Born Jacob Gershwin in Brooklyn in 1898 to Russian Jewish immigrants, George Gershwin was a roller-skating street kid until he heard a friend's violin through a school window at age ten. When his parents hoisted a piano through the apartment window intending it for his brother Ira, George hijacked it, and by fifteen he had dropped out of school to work as a fifteen-dollar-a-week song plugger in Tin Pan Alley. This episode explores how that gritty commercial apprenticeship taught him the mechanics of a hit, how Al Jolson turned Swanee into a national phenomenon in 1919, and how Rhapsody in Blue, premiered by Paul Whiteman's band in 1924, fused jazz, ragtime, Hebrew chant and Hispanic rhythm with the harmonic architecture of Debussy and Chopin.

The conversation then follows Gershwin's imposter syndrome to Paris, where Maurice Ravel and Nadia  ...