"The Histoire ragtime is a concert portrait, or snapshot of the genre. [...] If my subsequent essays in jazz portraiture were more successful, that is because they showed awareness of the idea of improvisation, for by 1919 I had heard live bands and discovered that jazz performance is more interesting than jazz composition."*
Stravinsky was enthusiastic about live jazz from the moment he first encountered it. He had the chance to hear some bands in the United States (in Harlem, Chicago and New Orleans) and mentioned a particular admiration for the musicians Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Charles Christian.
Stravinsky's discovery of jazz was, as he said, "a very important event in [his] life."** He felt it added "a wholly new sound" to his music, first explored in the work Histoire du Soldat of 1918.
In addition to the many jazz-inspired works for classical players throughout his career, Stravinsky also wrote a number of pieces specifically for jazz bands and similar ensembles, including:
• Scherzo à la russe, (1943–44) for the bandleader Paul Whiteman (who also famously commissioned Gershwin to compose Rhapsody in Blue).
• Circus Polka (for a young elephant) for the choreographer George Balanchine, first performed by the Ringling Brothers' Circus Band at Madison Square Gardens.
• And the Ebony Concerto for clarinettist and bandleader Woody Herman, whose players astonished Stravinsky as much with their "instrumental mastery" as with their smoking:
"When the musicians did not blow horns they blew smoke, and of such tangibility that the atmosphere looked like Pernod clouded by water."*
"Jazz — blanket term — has exerted a time-to-time influence on my music since 1918, and traces of blues and boogie-woogie can be found even in my most 'serious' pieces."*
But none of these American musical art forms (jazz, ragtime, blues) had any direct influence on the writing of The Rite of Spring, which was completed five years prior to Stravinsky's first encounter with jazz (that's jazz in the catholic sense). Yet strangely enough, when you listen to The Rite — especially if you strip away the rich orchestral colours and just listen to a solo piano transcription — there's something there deep in its bones that feels like jazz.
Continue to part two: Jazz's post-Stravinsky Rites
Editor's notes
*Dialogues by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (University of California Press, 1982), pp. 53–4.
**Expositions and Developments by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (Doubleday, 1962), pp. 103-104.