The Rites of Swing

Ever since black music broke out of the bordellos of New Orleans and Kansas City at the beginning of the century and blazed its way into the consciousness of classical musicians, composers have been trying to marry the disparate traditions of European concert music and jazz.

Among the early experimenters was Igor Stravinsky, who in 1918 pored over some published ragtime numbers that his friend conductor Ernest Ansermet brought him from America. Sheet music was a flat, indistinct approximation of that quivering, incandescent music, but Stravinsky gleaned enough from it to incorporate ragtime into a suite of dances in “L’Histoire du Soldat” (The Soldier’s Tale) a Faustian fable for a small ensemble and narrator.

Eighty years later, with jazz now prestigiously ensconced in America’s most august musical institutions, Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, has written “A Fiddler’s Tale,” a musical edifice built on the foundations of Stravinsky’s work.

In a room at Lincoln Center, a six-person ensemble, plus Marsalis on trumpet and actor Andre De Shields, is getting ready to take both pieces on the road (the works will be played tonight at Royce Hall).

The idea for this devilish diptych came when Marsalis’ string quartet “At the Octoroon Balls” and the suite from “The Soldier’s Tale” shared the bill on a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert in 1995. David Shifrin, a clarinetist and the society’s artistic director, remembers that “during the Stravinsky, Wynton was backstage and really getting into it and saying things like, ‘Yeah I could do that.’ ”

So Shifrin suggested he write a piece that could be paired with Stravinsky’s for the same portable orchestra: two each of strings (violin and double bass), winds (clarinet and bassoon) and brass (trumpet and trombone), plus percussion and narrator.

But Marsalis preserved more than just Stravinsky’s instrumentation and his proto-jazz allusions. He commissioned essayist and critic Stanley Crouch to write a new, jiving version of the original story. Instead of a fiddle-playing soldier as in the Stravinsky, the protagonist is a workaday musician who trades her soul to a demonic record man in exchange for wealth and glory. And he maintained the sequence and some of the titles of the original movements, adopted some of the forms and adapted some of Stravinsky’s trademarks: lurching rhythms, metric shifts, pungent harmonies, quick-cut collage effects and diamond-edged articulations.

But where Stravinsky’s piece is spare and transparent, Marsalis’ is busy and lush. Each fragmentary tune emerges from an undergrowth of twining accompaniment figures, and the sounds are restless and complex without being really contrapuntal. In a few passages, “A Fiddler’s Tale” sounds like what Stravinsky might have written had Ansermet brought him, instead of ragtime, a few examples of New Orleans jazz.

“My music is not laid out horizontally, it’s vertical,” Marsalis tells the other musicians during a rehearsal. “You’re used to playing melodies, but in our music it’s all blocks and we have to get the sound of each one right. It’s like, if you go to Europe, the cities are all laid out horizontally, but here in New York, it’s all vertical.”

Indeed, Marsalis’ version of the movement called “The Devil’s Dance,” is thick and layered, alternating wild, diabolically difficult licks on the violin over a noisy ground rhythm with strident, snarling chords on trumpet and trombone, propelled by a busy filigree on the clarinet. It’s a roiling mass of sound, until Marsalis patiently, tensely, finds the right balance and fine-tunes the sound. He and the trombone player try various mutes in different combinations, coloring their chords and making them variously toll, bray, blare or growl.

The players are mostly members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, but Marsalis talks to them the way he might his own jazz band, explaining who lays down the rhythm, who has the tune, who punctuates with interjected chords. He scat-sings lines to instruct them in the feel of the syncopation, and he demonstrates the elastic, swing phrasing he wants by playing a passage until they get it in their ears.

“I know that it sounds schizophrenic for now,” Marsalis says. “But the vibe of it will come out. It just takes time.”

As he rehearses, Marsalis also rewrites, thinning textures, simplifying unplayable riffs, snipping out measures. “This is really for my own education,” Marsalis says during a break, leaning on a piano, a brown fedora pushed back on his head. “My music is designed for people to play on it. Nothing is in stone.”

At times, Marsalis’ jazz-world flexibility and willingness to learn runs into the classical musician’s respect for what’s printed in the score. “All those tempo changes and meter changes, I’m going to start taking all that stuff out, because we don’t have time to rehearse it all,” Marsalis announces.

The other musicians rebel, almost offended at the notion of taking the easy way out. “We should do it the way you like it,” Shifrin says generously and firmly.

Occasionally, the jostle of jazz and classical traditions produce a moment of perplexity, as when Marsalis asks the percussionist Stefon Williams to whisper a rhythm by stroking the skin of a snare drum with a metal-bristled brush.

“I can’t do that,” Williams admits. “That’s a drum set thing. I never played drum set.” Williams is a crackerjack jazz vibraphonist who plays with Marsalis and Cassandra Wilson, but his training was as a symphonic percussionist. This is one technique that slipped between the cracks of his broad background.

“I’ll check it out,” he reassures the composer. “I’ll get someone to show me.”

The moment, a passing discomfort in the context of a tense and pressured rehearsal, exposes the tender heart of the project.

“I’m trying to find out where is the point that jazz meets certain aspects of classical music,” Marsalis says, “then try to create music that’s syncopated, but that anybody can play.”

There’s the rub: However skillfully the composer blends techniques--writing chains of jazzy sixth chords for string quartet or laying a developing, narrative form taken from classical tradition over a plucked ground bass and a sibilant hi-hat--the fact is that most musicians are likely to get one of the two styles wrong.

As a trumpeter, Marsalis is remarkable for his chameleon-like ability to switch from the plush, downy timbre he favors in his jazz work and the hard, tightly cornered sound he can produce for a baroque concerto. He is extraordinary in his feel for both approaches to rhythm.

“I don’t know another musician who is as versatile in changing styles as Wynton is,” says Shifrin. “My idol when I was growing up was Benny Goodman, who played Bartok and Mozart, but even he never had that complete versatility.”

Even so, Marsalis acknowledges that style-hopping is not easy, that he has not played classical trumpet with any regularity in years, and that he is having technical troubles in the Stravinsky. “Even if that’s where you started out, you still have to put in the time when you come back,” he says. “Michael Jordan figured that out after he went to play baseball.”

But if the historical path of classical-jazz synthesis, like the road alluded to in both Stravinsky’s and Marsalis’ “Tales,” has been paved with more good intentions than solid achievements, it’s not just for formal and technical reasons. The problem is also philosophical.

“For Stravinsky, jazz was just an interesting thing to put in his music,” Marsalis says. “There’s this whole concept of abstraction: You take a dance and transform it into something else. With us, it’s just the opposite. In jazz, we always ask, ‘Is it swinging? How danceable can you make it?’ Dance for us is very literal. A waltz is a waltz.’

That gulf--between the desire to “take a snapshot,” as Stravinsky put it, of a popular genre and adorn it with the dignity of a classical frame, and the impulse to make orchestral music swing--has stymied generations of composers. At first, Europeans like Ravel and Milhaud tended to spice up their styles with blue notes, saxophones and syncopations. Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and, more recently, Andre Previn and Anthony Davis have attempted fusions that probed more deeply into jazz, with varying degrees of success.

Marsalis himself has done it before in “At the Octoroon Balls” and will do it again, in a large-scale orchestral piece he has been commissioned to write for the New York Philharmonic.

“I’m working up to that,” he says. “Stravinsky was such a master of orchestration and the whole tradition that the difficult thing for me to do is to figure out how to work within my own limitations.”

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Marsalis/Stravinsky, “The Soldier’s Tale” and “A Fiddler’s Tale,” today at 7 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $16-$50. (310) 825-2101.