of the Golden Gate Quartet—subject a simple tune to a series of riffs, casting it as an African tribal dance, a Latin samba, a black spiritual, a popular song, and, finally, a swing piece for jazz combo. Even if the movie failed at the box office, this sequence is of major interest to the rest of us: The “folk” melody, never credited, is in fact the “Largo” from Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony in E minor (From the New World), written during the composer’s American sojourn of 1892–1895. 1