Why Jazz Musicians Love 'The Rite Of Spring'

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

by PATRICK JARENWATTANANON, May 26, 2013 6:00 AM
A 100-year-old ballet, composed by a Russian for a French audience, has become something of a jazz standard.

Igor Stravinsky's orchestral score for The Rite of Spring has been interpolated on record by musicians like Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane and Hubert Laws. Many, many more knew the Rite, and would quote famous passages during their solos — several recordings exist of Charlie Parker summoning a lick or two. Jazz musicians still love the work. The last two years alone have seen two new arrangements of the entire thing: one adapted for a big band, another from the trio The Bad Plus.

The Rite and jazz music at large can be seen as cousins. Roughly contemporaneous, both emerged in the 1910s, experienced their share of rejection and wound up among the most profoundly influential musical developments of the 20th century. Along the way, they've intersected at curious junctures as they matured in parallel.

So how did a "classical" ballet become so important to jazz musicians?

Stravinsky The Jazzman

You might hypothesize that Stravinsky was influenced by jazz, and you'd be half right. He certainly admitted certain jazz influences in writings and interviews, and as early as 1918 his theatrical work Histoire du Soldat incorporated a movement called "Ragtime" — taking after the style often described as a precursor to modern jazz. Other works inspired by ragtime records followed soon.

Later, long after he had actually heard live jazz, Stravinsky wrote a piece for the Woody Herman Orchestra, a big band quite popular in its day. The result was a short work called the Ebony Concerto, featuring Herman on clarinet; it premiered in 1945 and was recorded, with Stravinsky conducting, in 1946.

In later histories, members of the Herman Orchestra declared their love for Stravinsky's work – "one of our musical Gods," pianist Ralph Burns wrote in the liner notes to the Blowin' Up A Storm compilation – and also mentioned how difficult it was for them, many of whom were not classically trained, to learn the highly technical work. (Ironically, the catalyst for the commission came about through a fib a band member told about having hung out with Stravinsky in Los Angeles and playing him Woody Herman records.)

Still, with no improvisation and little in the way of swing, you'd be hard-pressed to call anything Stravinsky wrote "jazz." Herman himself described the Ebony Concerto as "pure Stravinsky and [it] had nothing to do with jazz."

Perhaps Stravinsky was influenced by jazz, but jazz itself would have been impossible for The Rite of Spring. When the ballet was first presented in 1913, jazz had yet to be commercially recorded, and Stravinsky was living in Europe.

Rhythm Changes

A better key to understanding the relationship between the Rite and the jazz community probably lies in an examination of the work itself. Like Stravinsky's two ballets which preceded it, The Firebird and Petrouchka, the Rite was written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company in Paris. Like those two earlier ballets,The Rite grounds itself in folk-inspired forms and melodies.

Where The Rite differs is in the extreme experiments Stravinsky devised in meter, rhythmic syncopation and dissonance — experiments which allowed Stravinsky to later deny his folkloric inspiration, when his aesthetic philosophies had changed. But scholars like Richard Taruskin have pinpointed the deeply embedded folk elements of the Rite.

To enact this faux-primitive fantasy for dancers, Stravinsky often calls on insistent pulses, interrupted by oddly phrased or even violent accents. Yet he manages to generate fitting melodies atop this. In one of his sketchbooks for the Rite, Stravinsky writes: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse."

Jazz, too, sublimates folk traditions (of African-Americans) into muscular, polyrhythmic undertow. As jazz pianist Julian Joseph once demonstrated on video for The Guardian, the layering of melody over an insistent rhythm, as well as the richness of harmonic information on offer, are analogous to the work of jazz musicians, who are both bound and liberated by the imperative to swing, and who seek to push harmonic limits.

"[T]here seems to be a perfect storm of bite, grit, rhythm and dissonance," the saxophonist and composer/arranger Darryl Brenzel wrote in an email to me. Brenzel recently adapted the entire Rite of Spring for the Mobtown Modern big band, and blogged about the experience. He also wrote to me:

Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/05/26/186486269/why-jazz-musicians-love-the-rite-of-spring?ft=3&f=126134671&sc=nl&cc=jn-20130526