The Jazz and Classical Music Society

The recent post of Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra was amazingly popular, so I've come up with a few more items that mix the two genres in some way - or more accurately, mix musicians from the two genres. 

Here is the first such item, a Columbia LP from 1956 from the Jazz and Classical Music Society, which was formed the previous year by Gunther Schuller and John Lewis - the former from the classical realm, the latter from jazz. The idea was (as the name suggests) to bring together composers and instrumentalists from both sides to form something new. This effort would later adopt the name "third-stream" music. 

In this, the earliest example of such music, we have several pieces for a large brass ensemble. Side one is a Schuller symphony that was not written for this ensemble. Here it is conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, who apparently also programmed it with the New York Philharmonic. 

The second side has compositions by three famous jazz artists - Lewis, J.J. Johnson and Jimmy Giuffre. None of these compositions are in any recognizable form jazz, nor are they what we would usually consider classical music. They are a form of concert music that many musicians were interested in pursuing at the time, perhaps concerned that jazz was not "serious" enough. 

This music does indeed sound very serious - it is at times attractive and at times impressive, and often both. What it is missing, however, is what made the Reiner-CSO performance of Liebermann's piece stand out - wit and swing. Even so, there is much here to enjoy - particularly the superior instrumentalism of the band and soloists Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Joe Wilder. 

This was one of those transfers from hell - two turntables, three cartridges and four styli later I have an acceptable product, although some restle remains in the Schuller. The next post in this line will be pianist Friedrich Gulda, who managed to straddle both the jazz and classical worlds successfully.