Compositions by Marsalis and Shorter a seductive blend by Mark Stryker
Composers have been marrying elements of jazz and classical music for a century with drastically uneven results. The aesthetic bliss promised by the union is too seductive for many composers to ignore, but the challenge is daunting. So if you're Wynton Marsalis, you seek advice from a master.
When Marsalis finished his 1999 oratorio "All Rise" for orchestra, jazz band and chorus, he shared the score with the composer-pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who had dedicated a large part of his career to synthesizing classical forms and jazz improvisation. Lewis, a fiercely intelligent man not given to empty flattery, silently studied the score for an hour. Finally, he spoke:
"This piece has solutions to a lot of problems we've been thinking about for a long time."
Metro Detroiters have the rare opportunity this week to hear two starry jazz composers, Marsalis and Wayne Shorter, renew the quest to merge jazz and classical idioms. Marsalis' "Two in 3" will be given its world premiere Wednesday in East Lansing by the Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. A cocommission by MSU, Wharton Center and Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the piece will also be performed Saturday by the DSO and Lincoln Center band at Orchestra Hall.
Shorter's "Terra Incognito" (2006), his first piece of classical chamber music, will be performed by the Imani Winds, a young ensemble that specializes in genre-bending works, on Saturday in Ann Arbor for the University Musical Society. Shorter, a leading tenor and soprano saxophonist, will also appear with his quartet and both groups will team to play his arrangements.
Marsalis, 46, the most famous jazz musician on the planet, and Shorter, 75, the most influential composer in jazz since the '60s, are musicians of vastly different artistic temperament and style. But both, to paraphrase Lewis, are seeking solutions to similar problems -- how to marry the formal complexities, strategies and orchestral colors associated with classical music with the improvisatory freedom, melodic language and blues-groove-swing of jazz.
Marsalis: 'I go purely off of my hearing'
The 100-year-old dialogue has encompassed a byzantine exchange of ideas, influences, successful cross-fertilizations, noble failures, aesthetic dead ends and pretentious disasters. Landmark early examples include ragtime-braised pieces by Erik Satie and Claude Debussy and Scott Joplin's ragtime opera "Treemonisha."
Composers like Gershwin, Ravel, Copland, Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Ellington and James P. Johnson picked up the thread in the '20s and '30s. So-called Third Stream composers, led by polyglot Gunther Schuller (who coined the term), earnestly upped the ante in the 1950s and '60s.
Today, aesthetic crossbreeding is epidemic, from jazz avant-garde heroes like Anthony Braxton to mainstream classical composers like John Adams to post-everything musicians like drummer-composer John Hollenbeck, whose improvising chamber ensemble doesn't so much cross boundaries as bury them.
In any era, the difference between success and failure is whether the music strikes the ear as organic and indivisible or sounds like an incongruous graft of ideas. One key, says Marsalis, is to exploit the common ground between jazz and classical music:
"Orchestration, how to build climaxes, how to use percussion, the harmonic system is the same, marches and two-beat grooves that exist in classical music and exist in jazz, funereal music, call-and-response -- Beethoven's Third Symphony has all kinds of call-and response. ...
"If we're going to come up with a work of art that features both, we may have a section where we feature our disagreements, but ultimately what will be successful will be that mountain of material that we have in common."
"Two in 3" is a 16-minute waltz cast roughly as a concerto grosso -- an 18th-Century form in which a smaller group of instruments (in this case a jazz band) functions within a larger orchestra. The two ensembles (or families of instruments within them) bounce off each other. Jazz band sections leave open space for improvised solos. Marsalis says he has tried to emphasize lyricism over virtuosity.
The title refers to lovers and the three-beat waltz meter. "The premise is that everything is in that first glance that you have with a person who you will be in love with," says Marsalis.
The commission grew out of Marsalis' long ties with the Detroit-born bassist Rodney Whitaker, who worked with the Lincoln Center band for years and now directs jazz studies at MSU. "Two in 3" is the successor to the trumpeter's classically oriented works written in the '90s, including the string quartet "At the Octoroon Balls," the Stravinsky-inspired "A Fiddler's Tale," the orchestral ballet "Them Twos" and the monumental "All Rise."
These pieces bring together a gumbo of idioms, including conservative classical modernism, country fiddling, gospel, Ellingtonia, New Orleans shouts and dirges and an omnipresent blues tonality. Some are marred by a long-winded pedanticism, but the best music, especially large chunks of "All Rise," sings in a natural vernacular.
You can hear Marsalis gradually lassoing command of his materials, especially in the lower end of the ensemble. Lewis used to harp about the staid motion of Marsalis' bass lines. "That's an example of a problem," says Marsalis, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his jazz oratorio "Blood on the Fields."
"When the bass moves around a lot, generally music is going to groove less. If you want the music to groove, the bass has got to be rooted. So, can you get the bass to move but also groove. ...
"I didn't study composition in school or orchestration or arranging. I learned it as I went along. As much as I advocate education, I've had very little of it in these arenas. I go purely off of my hearing."
Shorter: 'Whatever you want to make it'
If Marsalis is a staunch traditionalist, handing down commandments like Moses, then Shorter is a maharishi, who speaks in slippery metaphors and whose career has been defined by creativity, change and risk. He's played in four landmark bands since the late '50s -- Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis Quintet, the jazz-rock group Weather Report and, since 2000, his quartet with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade.
The compositions Shorter wrote in the '60s such as "Nefertiti," "Fall," "Infant Eyes" and "Speak No Evil" have become a cornerstone of the repertory. These are short stories, bewitching unions of elliptical melody and beautifully enigmatic harmonic color. His recent compositions, best represented on the sophisticated fusion album "High Life" and the acoustic "Alegria," are like novels. He eschews simple song forms for labyrinthine structures and thick clouds of brass and reeds.
Shorter's idiom remains jazz but classical influences percolate. His 2000 appearance with the DSO included orchestral arrangements of new and old pieces and an 11-minute excerpt from a work-in-progress he called "Syzygy." Essentially, Shorter has reconnected with his training as a composition student at New York University in the early '50s.
Imani Winds clarinetist Mariam Adam says that Shorter uncovered material in his NYU notebooks that he used in "Terra Incognito." She also recalls how excited he was to show off his orchestration books and scores by Ravel and Stravinsky when the quintet visited him at his home. (Shorter was unavailable to talk for this story.)
Commissioned by the La Jolla Music Society's SummerFest, "Terra Incognito" is written for flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon and horn. The piece is through-composed like a classical work. But in a jazz-derived twist, Shorter encourages the players to devise a new roadmap for each performance, cutting and pasting sections from the 15 minutes of material.
Adam says the music blends Shorter's lush harmonies with a tart melodic bite. She compared passages to spring awakening, a leaky faucet and a scary movie. The title translates to "unknown land."
"At the first rehearsal we played the entire piece top-to-bottom," says Adam. "He said, 'That's cool. Now, you don't have to play it start-to-finish. You can start there or there, and you don't have to play that part at all. Whatever you want to make it.' Our mouths were hanging open."
An Imani Winds promotional DVD includes a 2007 concert performance from France of Shorter's "The Three Marias" by the quintet with his quartet. It's a leap forward from the opaque, stiff orchestrations that he offered with the DSO in 2000. Of course, clarity is easier to achieve with a chamber group than an orchestra. But the flexibility of the wind writing, the integration of the two ensembles and seamless web of composition and improvisation all suggest a composer finding solutions.
As Shorter told the Free Press eight years ago when asked about the motivation behind his classically oriented works, "The music I'm writing is really out of the workshop arena," he said. "It's an adventure."