[5][6][7] Gershwin's piece inaugurated a new era in America's musical history,[8] established his reputation as an eminent composer and became one of the most popular of all concert works.

[10] Following the success of an experimental classical-jazz concert held with Canadian singer Éva Gauthier in New York City on November 1, 1923, bandleader Paul Whiteman decided to attempt a more ambitious feat.

[2] He asked composer George Gershwin to write a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert in honor of Lincoln's Birthday to be given at Aeolian Hall.

[4][25] Entitled "An Experiment in Modern Music",[3] the much-anticipated concert held by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra drew a packed house.

[4][26] The excited audience consisted of "vaudevillians, concert managers come to have a look at the novelty, Tin Pan Alleyites, composers, symphony and opera stars, flappers, cake-eaters, all mixed up higgledy-piggledy.

"[25] A number of influential figures of the era were present, including Carl Van Vechten,[8] Marguerite d'Alvarez,[8] Victor Herbert,[27] Walter Damrosch,[27] and Willie "the Lion" Smith.

[29][30] Whiteman had selected the music to exemplify the "melodies, harmony and rhythms which agitate the throbbing emotional resources of this young restless age.

"[31] The concert's lengthy program listed 26 separate musical movements, divided into 2 parts and 11 sections, bearing titles such as "True Form Of Jazz" and "Contrast—Legitimate Scoring vs.

"[8] Olin Downes, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, favorably noted the rhapsody as a "highly original form", and the composer as a "new talent finding its voice.

[62] Grofé orchestrated this adaptation for a more standard "pit orchestra", which included one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon, three saxophones; two French horns, two trumpets, and two trombones; as well as the same percussion and strings complement as the later 1942 version.

It is scored for solo piano and an orchestra consisting of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets in B♭ and A, one bass clarinet, two bassoons, two alto saxophones in E♭, one tenor saxophone in B♭; three French horns in F, three trumpets in B♭, three trombones, one tuba; a percussion section that includes timpani, one suspended cymbal, one snare drum, one bass drum, one tam-tam, one triangle, one glockenspiel, and cymbals; one tenor banjo; and strings.

[61] Grofé's other arrangements of Gershwin's piece include those done for Whiteman's 1930 film, King of Jazz,[64] and the concert band setting (playable without piano) completed by 1938 and published 1942.

[67] After the warm reception of Rhapsody in Blue by the audience at Aeolian Hall, Gershwin recorded several abridged versions of his composition in different formats.

[68] On June 10, 1924, Gershwin and Whiteman's orchestra created an acoustic recording running 8 minutes and 59 seconds and issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company.

In July 1935, after several years of performing the rhapsody for sold-out audiences in Massachusetts,[75] conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra recorded the first unabridged version—nearly fourteen minutes in length—with Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá for RCA Victor.

[77] At the time, contemporary critics praised Fiedler for jettisoning the so-called "jazzy sentimentality" of Grofé's earlier arrangement and adding a "more symphonic richness and authority.

"[78] During the final months of World War II, amid the box-office success of the Gershwin biographical film Rhapsody in Blue (1945), pianist Oscar Levant recorded the now iconic composition with Eugene Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra on August 21, 1945.

In Summer 1973, Brazilian jazz-rock artist Eumir Deodato reinterpreted Gershwin's rhapsody in an abridged version that featured uptempo neo‐samba rhythms.

[87][88] In the wake of Deodato's earlier reinterpretation, French pianist Richard Clayderman recorded a similarly abridged disco arrangement in 1978 which became one of his signature pieces.

[89][90] Concurrent with the emergence of these more diverse interpretations, scholarly interest revived in the original 1924 arrangement by Ferde Grofé which had not been performed since the end of the Jazz Age.

On February 14, 1973, conductor Kenneth Kiesler and pianist Paul Verrette performed Grofé's original arrangement on the University of New Hampshire campus.

[92] One hundred years after the debut of Gershwin's rhapsody in 1924, tens of thousands of orchestras as well as solo pianists have recorded the piece, both abridged and unabridged.

Gershwin frequently uses a recursive harmonic progression of minor thirds to give the illusion of motion when in fact a passage does not change key from beginning to end.

"[7] Howard posits that the work's legacy is best understood as embodying the cultural zeitgeist of the Jazz Age: Beginning with that incomparable, flamboyant clarinet solo, Rhapsody is irresistible still, with its syncopated rhythmic vibrancy, its abandoned, impudent flair that tells more about the Roaring Twenties than could a thousand words, and its genuine melodic beauty colored a deep, jazzy blue by the flatted sevenths and thirds that had their origins in the African-American slave songs.

[111] In 1941, social historian Peter Quennell opined that Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby embodied "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune.

[59][113] Various writers, such as the American playwright and journalist Terry Teachout, have likened Gershwin himself to the character of Gatsby due to his attempt to transcend his lower-class background, his abrupt meteoric success, and his early death while in his thirties.

"[114] Likewise, music historian Vince Giordano has opined that "the syncopation, the blue notes, the ragtime and jazz rhythms that Gershwin wrote in 1924 was really a feeling of New York City in that amazing era.

"[114] Accordingly, the opening montage of Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan features a rendition by Zubin Mehta in which quintessential New York scenes are set to the music of Gershwin's famed jazz concerto.

[121] Since 1980, the piece has been used by United Airlines in their advertisements, in pre-flight safety videos, and in the Terminal 1 underground walkway at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

[122][123] Rhapsody in Blue was sampled in Ben Folds Five's "Philosophy"[124] and South Korean girl groups Red Velvet's "Birthday"[125] and Loossemble's "Real World".