A Friday highlight in the Concertzender’s programming, in which classical music starts out, jazz overtakes on the right, string quartets sort themselves out and big bands dive in and out.
The name for the central point which controls all this traffic is Third Stream. A name invented by 2 Americans – Gunther Schuller and George Russell. At the beginning of the 50’s they were looking for a synthesis of jazz and classical, for which they established a sort of laboratory at the New England Conservatory in Boston – on the American North-East coast.
The first episode of Rush Hour shows how it all started, this time with an impression of what in our time has been written and composed on the intersection of jazz and classical. In the early years there was some discussion about the definition of the term Third Stream, but if it’s about music it’s better to ask the musicians – people with one foot in the classical world, and one foot in jazz. Such as the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, blues harmonica player Corky Siegel, or from Scandinavia: Helge Sunde.
You can find the link to the broadcast here.