MSU’s jazz and classical armies rendezvous and conquer
by Lawrence Cosentino
There are risks to putting jazz and classical musicians together. When Duke Ellington unleashed his first big jazz-symphony hybrid, “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” in 1951, photographers swarmed the stage. (Ellington made news taking a bath, let alone blending a symphony orchestra with his big band.) A flash bulb exploded and fell on the balding head of a string-bass player, according to a review the next day.
Fast forward to 2014. For years, music groupies have enjoyed the overflowing talent of MSU’s jazz and classical programs — but always separately. Friday night, the MSU College of Music arranged a historic meeting, like Apollo docking with Soyuz or Stanley meeting Livingstone. For the first time, jazz and classical forces joined, and they didn’t just shake hands.
The students tackled major music from (arguably) the greatest composers of their respective idioms, Ellington and Ludwig von Beethoven.
The night’s big payoff was the music that broke the flash bulb, Ellington’s “Harlem,” a swaggering, plaintive, multi-layered panorama of sound. The stage was crammed with over 100 student musicians, but no bald heads were exposed to harm.
Despite the forces involved, it was a tight performance of a tight piece of music. In the first seconds, a muted trumpet whinnied out a brazen challenge, shimmering strings rippled in response and the game was on.
A lot of people have gotten their idea of how to mix classical and jazz music from George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a classical piano concerto dressed up in jazzy sequins. Far fewer concertgoers are as familiar with Ellington’s major works, and that’s a pity. The dean of American jazz critics, Gary Giddins, called “Harlem” an “American masterpiece still largely unknown in America.”
read more: http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/article-10840-when-parallels-meet.html
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