By Keenan A. Harmon
There’s a story where jazz bassist Charlie Hayden and saxophonist Ornette Coleman were performing in a club, experimenting with new ideas in jazz. Hayden noticed a man was leaning in with his hand cupped to his ear to get a good listen to what the bass was doing. When the man straightened up, Hayden realized that the listener was none other than Leonard Bernstein.
For many people, jazz is a different kind of music. Most know it as an expression of freedom, but it’s often completely misunderstood as an artform with a lot of folks not connecting to the ideas, harmonies or the dialogue among musicians. Another thing that is overlooked is how the paths of musicians in the fields of classical and jazz are in conversation. Here are a few more stories:
While George Gershwin was having his heyday in the 1920s after writing his famous Rhapsody in Blue for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, another American composer, Aaron Copland, late in the decade, composed a short bluesy piano piece titled “Sentimental Melody,” showcasing both jazz and blues’ influences. While in Russia, Dmitry Shostakovich composed his clever orchestration for the popular tune “Tea for Two,” which he titled “Tahiti Trot.”
Stride piano was popular at this point, evolving from ragtime, and pianists Fats Waller and Art Tatum were emerging as names in the music world, both writing and performing popular songs of the time. Among them, stride pianist James P. Johnson composed his Harlem Symphony with a Gershwin, Ferde Grofé flavor. Slowly, here in America, the Big Band era was beginning, and at the forefront were Duke Ellington (who began as a stride pianist) and clarinetist Benny Goodman, along with so many others.
If we jump ahead to the 1950s, big band begins to fade, and the artform evolves into concentrated improvisation through bebop. An 11-year-old prodigy wins a young artist competition to perform a Mozart Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony. That child was Herbie Hancock.
Miles Davis creates his iconic “Birth of the Cool” album, incorporating the horn and tuba into the chamber ensemble. Part of that ensemble on horn was Gunther Schuller, who would later coin the term for fusing the two streams of classical and jazz as “Third Stream.”
Also, during that decade, Henry Mancini established himself as a television and film composer with jazz influences, hiring a young jazzer named “Johnny” Williams to play the opening of the TV show “Peter Gunn.”
A few more decades go by, and the musical minds of pianist Oscar Peterson and pianist and conductor Andre Previn have a sit-down dialogue at two pianos, discussing music and virtuosic pianists from the past like Fats Waller and Art Tatum, which is aired on the BBC.
In the mid-90s, Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen composed his set of 24 preludes and fugues in the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach. The set also included direct influences from jazz, given that the pianists Madsen admired and studied were Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson.
Epilogue
After the Big Band era, Benny Goodman became devoted to performing classical music, so much so that Aaron Copland composed his Clarinet Concerto specifically for Goodman. Herbie Hancock, less than a decade after performing with the Chicago Symphony at 19, would join Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and later produce countless albums and influence hip-hop. Henry Mancini’s jazz pianist later became the film composer we know and love, John Williams. Gunther Schuller became the President of the New England Conservatory while still exploring composition and writing about Third Stream music. Charlie Hayden would win the Guggenheim Fellowship on the recommendation of Leonard Bernstein.
That is just the tip of a very large iceberg of stories from the last 100 years of the artform and its constant path with classical music. At the core of both artforms are talented practicing musicians looking for audiences who would simply give, like Bernstein, a listening ear.