Gunther Schuller

Gunther Schuller is probably the greatest friend jazz has ever had from the classical world. A jazz devotee from the beginning, he has been the most outspoken advocate of a fusion between elements of European classical music and jazz, inventing the term "Third Stream" at a 1957 Brandeis University lecture to describe it. Although Third Stream music had been around in some form since the beginning of the century, it was Schuller who crystallized the idea, and thanks to alliances with such jazz figures as John Lewis, George Russell, Charles Mingus and Jimmy Giuffre, he actively encouraged new works in that form. Schuller's own compositions often include jazz elements, though usually far more abstractly integrated into his own twelve-tone music than the works of the jazz musicians he has encouraged. As a conductor, Schuller inadvertently helped touch off a popular ragtime fad in the 1970s with his spirited performances of Scott Joplin, and he has participated in some key jazz recordings as a French horn player. He has also been a tireless mover and shaker for jazz studies programs in universities, which have had a profound and controversial effect on the direction of the music in the last third of the 20th century. Ironically, in view of his efforts to bring jazz into academia and the concert hall, Schuller is entirely self-taught as a composer. As befitting the son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he did study theory, flute, and French horn privately, but his progress on the latter was so swift that he began playing professionally with the American Ballet Theatre in 1943, and held down first-desk positions with the Cincinnati Symphony (1943-45) and the Metropolitan Opera (1945-59). He first attracted notice on the jazz side of the fence by playing French...