What is American music?

This seemingly simple but endlessly negotiable question sparked the creation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered Feb. 12, 1924, in midtown Manhattan’s Aeolian Hall.

It’s a conundrum that has long preoccupied Sacramento pianist Lara Downes, who’s carved out an expansive niche by kicking down outdated and nonsensical orthodoxies that long excluded Black and other marginalized composers from the concert hall canon.

Dropping into theSan Francisco Conservatory of Musiclast spring with her buddy, jazz bass starChristian McBride, Downes was again struck by the open-ended query while listening to students in the Conservatory’s Roots, Jazz and American Music program.

“With the centennial of ‘Rhapsody’ coming up, I’ve got all these engagements to play the piece next year, and talking with the RJAM students about their place in that continuum, I started thinking again about what this notion of American music means to me,” Downes told the Chronicle in a recent phone conversation.

Moving at lightning speed — at least by the programmatic standards of performing arts centers — Downes offers a fresh answer to that question at the Conservatory’sCaroline H. Hume Concert Hall on Saturday, Oct. 21, when she premieres a reimagined version of “Rhapsody in Blue” she commissioned from Puerto Rican saxophonist and composer Edmar Colón.

The sold-out “American Kaleidoscope” concert, which also features the world premiere of San Francisco composer Jameson Caps’ “Rumination” and Mason Bates’ “Anthology of Fantastic Zoology,” will belivestreamed.

Immediately after her eureka moment, Downes found a quiet room upstairs at the Conservatory and spent an hour on the phone with Colón. She’d collaborated with him last year at the Boston Pops, playing a suite of Duke Ellington-associated tunes he’d arranged opening with a percussion-laden version of Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” that “wasn’t gimmicky at all,” she said.

“He was finding the layers that were already there and bringing them to the foreground, which was what we talked about with ‘Rhapsody,’ ” she continued. “There’s so much room to bring out different elements in Gershwin, especially of rhythm. It takes on all these dimensions I think he was trying to achieve.”

With Colón on board, she went back downstairs and ran into Jason Hainsworth, RJAM’s executive director, and lined up a cast of young musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra and the RJAM programs led by conductorEdwin Outwater.

After the premiere she plans to record the new work with the students forPentatone, the label acquired by the Conservatory last year.

Much as Gershwin was tasked with writing a piece that spoke to a cultural scene thrumming with creativity — from the Harlem Renaissance, the blues craze sparked by Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit “Crazy Blues,” jazz, vaudeville, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley — Downes sees the Colón commission as an opportunity to reimagine “Rhapsody” for a new generation.

“These students have a really broad outlook,” she said, contrasting the kind of curricula on tap these days at the Conservatory, where she studied before attending the Hochschule for Music in Vienna with Austrian conductor Hans Graf and in the Concert Class of Rudolf Buchbinder at the Music Academy in Switzerland. “They come to this thinking that music can be everything. The process will be very different with them than it would with a professional orchestra.”

《蓝色狂想曲》不是写历史l orchestra. Paul Whiteman, leader of the most popular dance band of the 1920s, wanted a new work that spoke to a nation that had been transformed by massive waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and internally by the migration of African Americans out of the South.

“Rhapsody” was conceived in the midst of a roiling debate over American identity that climaxed with the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Downes notes that an unintended consequence of the legislation allowed her paternal grandfather, a Black Jamaican who was a British subject, to immigrate to Harlem in the mid-’20s.

Gershwin was reluctant to undertake the ambitious assignment on short notice, but Whiteman convinced him with the assurance that he only needed to deliver a piano score. The band’s innovative arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated Gershwin music for Whiteman’s players, which included some of the finest players of the era.

Colón worked from Gershwin’s piano score, and the freedom to imagine “Rhapsody in Blue” stems partly from the fact that the copyright lapsed Jan. 1, 2020.

“It’s possible to look at this piece differently now that it’s in the public domain,” Outwater said. “Edmar can pull in more voices of what was happening in the ’20s, not only what was becoming jazz, but Yiddish theater, vaudeville, pop songs, all these things floating around.”

Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer.