Gunther Schuller and "Third Stream"

further thoughts on abandoning genres

Last week I spoke some about how old-fashioned the idea of genres and categories is— except to salespeople. An important force in breaking down these barriers was Gunther Schuller, who I interviewed about a decade ago for Downbeat Magazine. Gunther was one of the greatest musicians and thinkers of our times, the man who coined the phrase “Third Stream” in describing the meeting ground of classical music and jazz that began in earnest the 1950’s.

Gunther, who died at age 89 in 2015, was an important composer, conductor, and writer, but perhaps one of his greatest legacies was starting the jazz and Third Stream departments (now called Contemporary Improvisation) at New England Conservatory. It’s hard for a young person to know how rare jazz departments were in schools in the late 60’s, and how radical and controversial “3rd Stream”was.

Gunther was happy to see that his once controversial ideas had practically entered the mainstream. Here is the article as it appeared in 2013.

Hey, if you are free Thurs., Jan. 26 please attend or stream the biggest concert I’ve ever done in my life. Four ensembles, 35 musicians, an ambitious and maybe even masochistic endeavor! It’s at Roulette in Brooklyn. Here’s the link to info.

https://roulette.org/event/joel-harrison-new-works/

Third Stream

Then and Now

By Joel Harrison

The word eclectic has lost its meaning as it pertains to jazz. Today’s music takes innumerable shapes and forms as it spreads across the world, and practically defies labeling or description. But it was not always thus.

Some 65 years ago, when the swing era was in decline and bebop had ascended, jazz and classical music were worlds apart, in culture, race and sound. But there were a handful of people intent on bringing down the walls between the two genres. Foremost among them was Gunther Schuller, who is now 87 years young. He and John Lewis, Jimmy Giuffre, Gil Evans, George Russell, J.J. Johnson, Bill Russo, Dave Brubeck and others sought to build a bridge (or one might even say a détente) between classical and jazz. In our current era—when genre definitions are fluid and many artists routinely blend a variety of styles—it’s important to realize just how radical these ideas seemed at the time.

When I entered Schuller’s spacious home in Newton, Mass., he was dressed in his bathrobe, hunched over a score. He was working on one of seven current commissions, a re-orchestration of Scott Joplin’s obscure opera Treemonisha from 1901. His desk was littered with music paper, pencils, pens, water bottles and correspondence. MSNBC blared from a TV two feet away, and seesaw stacks of music loomed from every corner.

Schuller sat down and recounted some of the battles that he and his fellow composers fought over the decades.

“Jazz was all over the radio stations in the ’30s and ’40s, and I had the radio on all the time,” he said. “I’m sure I had heard jazz before, but one night I was doing my homework at about age 12, and I recall hearing some music and feeling as if I had never heard anything so wonderful. It was Duke Ellington and his orchestra, live from the Hurricane Club on Broadway and 49th Street, and I just had to stop my homework and listen. At that time, I was already beginning to compose, and I was deeply fascinated by the classical orchestra. [Schuller’s father was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic.] The sound of jazz was so different than the symphony. Ellington’s orchestra, so full of fantastic musicians, played ensemble and blended beautifully, but when they got up to solo, each soloist was totally different. That’s what got to me.

“I woke up the next day and said to my pop, ‘I heard some wonderful music last night, and I feel that this music in the hands of the best musicians is as great as anything of Bach or Brahms.’ Well, my poor father nearly had a heart attack. He was worried I had gone off the deep end, because jazz was considered a bad, degenerate music.”

By age 17 Schuller was playing French horn in major U.S. orchestras and immersing himself in the entire history of European music. He simultaneously sought out jazz music, frequenting nightclubs after his evening performances. He spent days transcribing Ellington scores (as well as Alban Berg’s violin concerto), increasingly compelled to bring about a stylistic marriage—not a pastiche, but a deep, sincere and authentic communion.

A watershed moment occurred in 1957 when Schuller organized a concert at Brandeis University involving six commissions, three for classical composers (Milton Babbit, Harold Shapero and Schuller himself) and three for jazz composers (Jimmy Giuffre, Charles Mingus and George Russell). At that concert he coined the phrase “Third Stream” to describe this new synthesis of jazz and classical music. He was attacked on all fronts.

“Both sides felt that I was going to contaminate the music, stultify or codify it,” Schuller said. “Jazz people thought I’d take the soul from their music, while universities and symphonies rejected jazz with persistent racism and elitism.”

I asked Schuller what compositional challenges arose from the first Third Stream efforts.

“At first it was very difficult to find jazz musicians who were comfortable in this new, strange context, especially, in my case, when the language was atonal,” he responded. “I recall when J.J. Johnson wrote what was in effect a concerto for Dizzy Gillespie [1961’s Perceptions]. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable Dizzy was at times, and of course this is one of the great instrumentalists of the era. On the other side, it was next to impossible to find classical players who could swing, much less improvise. In the 1950s the supply of musicians who could authentically do this ‘combining’ was very small. For instance, I discovered bassist Richard Davis, who had played with the Chicago Youth Symphony and could do anything, but if he was unavailable I was out of luck. Those single options slowly began to increase, but in the meantime there was great condemnation from, for instance, DownBeat magazine. As always, we musicians paid no attention to the critics and continued on our way.

“We started a workshop every Wednesday where Lee Konitz, Bill Barber, John Lewis and others would work out our new ideas. Someone might take a Debussy piece and jazz it up, or I might take a Bach prelude-and-fugue and orchestrate it for the group. Our first efforts were modest. We were finding our way.”

On the West Coast, a young Dave Brubeck (influenced by composer/teacher Darius Milhaud) was doing the same thing, but apparently the two parties did not yet know about each other’s efforts. The tide of influence had, in fact, been flowing between the two genres for some time, but it was happening on the individual level, not on the institutional level.

The rhythmic vitality and the spontaneity of jazz had enthralled many Western composers since the ’20s, including Stravinsky, Varese, Stefan Wolpe. Darius Milhaud, and Lukas Foss. However, their work did not feature jazz instrumentalists (with the exception of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto of 1945, composed for Woody Herman’s band). Schuller became an important intermediary between the two worlds. He was able to instruct classical string players, for instance, in how to bow a passage so it would swing more, while also schooling jazz players in the minutiae of classical performance. “That’s what someone like [jazz woodwind player] Eric Dolphy was so much involved with,” said Schuller. “He was very aware of modern classical music, wanting to know and do more with it. I stayed with him for a week in his apartment in Brooklyn. His apartment was pretty pitiful, by the way. He had no money, and he ate mostly beans. I heard him practicing, in effect, things he had heard from Schoenberg or Bartok. And, of course, Miles was the same way, always inquisitive about this music.”

Schuller continued with a poignant story about Charlie Parker: “There were these endless gatherings at the Baroness Koenigswarter’s palace on the Upper West Side, and there were mattresses all along the floor where people would hang out. Bird came down and sat next to me one night, and he was in a very sad mood. He said, ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you, because maybe you can help me. ... I know there is this incredible music out there, and I want to study with you and learn about it.’ I guess that he’d heard that I was teaching a lot of jazz musicians. Anyway, Bird was almost crying in desperation, and I guess he knew he wasn’t well, and that he might not make it much longer ... . That was the last time I saw him; he died a little while later [on March 12, 1955].”

I asked Schuller to paint a picture of the times. How did it feel to his comrades to be in the midst of this movement?

“It was such love, and enthusiasm, and excitement, because we knew we were breaking important ground,” he said. “The jazz composers would run up to Juilliard every chance they could get to see something by Hindemith or Stravinsky. As the rest of the field began to follow along—whether Bob Graettinger or Woody Herman—I sat there smiling because it was all happening. Still, it took almost 10 years before the controversy over this died down in America, while in Europe there was never any controversy. They jumped on the idea from the beginning.”

One of Schuller’s best-known early attempts to give shape to his vision is 1960’s Jazz Abstractions, which featured the Beaux Arts String Quartet in tandem with Dolphy, guitarist Jim Hall, saxophonist Ornette Coleman and bassist Scott LaFaro. The string quartet had most of its parts notated, but there were sections in which they were given thematic motifs to improvise on. Schuller never asked them to swing, as he knew that was beyond their reach. The jazz musicians were given written parts of varying difficulty, a spectrum whose far end gave Coleman almost total freedom.

Meanwhile, George Russell had written his groundbreaking masterwork All About Rosie, Giuffre had penned 1959’s Mobiles for strings and improvising clarinet and Mingus was writing Revelations while Stan Kenton was confronting the dense, complex works of Bob Graettinger. The tide was turning. At New England Conservatory, Schuller started the first accredited jazz studies program in 1969; he hired Russell to teach jazz composition and the young iconoclast Ran Blake to develop the Third Stream department. In a 1988 article [XXX in what publication?], Blake described the origin of the department: “My idea was to gather a student body of talented and eclectic improvisers, each of whom would attempt to forge a unique personal improvisational style from a synthesis of his or her stylistic roots. I soon came to include world music of all kinds.”

Blake became an influential teacher, providing an environment where Coleman, Messiaen, Mahalia Jackson and Squarepusher are all fair game for study. Said Blake, “What an incredible teacher Gunther has been for me—having me exposed to so much music and encouraging me to veer off the straight course, having me shave away all the extraneous jive.”

[Header: Integrating Everything]

Today, because the genre distinctions between jazz, classical and other styles are no longer rigid, the term “Third Stream” might seem quaint. The concept of synthesizing jazz and classical music is commonplace. In short, Schuller has been vindicated. Many jazz composers nowadays feel fundamentally free and fully able to write music of any sort, across any stylistic spectrum. The Maria Schneider Orchestra and John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble, for example, are groups that gracefully integrate jazz and classical elements. In fact you'd be hard-pressed to find a young big band composer who doesn't have classical chops in his toolbox these days. Meanwhile, the youthful NEXT Collective has put out an album of jazz arrangements of hip-hop songs. Many 21st century jazz musicians create “outside the box” because they simply ignore the concept of the box.

 “Smashing of genres and styles has never been the goal for me,” said trumpeter Dave Douglas. “I certainly look for fresh sounds, and I’m trying to expand my voice, but the meeting of musical worlds happens subservient to that search.”

The type of criticism Schuller encountered is now absent, and composers have access to a growing pool of instrumentalists who are both stellar readers and improvisers.

For saxophonist Ben Wendel from the group Kneebody, no friction between genres has ever existed. He grew up with hip-hop, jazz and classical music, and they flow together naturally for him.

But if you reach back to an older generation, those younger than Schuller but older than Wendel, you see that the road toward this worldview was curved, not straight. W.A. Mathieu, 75, was present in the ’50s as Schuller’s developments were entering the field. He was writing charts for the Stan Kenton band, learning Bartok and Bach, and moving towards his own synthesis.

“Some early Third Stream works felt forced,” Mathieu said, “because they tended to be more of an idea that was being pushed into existence than a natural byproduct of a lived-in experience. Yes, it was radical, but naturally the style hadn’t matured. Slowly, as things changed, the radical became an everyday reality. What was futuristic then has become the cultural norm.”

Reedist Henry Threadgill discussed the parallel world that existed in Chicago in the ’60s where early members of the AACM found their own route towards unity. They were well aware of what Schuller and others were up to. “Third Stream struck me for having a new personality, new orchestration and a distinct point of view,” Threadgill said. “In that moment there seemed a world of possibilities; we were influenced by the music that was happening at the University of Chicago by people like Ralph Shapey, Boulez and Stockhausen. Between that, Ornette and Cecil [Taylor], I began to hear what my own voice might be. I wouldn’t say our goal was any sort of hybrid; it was more like we knew we could integrate everything we heard into our own unique sound.”

Saxophonist/clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, who studied at NEC in the mid-’70s, added, “When I got to the conservatory, I had already been involved with people from BAG [the Black Arts Group] in St. Louis. Much of what I began to learn about modern classical music reminded me of what I had explored through group improvisation with people like Oliver Lake. Certainly there were differences between these worlds but not nearly as important as they were made out to be. My generation was part of a renaissance where there were a lot of breakthroughs in combining the performance practices of Euro- and African-American music.”

The composer has had a critical, and sometimes overlooked, role in all of this. “From the beginning,” said Schuller, “I was distraught that the composition part upon which jazz was being improvised was never talked about. It is always the soloist and never the composition that is discussed. I also felt that jazz improvisation often paid too little attention to the composition. I was longing for some kind of integration where the thematic or rhythmic material of the tune might show up in the soloing.”

Pianist/composer Billy Childs, who feels a direct linkage to Schuller in his chamber-jazz projects, agrees that “composition has always played a key role in combining genres, and that sometimes the work of the composer is overlooked in jazz.” This fact was probably compounded as popular jazz of the ’70s and ’80s moved toward rock and funk rather than the concert hall. Nonetheless, Third Stream’s origins and legacy continue to affect many composers, including J.C. Sanford, who got his doctorate from NEC in the ’90s. Sanford pointed out that despite all the movement towards synthesis we’ve seen, labels, promoters and critics still find the need to separate things into boxes.  

Without a doubt, the distinction between jazz, classical and many other “streams” of music becomes more unrecognizable every year. Threadgill summed it up best: “When I’m writing, it’s all one.”

Undeterred by age, fashion or opinion, Schuller continues to compose and conduct at an astonishing rate. His recent piece Encounters, for a large big band and a huge orchestra, demonstrates that his all-encompassing vision has not flagged 56 years after the Brandeis premieres. For Schuller, there is no rest. “Curiosity and imagination, which are both all too lacking today, are the key,” he said. “All the schooling in the world can’t make up for lack of those two things.”

I asked how he felt about the legacy of Third Stream and NEC. “Part of my thinking in starting a jazz department was that I knew the whole school needed to know this music, and I saw over time that the whole conservatory was integrated into one family. From the beginning, I believed that any music could coexist in the hands of a skilled craftsman, whether from New Guinea, India, Africa or America. Jazz and classical was just the beginning—the Third Stream has become 5,000 streams.”

Acclaimed Third Stream Titles

Gunther Schuller/George Russell/Harold Shapero/Jimmy Giuffre/Charles Mingus/Milton Babbit, Modern Jazz Concert (Columbia) 1958

Gunther Schuller/Jimmy Giuffre/John Lewis/J.J. Johnson, Music For Brass (Columbia) 1957

Gunther Schuller, “Conversation for Jazz Quartet and String Quartet” from Third Stream Music (Atlantic) 1959

John Lewis, The Modern Jazz Society Presents A Concert Of Contemporary Music (Verve) 1955

John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions—Compositions By Gunther Schuller And Jim Hall (1960) (Atlantic LP) (Also available on Collectables CD Golden Striker/Jazz Abstractions (1999) and the Ornette Coleman box set Beauty Is A Rare Thing (Abstractions and Variants on a Theme by Thelonious Monk only)

Mirage: Avant Garde and Third Stream Jazz (works by Rugolo, Schuller, Lewis, Mingus, Burns, Ellington, Russell, Russo, Tristano, Blake) (New World Records) 1946-1961

Larry Austin, Improvisations For Orchestra And Jazz Soloists (Columbia) 1961

Jimmy Giuffre, Piece For Clarinet And String Orchestra/Mobiles (Verve) 1960

Stan Getz, Focus (Verve) 1961

Ornette Coleman, Skies Of America (LSO) 1972