“[I] loved Greg’s music direction. And the band made that music that I’ve heard so much — yeah, I wore out the grooves on the original cast album when I was in high school — sound really fresh and authentic.

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“In November [of 2007], Greg Bolin was hired to do an unenviable task: reassess, edit, and rewrite a masterpiece, Porgy and Bess. And not only did Bolin have to work with George Gershwin’s intimidating score; he also had to work with the signature reinterpretations of it by some of America’s best known and highly skilled musical artists: Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Cleo Laine and Ray Charles, and Nina Simone, among others. To take all those artistic voices and visions and put them together into one work that retained the best of each while creating a cohesive larger whole is, at the least, a challenge. The end result would need to serve and support the narrative; rather than simply be a revue that skips around the decades and styles, Bolin’s version had to capture a singular place and time.
The Zachary Scott Theatre Center found the right person for the job, as there is probably no composer in Austin better prepared for this particular assignment... Listen and welcome a new compositional voice to the Austin scene.
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