Gunther Schuller: Journey into Jazz

What might seem the most innocuous music is often the most avant garde, the most challenging, the spark that forces us to question the boundaries of what we might call jazz. Gunther Schuller’s Journey Into Jazz, composed in 1962, is just that: a children’s narrative, telling the story of one Eddie Jackson, “a boy who learned about jazz,” a communal mode of music-making that is free, ostensibly, of all the restraints that come with genre labels.

Composers of today’s Olympian jazz-classical concertos would do well to listen to these deceptively understated, coolly creative pieces that capture the zeitgeist of the 1960s. These three newly recorded 20-minute works (dubbed “Third Stream” by Gunther Schuller himself) explore and synthesize myriad interactions between a jazz combo improvising and a chamber orchestra reading a through-composed score with some big band gestures.

During each of jazz’s growth spurts, opportunity for greater complexity and freedom arose. When jazz went from Dixieland to hot, the improvisations and prominence of the soloist’s voice grew. Then from hot to swing and the big band era, the arrangements began to take on a new complexity. The music during the big band era further absorbed colors for its palette from the modern classical music coming out of Europe. Groups lead by Claude Thornhill, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman were some of the main proponents of furthering the sophistication factor on the bandstand and in compositions.

Gunther Schuller is not merely an award-winning composer, former principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, retired artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Festival, and member of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, he also wrote the book on jazz. Two books actually, Early Jazz and The Swing Era (both Oxford University Press), and over a long and acclaimed career he has collaborated with or performed music by such distinctive jazz artists as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, among many others.

Composers of today’s Olympian jazz-classical concertos would do well to listen to these deceptively understated, coolly creative pieces that capture the zeitgeist of the 1960’s. These three newly recorded 20-minute works (dubbed “Third Stream” by Gunther Schuller himself) explore and synthesize myriad interactions between a jazz combo improvising and a chamber orchestra reading a through-composed score with some big band gestures. All the new recordings reward relistening.

Arnie the Hep-Cat. Gunther Schuller became a working musician at the young age of 16, picking up professional gigs as a horn player in New York. By the time he turned 18, he was principal horn of the Cincinnati Orchestra under Goossens. By 20, he had joined the horn section of the Met Orchestra. He also became a busy studio musician. Perhaps his most famous dates came to him as a player in the Gil Evans-Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions.

BMOP/sound, the nation's foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music recordings, announces the release of its fourth CD Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz. Representative of the Third Stream genre, a revolutionary style of music brought forth into the mainstream by Schuller in the 1950s, the three pieces on this album unite the structural complexities found in contemporary classical music with the improvisational elements of jazz.