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"SO TELL ME HOW the Copland I just heard is different from jazz." The woman had just seen a performance of Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra led by The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Music Director Designate Andreas Delfs. "Actually," responded Craig Curtis, MPR's vice president of programming, "Copland composed it for Benny Goodman." A fascinating interplay between classical music and American jazz has been producing amazing sounds since early last century. Classical pieces infused with jazz forms, chords and rhythms - like the Copland classical concerto or Bernstein compositions. Jazz scores reflecting the elegance of classically trained composers like John Lewis (founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet) and Fletcher Henderson (whose arrangements became the cornerstone of the swing era). Crossover performances by great artists of both genres, including André Previn and Wynton Marsalis. Today we take these "hybrids" for granted. But they reflect extraordinary creative vision that blends refined, classical European traditions with the bold, brassy American sound called jazz. Melding the Top Brass In the late 1930s Goodman's popularity was on the rise and Copland was gaining fame for classical compositions that had a unique American sound - Billy the Kid (1938) and Fanfare for the Common Man (1942). Following the success of Copland's Appalachian Spring in 1947, Goodman asked the composer to write a concerto for the clarinet-his clarinet. Copland accepted. Although he sometimes denied that jazz had much of an influence on him, he was eager to explore the clarinet's expressive possibilities. He knew Goodman was a skillful instrumentalist who played Mozart as flawlessly as he played Fats Waller, and that Goodman had already collaborated with Béla Bartók on the composer's Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano (1938). Copland completed the Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra in the summer of 1948. The work is classical and jazzy. It starts slow and tender, and by the middle of the second movement it's full of hot rhythms. Copland met the challenge of incorporating Goodman's signature style with unconventional orchestration: "I did not have a large battery of percussion to achieve jazzy effects, so I used slapping basses and whacking harp sounds to simulate them." The collaboration turned out to be more than Copland bending his classical style to work with Goodman. He incorporated movements that gave the clarinetist unconventional freedom within the concerto. Goodman, in turn, let the piece inspire some of his most sophisticated extemporizing. Maestro in Two Worlds A sellout crowd in the dim-lit basement venue on 27th between Park and Lexington came for the thrilling improvisations promised by the marquee piano-bass duo jamming through pieces by Duke Ellington and others. Sitting at the keyboard, where one might expect a jazz legend like Oscar Peterson or Chick Corea, was the great classical composer, conductor and musician Sir Andre Previn. In a rare live jazz appearance, Previn played three nights, recording some of the sessions with bassist David Finck for Live at the Jazz Standard, an album released this spring. A previous collaboration between the two, We Got It Good and That Ain't Bad, a tribute to Duke Ellington, was released in 1999. The maestro, who regularly conducts such great orchestras as the Vienna Philharmonic, Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic, actually cut his live-performance teeth in the 1960s Los Angeles jazz scene, playing with small outfits and producing film scores for MGM Studios, including the best-selling My Fair Lady. For nearly three decades, Previn focused on classical conducting and composing. He returned to jazz in the 1990s when he began performing, recording and touring with the newly formed André Previn Jazz Trio. Today his recordings include not only classical concertos and symphonic works, but also a long list of jazz albums.
George Gershwin, the master of Broadway musicals, was among the first composers to synthesize jazz and symphonic procedures, in his Rhapsody in Blue (1924). He returned to the formula for perhaps his most famous work, the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Leonard Bernstein blended several American musical styles, including contemporary classical and jazz, in West Side Story - his 1957 modern-day musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet. In 1997, jazz composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis won the Pulitzer Prize for music - an honor that had been awarded exclusively to classical composers for five decades - for his epic oratorio about slavery, Blood on the Fields. It hasn't only been U.S. composers who have explored the quintessentially American genre. Russian-born Igor Stravinsky mixed Russian folk traditions with American jazz in The Soldier's Tale (1918) - a piece for chamber ensembles. Almost 30 years and several classical compositions later, he was still experimenting with jazz, writing his Ebony Concerto (1945) for Goodman's colleague, clarinetist Woody Herman. Of Juke Joints and Orchestra Halls
Put more simply: The carefully crafted frameworks of classical music and the exuberant, untamed extemporizations of jazz are more alike than they seem. By blending the two, musicians and composers have settled fascinating new musical territory - a landscape of juke joints and orchestra halls - where fans of both genres can enjoy this modern and uniquely American tradition. Program Playlist
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