BY MADELINE ROYCROFT
“Jazz truly rules the world.”
This was the opening line of the first French review of recorded jazz music, published in 1926 in La Revue Musicale. Writing in one of Europe’s most iconic classical music magazines, Henry Prunières knew he had to acknowledge jazz as equally sophisticated as classical music if he wanted his journal to remain ahead of the game.
On April 30, we celebrate International Jazz Day, a UNESCO-organised event that acknowledges jazz for its “diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe”. The host city is Washington DC this year, but this awesome worldwide map lets you find an event happening near you.
There is no doubt that jazz was important to the progression of classical music throughout the 20th Century. So without trying to steal the limelight from classical music’s cooler sibling, we’ve compiled a list of classical composers who, at some point in their career, tipped their hats to jazz.
10. Claude Debussy
Known for his use of the pentatonic scale, unprepared modulations, bitonality and unresolving successions of dissonant chords, it is no surprise Debussy’s name has been associated with the development of jazz. While he didn’t live to see the Jazz Age, Debussy’s use of chromaticism and whole-tone scales in the early 20th Century would later become an inspiration for bebop musicians such as Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.
9. Kurt Weill
Best known for his theatre music, German composer Kurt Weill famously collaborated with Bertold Brecht on The Threepenny Opera (1928), a socialist ‘play with music’ that scrutinised capitalist society. It was here Mack the Knife first appeared, a ballad that has since been popularised by jazz singers such as Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin.
Hear the German original here….
…or listen to this newer version sung in English by Jerry Orbach (that guy from Law and Order)
8. Dmitri Shostakovich
Jazz was extremely popular in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and ’30s (before the government decided it was too bourgeois for public consumption). However, after hearing Shostakovich’s two Suites for Jazz Orchestra (composed 1934 and 1938 respectively), you’d be right to wonder whether ‘Soviet jazz’ is a cultural oxymoron. Or, considering the government demanded that composers acknowledge this up-and-coming genre and write something for the newly founded State Jazz Orchestra, perhaps you can detect a hint of sarcasm in these works. As ever with Shostakovich, we’ll never know…
7. Erik Satie
Satie was incorporating jazz and ragtime elements into his compositions long before it was in vogue to do so. From his work as a cabaret pianist in turn-of-the-century Paris, Satie’s body of work is inherently filled out with rags and cakewalks, but he continued to include elements of these styles in his music even after he found success as an art music composer. Written between 1916 and 1917, his eccentric 15-minute ballet Parade features several popular music styles that had previously never been heard in a ballet theatre. While the success of Parade was short-lived, Satie’s 1919 piano arrangement of the rag is still performed today.
Here’s a reconstruction of the original ballet with hilarious dancing…
…and a popular piano arrangement of the work:
6. Aaron Copland
A pioneer of the American classical style, Copland’s oeuvre is undoubtedly dotted with blue notes. Most notable of these is his 1926 Piano Concerto, often affectionately referred to as the Jazz Concerto. With additional alto and soprano saxophones in the orchestration, the concerto comprises two contrasting sections that Copland thought outlined the two essential moods of jazz- “the slow blues and the snappy number”.
5. Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Zimmerman was a West German composer whose avant-garde style primarily fused elements of serialism and post-modernism. However, in his concert for trumpet and chamber orchestra Nobody knows de trouble I see (1954), Zimmermann manages to combine 12-tone theory with jazz, borrowing the traditional African-American spiritual song Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen for the main thematic material. It has since become an important part of 20th Century trumpet repertoire, but is scarcely performed today partly due to the diverse technical and musical demands it places on the soloist.
4. Maurice Ravel
Encouragement from Gershwin finally motivated Ravel to tour the United States in 1928. The 52-year-old composer became entranced by jazz, stating “the most captivating part of jazz is its rich and diverting rhythm”. His 1931 Piano Concerto in G is infused with jazz idioms – the first movement in particular showcases an interesting blend of the Basque-inspired sound of Ravel’s youth, written amongst jazz-inspired melodies, rhythm and harmonies.
3. Darius Milhaud
Milhaud’s first encounter with jazz was in 1920 when he heard a touring American band play in London. He was so inspired that he made a trip to the United States, in order to spend time in the jazz clubs and bars of New York City and Harlem. La Creation du Monde (1923) was the first large-scale work Milhaud wrote after returning home to Paris. Reminiscent of Satie’s Parade, the ballet is only 20 minutes in length and was commissioned by Le Ballets Suédois, a Swedish dance company based in Paris from 1920-1924. An alto saxophone replaces the viola section in the orchestration, which is heard especially clearly in the final chord: a consonant major seventh chord held softly by the saxophone and strings.
2. Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky’s affair with jazz dates back to the end of his Russian period, where the hint of jazz that appeared in The Soldier’s Tale (1918) becomes more and more flavoursome in compositions like Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918) and Piano-Rag-Music (1919). Easing off the jazz for the first part of his neo-classical period, it wasn’t until 1945 that Stravinsky went all out in a large-scale jazz-inspired composition. With a bluesy slow movement, his Ebony Concerto was written for and premiered by famous American jazz clarinettist Woody Herman.
1. George Gershwin
The quintessential jazz-influenced composer, Gershwin’s most successful works straddle the border between popular and classical music. His first major classical works were the ever-popular Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), both of which blend classical forms with elements of jazz, such as bluesy melodies, syncopated rhythms and wind-oriented instrumentations. Equally notable is Porgy and Bess (1934), Gershwin’s groundbreaking, genre-defying opera which featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers. The first aria Summertime has become one of the most covered jazz standards in 20th century music.
Image ElPadawan via Flickr, CC2.0.
