When the Library of Congress announced earlier this year that it was dedicating an annual prize for songwriting in the name of George Gershwin, it was fitting that the first recipient was Paul Simon, a composer who has almost nothing in common with Gershwin.

Gershwin was by far the most ambitious of 20th-century music makers. He seems to belong to every phase in the evolution of American popular music and jazz, and yet to none of them. He inspired virtually everybody, from Leonard Bernstein to Duke Ellington to Mr. Simon, yet there’s no one who did quite what he did.

The tendency is to associate Gershwin’s music with the era that produced it, yet even though he wrote for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (and, before that, Fred and Adele Astaire), Gershwin’s music no more belongs to the 1930s than Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemp” belongs in a medley of nostalgic hits from the World War I era. Gershwin’s music was even more of a part of the 1950s, when “Porgy and Bess” first began to be widely performed and when Gershwin’s songs became a foundation fixture of the LP medium. Today, there are new Gershwin collections every year. This summer, as we approach the 70th anniversary of his death, there are at least two: singer Patti Austin’s “Avant Gershwin” (Rendezvous) and guitarist Frank Vignola’s “Vignola Plays Gershwin” (Mel Bay).

Something about Gershwin, who, through his brief career, moved from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway to Hollywood to Swing Street to the philharmonic and the opera house, inspires an increasingly larger-than-life presentation. As early as 1939 (only two years after the composer’s death from a brain tumor at 38), when hardly anyone was thinking about a larger context for the popular song, one of the first jazz or pop albums to emerge was a 78 rpm collection of Gershwin songs by the chanteuse Lee Wiley. In 1950, not long after the 10-inch LP was invented, Ella Fitzgerald quickly established herself as the leader of the songbook-album format by recording her first of three Gershwin collections. When next the 12-inch LP was rolled out, both Chris Connor and Sarah Vaughan tried to beat Fitzgerald to the punch by recording a more impressive, large-scale Gershwin package. Fitzgerald eventually got the last laugh, as it were, with her massive 1959 project that encompassed five whole LPs and utilized a symphony-size orchestra helmed by the legendary Nelson Riddle.

As the decades wore on, the Gershwin arms race continued: When Vaughan recorded a fullscale philharmonic collection of Gershwin tunes with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Fitzgerald countered by turning out a jazzier Gershwin package, but in collaboration with another of his greatest philosophical heirs, André Previn.

The idea of an over-the-top, aggressively ambitious Gershwin production is at the heart of Ms. Austin’s “Avant Gershwin,” which, because of Fitzgerald’s longstanding relationship with the composer, is a logical followup to the R&B hitmaker’s 2002 tribute to Fitzgerald. Like that album, the new set employs the WDR Big Band of Germany (under the direction of the arranger Michael Abene). Recorded live in two cities in Germany last year, “Avant Gershwin” is first and foremost a very loud album. The composer of “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Concerto in F” always seems to justify extended presentations; roughly half the album is taken up by two outsized medleys — a general Gershwin gathering and one of “Porgy and Bess.”

The ostentatious presentation does seem to be inherently Gershwin-esque; just as Ms. Austin is a contemporary pop singer, who like many others is now doing jazz and standards, the Gershwin oeuvre incorporates big bands, show music, blues, and even something like soul music. Ms. Austin and Mr. Abene realize that “Clap Your Hands,” which begins the first mega-medley, was the Motown of its day, representing Gerhwin’s inspiration to channel of the energy and soul of black church music into mainstream pop in the form of a jazzed-up approximation of a Southern spiritual. Mr. Abene further jazzes it up with an odd-meter funk backbeat. Elsewhere, Ms. Austin corrects a piece of period dialect by singing “mama” instead of “mammy” in Gershwin’s 1919 hit, “Swannee.”

Both medleys are excitingly arranged by Mr. Abene, but though they are musically thrilling, they also shift jarringly from one song to the next, which seems excessively tricky for its own sake and almost deliberately prevents Ms. Austin from getting to the emotional core of any song. The album is all orchestral and vocal fireworks with very few heartfelt interpretations of the great Gershwin songs (which was the point of virtually all of Fitzgerald’s Gershwin projects). Even the one ballad on the set, “Love Walked In,” is transformed into a medley. This is a highly entertaining package with no shortage of razzle-dazzle, but it could use a little more jazz-age soul.

Mr. Vignola’s “Vignola Plays Gershwin” co-stars the drummer Joe Ascione (the guitarist’s partner from his long-running band, the Frank & Joe Show), along with bassist Tom Kennedy and the rhythm guitarist Corey Christiansen. Although the record is in the contemporary swing idiom, and most of the tracks are fastas-a-bastard (to use the technical term), it’s a much more intimate approach to Gershwin. The use of a second guitar, rather than a keyboard, would ordinarily reveal Mr. Vignola’s roots as a modern-day descendant of Django Reinhardt, but here only “Lady Be Good” recalls the Gypsy swing touch directly.

Mr. Vignola opens with “I Got Rhythm,” which is as much a mission statement as a song title. The whole album is, indeed, driven by tempo, from the two superfast “rhythm” tunes — “I Got” and “Fascinatin'” — to the slow, blues-based “Summertime” (which features a long Reinhardt-esque arpeggio), the lightly Latin “Somebody Loves Me” and “The Man I Love,” which opens as a solo rubato ballad but shifts in to dancetime for the second chorus. Mr. Vignola’s faster numbers illustrate how much Reinhardt learned from Art Tatum — the two were among the speedier players of theswing era— and how much both pioneers, and all subsequent jazzmen, gleaned from Gershwin, his melodies, his chords, his virtuoso tradition, and his forging of new respect for the American musician.

wfriedwald@nysun.com