who &.html

Who & what

We're eleven men from all over the world with one passion: we love the song
Summertime, the famous first area of the opera Porgy & Bess as
sung by Clara and composed by George Gershwin.
The Summertime Connection exists for about 7 years and started with
only two members, Arjan and David. After a year they had about 1,000
recordings when they met Hans trough the then very popular Napster.
Hans had about 400 new recordings and so they teamed up. In consecutive
order the club grew with Bruno, Johannes, Stelios, Henry, Joost, Frank,
Rainer and Dmitry. Our nationalities are rather diverse: Austria,
Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Russia and the USA.
Our aim is simple: we want to have as many recordings of Summertime as
possible. That means we search the Internet, we ask artists or collectors for
their recordings, a.s.o. At the end of February 2008 we passed the
10,000 frontier (see the music page) and we want to thank all of those
who have helped us to obtain this result.
We maintain a very extensive database with as much data about
Summertime-performances as possible., but not only that but also about
5.000 records about songs published with the title Summertime, but not
written by Gershwin.
A long tradition of collecting recordings of Summertime exist. Already
in 1994 Paul Groenendijk and Jimmy Tigges published their Dutch book:
Summertime: moed gevraagd bij de 834ste versie (Summertime: asked for
courage with the 834th version). The Summertime Connection has taken
this work as its basis, but has now widened it to unknown dimensions.