While working on the video that you’ll find at the end of this piece which showcases Lee’s improvisation abilities, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles was reminded of an interview that Lee gave to Wayne Enstice [WE] and Paul Rubin [PR] which appears in their book JAZZ SPOKEN HERE: Conversations with 22 Musicians [New York: DaCapo Press, 1994].
Over the fifty years or so that I have been listening to Lee, and with the exception of the more involved pieces that he has recorded featuring the work of Bull Russo, Jimmy Giuffre and The Metropole Orchestra, for example, I have always been struck by the fact that Lee seemed to limit the tunes in his repertoire to a few standards.
I never knew what the reasons were for Lee’s attenuated range of songs until I read the following in Lee’s interview with Wayne and Paul.
"PR: We've noticed that on some of your albums certain standards reappear and, also, that on other tunes the changes sound very similar.
LK: You say, first of all, the changes, the tunes were similar? I don't know what you mean by that. PR: The chord changes.
LK: I know what you mean by chord changes, but what tunes I wonder did you have in mind?
PR: "I'll Remember April." There are other songs that sound like that one. One may even be called "April," but on a different record.
LK: Oh, they're all "I Remember April" but with different titles. Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that's simply a result of, I mean that's basically my repertoire, that few dozen tunes. And if I'm not setting up a special set of material for a record, I will choose those songs I like best and try 'em again, without the melody, say, just using the structure of the song,
WE: So you prefer having a limited body of material to play?
LK: If we have a little short confessional here [laughter], I keep thinking that it doesn't matter what tunes you play. The process is the same, and if it works then it's like a new piece, you know. And it is a fact that the better you know the song the more chances you might dare take. And so that's why Bird played a dozen tunes all his life, basically, and most of the people that were improvising—Tristano played the same dozen tunes all his life. And you know, it's amazing what depth he got. He wouldn't have gotten that otherwise, I don't think, in that particular way.
I think it's something similar to Monet painting the lily pond at all times of the day, catching the reflection of the light. I just feel with each situation I'm in, different rhythm sections or whatever, that "I'll Remember April" becomes just something else. And it is a very preferable point — that's the main thing. Everybody who knows that material knows that material pretty well — the listeners and the musicians. So they know, you can just nakedly reveal if anything's happening or not; there's no subterfuge. And that aspect of it is appealing to me, I think.”
Lee performs I'll Remember April from his Verve Motion! LP with Sonny Dallas, bass and Elvin Jones, drums.
From time-to-time, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles likes to turn its attention to vocal Jazz, especially when something new and different catches it’s ear.
Such was the case recently when Marilena Paradisi, a vocal Jazz artist based in Italy reached out with a request to send me her latest recording.
Some Place Called “Where” is the eighth album by the well known italian vocalist Marilena Paradisi and she brings to the music on it a growing lyrical awareness and a very special partnership with the American piano master Kirk Lightsey.
Released by Norwegian label Losen Records [LOS-187-2], Some Place Called “Where” is not a solo vocal album with a guest accompanist.
Rather, it is a duo recording that features Marilena’s voice and Kirk’s piano as they interplay around the music contained in the eight tracks that make up the recording.
Marilena says: “I've been very lucky to see Kirk playing live and every time his pianism struck me: he has style, energy and dynamism. He is a multi-instrumentalist, he plays flute and cello too. He has an unique style, a marvellous touch (he makes the piano singing!) and an unusual harmonic choice, inspired by the classical music he loves. Kirk himself doesn't like being considered as a "jazz musician", he doesn't like the way this word has been used nowaday. Kirk loves to say that music is magic, otherwise it is not music! Kirk keeps on searching for magic when he plays and he encourages you to find it, thanks his skill to play few notes for a magic mood.”
Kirk Lightsey says: “It's a really special project for me because to play in duo and this choice of repertoire makes me find orchestral sound of the piano, which is very important to me. Finding in that music the sound of suspense, mystery, sense of infinite space, affection and emotions is important for my feelings in music. Marilena has a very special voice and a lot of talent, I could say technically for her particular timbre, for intonation, flexibility, musicality, she is expressive and has great timing, but in one word she is very artistic and with this I mean that when she sings she is able to sing her feelings deeply and that's why she's expressive, and perfect for this repertoire.”
The title Some Place Called “Where” comes from a tune written by Wayne Shorter and the background of the tunes that make up the CD and how they were approached by Marilena and Kirk are discussed in the following insert notes by David Fishel which are presented in English followed by an Italian version.
Some Place Called “Where” features eight tracks, a sort of "niche repertoire" with a direct and touching expressiveness of Marilena and Kirk, who travel for forty minutes in their world: improvisation, studies in India and voice as an instrument for Paradisi, glorious and beautiful work with Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, Pharoah Sanders and Lester Bowie, and love for classical music too, for Lightsey.
This perfect coupling, this musical marriage with its velvety vocals and its pianistic perfection, is a rare delicacy. It is an album filled with melodious and harmonious manoeuvre, implemented with skill and with grace.
Marilena Paradisi conveys raw emotion through her impressive vocal range; she scats, she soars, her voice as much an instrument as Kirk Lightsey’s all-encompassing piano. The overall sound is so much fuller than you might expect from a duo, with Kirk’s progressive harmonic range and quality of touch often presenting an orchestral-sounding accompaniment. But it is the intimacy of the interplay that most impresses. You feel that they are playing – for you!
Italian-born Marilena has been active on the international jazz scene since 1994, with an abundance of recording, concert and master class credits – at the very highest level. American-born Kirk is the consummate maestro. His credit list is of the finest pedigree and includes five albums with Chet Baker – oh, and he also happened to tour with Dexter Gordon from 1979-1983.
The album’s title track is a beautiful rendition of Wayne Shorter’s winding and multifaceted Some Place Called “Where.” A complex tune delivered with clarity and composure.
All the selections in this stress-free zone are lovingly crafted. Tunes such as Portrait (Charles Mingus) and Little Waltz (Ron Carter) and Brazilian songwriter Dori Caymmi’s Like A Lover exemplify music that has been carefully chosen for depth and for sincerity. The final track Fresh Air is a self-descriptive Lightsey/Paradisi original. Kirk also treats us to a charming and lyrical flute solo. It’s the perfect conclusion to a perfect album.”
David Fishel
“Questo accoppiamento perfetto, questo matrimonio musicale con i suoi velluti e la sua perfezione pianistica, è una delizia rara. È un album pieno di manovre melodiche e armoniche realizzate con abilità e grazia.
Marilena Paradisi trasmette emozioni immediate attraverso la sua impressionante gamma vocale; Lei fa scat, lei svetta, la sua voce è uno strumento tanto quanto l'avvolgente pianoforte di Kirk Lightsey. Il suono complessivo è molto più pieno di quanto si possa aspettare da un duo, con la progressiva gamma armonica di Kirk e la qualità del tocco, quasi da accompagnamento orchestrale. Ma è l'intimità dell'interazione tra i due che più colpisce. Senti che stanno suonando - per te!
Marilena è attiva nella scena internazionale del jazz dal 1994, con un'abbondanza di registrazioni, concerti e studi al massimo livello. Kirk, americano, è il maestro perfetto. Il suo pedigree è dei migliori, tanto da comprendere cinque album con Chet Baker e un tour con Dexter Gordon dal 1979 al 1983.
La title-track è una splendida interpretazione dell'arioso e sfaccettato brano di Wayne Shorter. Una melodia complessa consegnata con chiarezza e compostezza. Tutti i pezzi scelti ed eseguiti in questa dimensione rilassata e intima sono rifiniti amorevolmente. Portrait (Charles Mingus), Little Waltz (Ron Carter) e Like A Lover (Dori Caymmi) sono un buon esempio di questa musica scelta per profondità e sincerità. Fresh Air è un brano di Kirk che rappresenta bene il dialogo tra i due, Kirk ci regala anche un solo di flauto incantevole e lirico. La perfetta conclusione di un album perfetto.”
The following Soundcloud audio-only file presents Marilena and Kirk on Mal Waldron’s Soul Eyes.
“Kuroda's aim is to express
the concept of motion. Using the bicycle as the primary object, he soon added
umbrellas. The idea came from a scene in a Hitchcock film.
Maybe it was the sense of
mystery created by the visual absence of people, or maybe he simply felt that
umbrellas would add mass to his compositions. Other changes in composition have
developed over the years: in his early works, the bicycles and umbrellas were
floating in vacant space. He then added trees, walls, fences, walkways, with
the static structures emphasizing the rushing movement.
He uses a variety of
different intaglio printing processes to achieve contrast in his lines some sharp
and thin, others thick and blurred" and in his background or colour
areas" some smooth and uniform, others dappled or textured.”
- Hanga Ten, Contemporary Japanese Print
Website
Kuroda is one of the most
important Japanese printmakers living today. He became famous in 1979 when the ClevelandMuseum
of Art organized the exhibition: 21 Young Contemporary Japanese Printmakers.
Kuroda suggests that things
move so quickly in Tokyo
that he wants to reflect the speed and movement in his bicycles. The umbrella
is a very traditional symbol of Japan.
- The Verne Collection Website
Shigeki Kuroda, a long
favorite at Luber Gallery, with his whizzing bicycles. He uses the bike image
in the foreground, and is forever designing new environments for them to drive
through.
- The Gilbert Luber Gallery Website
“If I were given Lee Konitz's
name in a word association test, my automatic corollary term would be
‘integrity.’ At thirty-four, Lee is still firmly self-contained, direct and
laconic in speech, and impregnably committed to his own way of personalizing
the jazz language. The winds of change that keep most of the jazz world in a
perpetual state of hurricane alert (as poll winners are toppled and ‘hippies’
change their definitions of what's ‘in’) have left Konitz unruffled. He keeps
deepening the direction he has chosen, works where he can providing he has
complete musical freedom, and teaches one day a week. In the past few years, as
‘funky,’ ‘soulful,’ hard,’ and various forms of experimental jazz have nearly
monopolized the foreground of jazz publicity, Konitz has become part of what
Paul Desmond calls ‘the jazz underground.’
Yet Konitz's jazz conception
is so singular and provocative that his influence is still felt, especially in Europe.
Nor certainly has that influence disappeared in America.
Konitz has set standards of melodic continuity and freshness of line that are
respected by musicians who are otherwise widely dissimilar to him in approach;
and I'm sure that as the scope of jazz improvisation continues to expand, the
worth of
in retrospect and he himself
will again be considered an important part of the foreground of jazz exploration.
In this set of performances,
which are among the most consistently resourceful Konitz has ever recorded,
his distinctive qualities are brought into especially clear focus. If, for one
thing, jazz at its most stimulating is indeed ‘the sound of surprise,’ Lee's
playing here is constantly fresh and unpredictable.
He avoids standardized
‘licks’ and limp cliché with persistent determination and instead constructs so
personal and imaginatively flowing a series of thematic variations that the
five standards he has chosen become organically revivified. Konitz goes far
inside a tune, and unlike many jazzmen who skate on the chord changes or ‘wail’
on the melodic surface of a song, Konitz reshapes each piece entirely so that
it emerges as a newly integrated work with permutations of form and expanded
emotional connotations that are uniquely different from the results obtained by
any previous jazz treatment of the piece. …
Consider the command of his
instrument that Konitz must have to execute the swiftly moving and subtly
interrelated ideas that make each of his performances in this album so
pregnant with invention. In addition to the remarkable clarity of Konitz's
supple and ingenious lines, he also is intriguingly skillful in the molding of
series of climaxes of varying intensities so that a topographical musical map
of each performance would show considerably more complexity and variety than is
true of the majority of jazz improvisations. Underneath this multi-layered
logic of ideas is a firm, complementary resilient rhythmic line that is an
integral part of the total design of Konitz's structure. He does not, in short,
depend on the rhythm section to swing him but instead fuses with drums and bass
so that a rare feeling of tripartite unity of execution emerges from these
tracks.”
Nat Hentoff, original liner notes to Motion:
Lee Konitz
One of my first
impressions of Jazz was the sense of motion I felt while listening to the
music.
This feeling of
movement was enhanced when I began playing Jazz because I played it on the
drums with all four limbs going at the same time, just about all the time.
No other musician experiences
Jazz in quite the same way as the drummer.
I’ve been on bikes,
in cars, small and large planes and helicopters, and on amusement park thrill
rides – none of them compares to the feeling of motion generated by a Jazz
group “in full flight” [sorry for the mixed metaphor].
One of the most
jarring experiences I’ve ever had with motion in Jazz was my first listening to
a Verve LP featuring alto saxophonist Lee Konitz with Sonny Dallas on bass and
Elvin Jones on drums that was recorded during the late summer, 1961.
The name of the
recording was – you guessed it – Motion: Lee Konitz [released on CD
as Verve 314 557 107-2].
The original LP
was comprised of the five [5] tunes that Lee, Sonny and Elvin recorded on August
21, 1961. The CD
set is on three discs that contains this music plus a number of other tracks
made around the same time with Dallas on bass and Nick Stabulas on drums that
Konitz labels as “equally compelling.”
Prior to Motion:
Lee Konitz, I had been accustomed to hearing Lee on recordings that
featured a straight-ahead “Cool” style of Jazz. His improvisation on these
recordings from the 1950s was very linear, fluid and heavily influenced by
pianist Lennie Tristano’s harmonic conception of the music.
That all changed
on Motion:
Lee Konitz.
Here, Lee’s solos
were very intense and jagged. They were made to sound even more so by his
choppy phrasing which stopped and started so often that they forced he
listeners’ ears to constantly move in new and different directions.
The rhythmic pulse
that drummer Elvin Jones lays down behind Lee on Motion: Lee Konitz was
also relatively new to me, sometimes, startlingly so.
With its many
accented triplets and other syncopations, Elvin’s drumming interrupted the even
flow of time then characteristic of most modern Jazz.
Elvin along with
Tony Williams revolutionized modern Jazz drumming by altering its motion away
from a linear, metronomic time. Instead of pulling the listener forward, Elvin’s
drumming pushed, shoved and bounced the listener in all directions.
Elvin and Tony
gave the rhythmic prism of Jazz different angles of acceptance and, as such,
changed the manner in which the listener perceived it.
As trumpeter,
composer and bandleader Wynton Marsalis once remarked: “Change the rhythm and
you change the music.”
Lee, Sonny and
Dallas are constantly changing the rhythm on Motion: the motion is
still there, but it is unsettled, jagged and implied. It seems to become
multi-dimensional, almost like the sense experienced when closing one’s eyes
while riding on a roller coaster.
Lee Konitz had
this to say about the music on Motion in the liner notes to the
original LP:
“When asked on a
radio show to comment on one of his records, Lester Young replied: ‘Sorry.
Pres, I never discuss my sex life in public.’ Bless his sweet soul!
After over twenty
years of playing, I find that music is like a great woman: the better you treat
her. the happier she is.
There's not much
for me to say about my music -I play because it's one of the few things that
make sense to me.
When I left
Chicago to come to New York in '48 I had been playing in my own way for a few
years, but for various reasons was unable to understand what it was I had hold
of. A woman can be very elusive! Then came the first recordings, the little
reputation and the working all over the place and practically losing contact
with my whole playing feeling.
Fortunately for
me, I never really made it professionally, so I've had the chance to relax and
get a little insight into my life. Freud said something like it all happens in
the first four years of our life and we spend the rest of the time trying to
figure out what happened. I guess I've always had some kind of feeling to
play; now I'm trying to eliminate as much as I can of what it is that prevents
it from happening
I've been
recording since 1949; I have always tried to improvise — lots of different
settings — some things made it for me, some didn't. This particular record
means something to me.
It was made one
afternoon the end of August with Elvin Jones and Sonny Dallas. This was the
first time the three of us had played together: in fact, I Remember
You was the first tune of the session. We just played what would be the
equivalent of a couple sets in a club and got these five tune* for the album. Elvin loves to play and gets lots of things going on and the time is always
strong; he really is something else. Sonny, to me, is one of the best bass
players around. So I was fortunate to have a good strong rhythm section.
Playing with bass and drums give* me the most room to go in whichever direction
I choose; a chordal instrument is restricting to me.
The thing that I
like about this set is that everyone is trying to improvise. The music will
speak for itself.”
I was reminded of
Lee Konitz’s Motion as a result of a recent viewing of the art of Shigeki
Kuroda and after reading this annotation about it on Hanga Ten, a contemporary
Japanese print website:
“Kuroda's aim is
to express the concept of motion. Using the bicycle as the primary object, he
soon added umbrellas. The idea came from a scene in a Hitchcock film.
Maybe it was the
sense of mystery created by the visual absence of people, or maybe he simply
felt that umbrellas would add mass to his compositions. Other changes in
composition have developed over the years: in his early works, the bicycles and
umbrellas were floating in vacant space. He then added trees, walls, fences,
walkways, with the static structures emphasizing the rushing movement.
He uses a variety
of different intaglio printing processes to achieve contrast in his lines some
sharp and thin, others thick and blurred" and in his background or color
areas" some smooth and uniform, others dappled or textured.”
Upon further
research, I located this information about Kuroda on the Ren Brown gallery website - www.renbrown.com
“Born in 1953 in
Yokohama, Japan, Shigeki Kuroda’s medium are etching, drypoint, mezzotint
& aquatint and mixed media, watercolor paintings
Kuroda is an exciting artist with a distinctive style and subject matter all
his own. After graduating from TamaArtUniversity, he began creating intaglio prints in
1976. He did further study in the United States in 1984, under the auspices of a Japanese
Government Fellowship.
The works are readily recognizable, usually depicting blurred riders on
bicycles, carrying umbrellas. Kuroda has been exploring this theme in a variety
of ways, combining the sharp lines of drypoint etching with the softer tones
and textures of aquatint, to create vivid prints.
Although the figures remain similar in each work, the mood is altered by the
backgrounds. In each, the artist gives the viewer a sense of the hurried speed
of the cyclists, while exploring variations in line, color, texture,
composition, mood, and the use of secondary imagery. He says the theme began as
an exploration of the circle—horizontal in the umbrella or vertical in the
wheel.
Since 2003, Kuroda has done some small prints of flowers, birds and other
animals, occasionally with mezzotint. By different techniques applied to a
copper plate, Kuroda manages to combine effects in such a fashion as to enchant
the viewer. His work has received critical acclaim wherever he has
exhibited--both in Japan and abroad. He continues to live with his
family in Kanagawa, and travels extensively in the United States and Europe.”
Given my perceived symbiotic relationship in the work of Konitz and Kuroda, I
thought it might be fun to put them together in a Jazz/Art video montage.
“When Brandeis University held its fourth Festival of the Creative Arts in 1957 at least one of the programmes represented a most unusual gesture. It consisted of six specially commissioned jazz pieces, and, for what little such distinctions are worth, three were from jazzmen, two from straight composers sympathetic to jazz, and one from a musician active in both spheres.
Though universities are supposed to foster research and other original work, this for many years remained one of the few cases of such an institution doing anything practical to further jazz. To have promoted a concert at which a well known band marketed its familiar product would have been nothing, but here was created a situation in which something new might happen. And there was no aimless or self-indulgent experimenting, an encouragingly high standard being attained by all six composers. One of the pieces may be accounted a partial failure, yet these scores are a mine of ideas for further development.
It might be objected that such commissions, by removing normal commercial pressures, create an artificial situation, that music produced under such circumstances can offer no realistic insight on jazz potentialities, and that the point is proved by so few of the 'ideas for further development' having been widely followed up. But even now it is premature to say that, our perspective being too short. It must be remembered that at all periods of musical history the pieces which really made that history were in their own day the property of only a limited circle of initiates. True, such patronage will seldom be available for jazz until it is safely dead, but it is the worst sort of defeatism to discourage commissions because they are rare.
And there is nothing artificial about the fine quality of the jazz which resulted on this occasion: the best of it affords us a glimpse of the sort of music we might be able to expect if jazz ever breaks away from the normally almost crippling limitations and sense of values of the entertainment business to which it has always been linked. Besides, a good piece of music is its own justification, and compared to its enduring value the conditions under which it was created are finally of little interest.”
- Max Harrison, “The Brandeis Festival LP” in Jazz Retrospect
The Third Stream and After
The following excerpts by Terry Teachout appear in Bill Kirchner, Ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz and provide a nice recap of where Third Stream music has been as well as where it was in 2000, the year this book was published.
And, in contrast with Gunther Schuller retrospective assessment of the success of the music, Terry also does a thorough job of detailing some of the failures and disappointments associated with Third Stream music.
“Starting in the mid-'50s, the Modern Jazz Quartet, a New York—based ensemble led by John Lewis, recorded a series of compositions by Lewis, including "Vendome" (Prestige, 1954) and "Concorde" (Prestige, 1955), that resembled the experimental works of the West Coast school in their attempt to import fugal techniques into a small-group jazz context.
Around the same time, Lewis and the classical composer Gunther Schuller organized the Jazz and Classical Music Society (originally the Modern Jazz Society), a group devoted to the performance of music "written by composers in the jazz field who would not otherwise have an opportunity for their less-conventional work to be presented under concert conditions."
In 1956 a contingent from the Jazz and Classical Music Society recorded Music for Brass (Columbia, 1956), an album of compositions for brass ensemble by Lewis, Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, and J. J. Johnson; the following year, a mixed ensemble of jazz and classical instrumentalists led by Schuller recorded Modern Jazz Concert (Columbia, 1957), a collection of six extended pieces by Schuller, Giuffre, Charles Mingus, George Russell, and the classical composers Milton Babbitt and Harold Shapero, all commissioned by and premiered at the 1957 Brandeis University Festival of the Arts. (The contents of these two albums, minus the pieces by Babbitt and Shapero, are now available on the Columbia CD The Birth of the Third Stream.)
Schuller contended in a lecture at the Brandeis Festival that these works represented a new synthesis of jazz and Western art music, which he dubbed "third stream music." Modern Jazz Concert and Music for Brass soon became the subject of intense debate in the jazz community, and numerous other composers, including Teo Macero, Friedrich Gulda, Andre Hodeir, Gary McFarland, Bill Russo, Eddie Sauter, and Lalo Schifrin, began to experiment with related compositional ideas.
Third stream music is typically (though not always) composed for mixed groups of jazz and classical instrumentalists. The standard jazz rhythm section is sometimes omitted — Russo's An Image of Man (Verve, 1958), for instance, is scored for alto saxophone, guitar and string quartet — and the regularly sounded beat of traditional jazz heard only intermittently. In most third stream works, fully written-out ensemble passages, often of considerable musical complexity, alternate with simpler improvised episodes involving one or more jazz soloists.
The inherent tension between composition and improvisation may be emphasized, as in Sauter's Focus (Verve, 1961), a suite for tenor saxophone and strings in which Stan Getz's solo part is completely improvised from beginning to end; in other pieces, such as Schuller's Transformation (Columbia, 1957), the improvised sections are carefully integrated into the larger compositional scheme.
The extent to which the original third stream composers drew on classical techniques varied considerably. Mixed-media works such as Schuller's Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra (Atlantic, 1960), in which the Modern Jazz Quartet performs the function of the "concertino" ensemble in a concerto grosso, and Giuffre's Piece for Clarinet and String Orchestra (Verve, 1959), a through-composed work whose solo part, though fully notated, presupposes idiomatic jazz inflection, clearly seek to reconcile the disparate elements of jazz and classical music. By contrast, J. J. Johnson's Poem for Brass (included on Music for Brass) and George Russell's All About Rosie (included on Modern Jazz Concert), which are intended for performance by jazz instrumentalists and contain no distinctively "classical" features, conform to the third stream model only in the relative complexity of their harmonic language and formal structure.
The third stream movement continues to this day under the auspices of Schuller and Ran Blake, who chaired the third stream department of the New England Conservatory of Music from 1973, and many highly imaginative mixed-media pieces, including Michael Gibbs's Seven Songs for Quartet and Chamber Orchestra(Gary Burton; ECM, 1973), Claus Ogerman's Symbiosis (Bill Evans; MPS, 1974) and Keith Jarrett's Arbour Zena (ECM, 1975), continued to be premiered and recorded well into the '70s.
Unfortunately, these compositions failed without exception to enter the working repertoires of established soloists and ensembles, and public performances of them are now rare. (Orchestra U.S.A., a third stream ensemble founded by John Lewis in 1962, disbanded three years later, and Stan Kenton's Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra, a similar group founded in 1965, was equally short-lived.) Much the same has been true of pieces by jazz composers specifically written for performance by classical musicians, such as Dave Brubeck's oratorio The Light in the Wilderness (1968), Roger Kellaway's ballet score PAMTGG (1971), and Anthony Davis's operas X (1985) and Amistad (1997).
The latter failure reflects a practical problem of stylistic integration which is also common to third stream music: not only are most classical musicians unable to improvise, but they find it difficult to realize in performance the unwritten rhythmic nuances intrinsic to the jazz idiom. (In addition, works in which electronically amplified jazz instrumentalists are accompanied by unamplified classical ensembles pose near-insuperable problems of acoustical balance in live performance.)
The larger failure of the third stream idea to engage the interest of more than a small number of major jazz soloists also suggests the possibility of an underlying incompatibility between jazz improvisation, with its spontaneous variations on regularly repeating harmonic patterns, and tightly organized classical structures such as sonata-allegro form, in which there is no room for discursive episodes that are freely improvised rather than organically developed.
For all these reasons, it may be that the future of attempts to synthesize jazz and classical music lies not in third stream works for traditional classical media or mixed groups but in substantially through-composed instrumental pieces written for large and medium-sized jazz ensembles.
Many of George Russell's compositions, including Jazz in the Space Age (Decca, 1960) and Living Time (Bill Evans; Columbia, 1972), fit this description, as do such works as Lalo Schifrin's The New Continent (Dizzy Gillespie; Limelight, 1962), in which Dizzy Gillespie is accompanied by a big band, and Carla Bley's A Genuine Tong Funeral (Gary Burton; Victor, 1967), a "dark opera without words" performed by Bley, the Gary Burton Quartet, and a five-piece horn section. Of comparable interest are such recent extended compositions for jazz orchestra as Bob Brookmeyer's Celebration (1997), Bill Holmes All About Thirds (1998), and Maria Schneider's ballet score The Hand That Mocked, the Heart That Fed (1998), which aspire to more rigorous formal challenges, as well as a higher degree of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, than the big band scores of the past.
Whether such a synthesis is possible within the less structured framework of small-group improvisation remains to be seen, however, and given the fact that jazz continues to be primarily an improvisationally based small-group music, it seems probable that at least for the present, jazz and classical music will continue for the most part to travel on related but independent stylistic tracks.” The following video montage is set to Carla Bley's Syndrome as arranged by Mike Abene and performed by the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw. It will serve as an example of Third Stream in 2009, the year it was recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
