Donna Summer - Dinner With Gershwin

Donna Summer was making a slow but steady comeback after a couple of flops ("Cats Without Claws" and her unreleased "I'm A Rainbow" which had some real pop gems but was deemed a disaster by David Geffen) when she released, mid-1987, this atmospheric little pop number called, intriguingly, "Dinner With Gershwin". It was a little more R & B with a hint of 80s smooth jazz, a catchy beat - rich and layered, and her sexy purr that took you on a daydream of intellectual longing. Barely missing the top 40, the question remained: why wasn't this song a bigger hit? Perhaps it may not have received enough promotion, Donna Summer was analogous with all things disco (and [disco] was, allegedly, long since dead even when now it was called Hi-NRG or simply Dance) . . . or it simply got caught in the mess of sounds that were hitting the airwaves back then - that was the year of Pet Shop Boys, of sophisti-pop, of George Michael, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson's "Bad", of heavy metal bands exploding into our ears with pop-friendly confections. It's a shame. Dinner With Gershwin is one of her better "obscure" songs - almost an oddity in itself as it almost sounds nothing like her but something Jody Watley would have performed. Even so, it deserves a closer listen alongside her return to Euro-dance form with the Stock-Aiken-Waterman production "Another Place and Time".