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BMOP/sound
1004
Recording Release Date 
June 2008
SACD Recording 
Recording Length 
Disc 1: 58:16
  • Boston Modern Orchestra Project
  • Gil Rose, conductor

Creator of the "Third Stream," Schuller is a master of weaving the structural complexities found in contemporary classical music with the improvisational elements of jazz. Reminiscent of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Journey into Jazz is the story of Eddy Jackson, a boy who is introduced to and learns to play jazz. In contrast, Variants and Concertino offer an exploration of the wholly original sound of jazz quartet and orchestra.

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News and Press

[News Coverage] RIP Gunther Schuller (1925-2015)

Saddening news. Gunther Schuller has died at the age of 89. A musical polymath, Schuller was active as a composer, conductor, arranger, historian, educator, arts administrator and, earlier in his career, French horn player. He pioneered the concept of “Third Stream” music: works that combine influences and materials from jazz and classical music.

Sequenza21 Full review
[CD Review] All About Jazz reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

What might seem the most innocuous music is often the most avant garde, the most challenging, the spark that forces us to question the boundaries of what we might call jazz. Gunther Schuller’s Journey Into Jazz, composed in 1962, is just that: a children’s narrative, telling the story of one Eddie Jackson, “a boy who learned about jazz,” a communal mode of music-making that is free, ostensibly, of all the restraints that come with genre labels.

All About Jazz Full review
[CD Review] MusicWeb International reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

The Variants for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra prove the point that jazz and straight music don’t mix!

MusicWeb International Full review
[News Coverage] Schuller: Journey Into Jazz voted Best Classical CDs of 2008 by NPR

Just as the 2008 presidential election exposed and ultimately crossed gender, racial and generational barriers, many of the year’s notable recordings explored and wrestled with different kinds of boundaries — some musical, some cultural, and some almost unimaginable if not for the power of music.

Album: Gunther Schuller: Journey into Jazz
Song: Concertino for Jazz Quartet & Orchestra
Artist: Gil Rose

NPR Full review
[CD Review] Downbeat Best CDs of 2008

Composers of today’s Olympian jazz-classical concertos would do well to listen to these deceptively understated, coolly creative pieces that capture the zeitgeist of the 1960s. These three newly recorded 20-minute works (dubbed “Third Stream” by Gunther Schuller himself) explore and synthesize myriad interactions between a jazz combo improvising and a chamber orchestra reading a through-composed score with some big band gestures.

Downbeat Full review
[CD Review] Still swimming in the stream

During each of jazz’s growth spurts, opportunity for greater complexity and freedom arose. When jazz went from Dixieland to hot, the improvisations and prominence of the soloist’s voice grew. Then from hot to swing and the big band era, the arrangements began to take on a new complexity. The music during the big band era further absorbed colors for its palette from the modern classical music coming out of Europe. Groups lead by Claude Thornhill, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman were some of the main proponents of furthering the sophistication factor on the bandstand and in compositions.

Jazz Police Full review
[CD Review] Downbeat reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

Composers of today’s Olympian jazz-classical concertos would do well to listen to these deceptively understated, coolly creative pieces that capture the zeitgeist of the 1960’s. These three newly recorded 20-minute works (dubbed “Third Stream” by Gunther Schuller himself) explore and synthesize myriad interactions between a jazz combo improvising and a chamber orchestra reading a through-composed score with some big band gestures. All the new recordings reward relistening.

Downbeat Full review
[CD Review] Gramophone reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

The late 1940’s to the early 1960’s witnessed several cross-fertilizations of then-contemporary classical music and modern jazz fashions. Given Gunther Schuller’s strong background in both worlds, it made sense for him to try and synthesize the two, decades before polystylism became a norm.

Gramophone Full review
[CD Review] Fanfare reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

Gunther Schuller is not merely an award-winning composer, former principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, retired artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Festival, and member of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, he also wrote the book on jazz. Two books actually, Early Jazz and The Swing Era (both Oxford University Press), and over a long and acclaimed career he has collaborated with or performed music by such distinctive jazz artists as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, among many others.

Fanfare Full review
[CD Review] American Record Guide reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

This fascinating recording is a window into one of the most underreported cultural stories of our time: the decisive effect of jazz on 20th Century classical music - greater in the long run, as Constant Lambert predicted in the 1930s, than the influence of serialism or neoclassicism. Written in the late 50s and early 60s for symphony orchestra and jazz ensembles, these rather austere but vital works by Gunther Schuller come in the middle of a phenomenon that began with Gottschalk and continues with Golijov.

American Record Guide Full review
[CD Review] Jazz Times reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

If Third Stream music, the merger of classical music and jazz, never took hold within either musical world as it might have since its official inception in the late 1950’s, the best examples of the genre still prove that it was more that just an academic pipedream.

Jazz Times Full review
[CD Review] ClassicalCDReview reviews Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

Arnie the Hep-Cat. Gunther Schuller became a working musician at the young age of 16, picking up professional gigs as a horn player in New York. By the time he turned 18, he was principal horn of the Cincinnati Orchestra under Goossens. By 20, he had joined the horn section of the Met Orchestra. He also became a busy studio musician. Perhaps his most famous dates came to him as a player in the Gil Evans-Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions.

ClassicalCDReview Full review
[CD Review] BMOP/sound releases its fourth album

BMOP/sound, the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music recordings, announces the release of its fourth CD Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz. Representative of the “Third Stream” genre, a revolutionary style of music brought forth into the mainstream by Schuller in the 1950’s, the three pieces on this album unite the structural complexities found in contemporary classical music with the improvisational elements of jazz.

All About Jazz Full review
[Press Release] BMOP/sound releases Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz

BMOP/sound, the nation's foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music recordings, announces the release of its fourth CD Gunther Schuller: Journey Into Jazz. Representative of the Third Stream genre, a revolutionary style of music brought forth into the mainstream by Schuller in the 1950s, the three pieces on this album unite the structural complexities found in contemporary classical music with the improvisational elements of jazz.

Full review
[News Coverage] Boston Modern Orchestra Project launches own label

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), an orchestra devoted exclusively to performing and commissioning new music, has announced it will launch an in-house record label, BMOP Sound, in January.

BMOP Sound will release five world premiere CDs early next year: John Harbison’s Ulysses, Michael Gandolfi’s Y2K Compliant, Gunther Schuller’s Journey Into Jazz (with the composer narrating), Lee Hyla’s Lives of the Saints (with mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger), and Charles Fussell’s Wilde (with baritone Sanford Sylvan).

Playbill Arts Full review