And speaking of Gershwin, Ira Gershwin's Bunny Berigan - I Can't Get Started. I know very little about music -- being one of those who only "knows what I like" and am ignorant of the theory. Which brings me to the ending of Berigan's I Can't Get Started. The song is a ballad with a great trumpet solo. But the ending, while not dissonant, has long struck me as not fitting with the mood of the song as a whole. To my untrained ears, those final few uptempo, hurried notes just seem to be tacked on. It's one of my favorite songs and I still recall listening to it in my childhood days back in the 1940s. Even then, as a kid, the ending struck me a somewhat cartoonish way to wrap up a great piece of music.
Indeed, the ending of “I Can’t Get Started” does sound somewhat cartoonish.
I like the topical references in the lyrics—to the Spanish Civil War, FDR, and Hollywood movies—appropriate for a song from the early months of 1938.