Kenton pro Wagner
Stan Kenton released an album of Wagner themes in 1964 “I don’t think jazz was meant to continue as dance music,” Stan Kenton told Nat Hentoff, jazz critic for DownBeat magazine, in 1952. “What jazz is going to evolve into is an American style of—if I can use the word—classical music. And that’s what we’re trying to do.” That mission defined Kenton’s long career and resulted in recordings that brought symphonic jazz into regions few expected or even wanted. The Progressive Jazz of Kenton’s band in the late 1940s looked to the music of Stravinsky and Bartók as models, a trend that continued with the Innovations Orchestra in the early 1950s and resulted in the thoroughly dissonant—and fan-alienating—album, City of Glass . Kenton and arranger-composers such as Pete Rugolo and Bob Graettinger were convinced that the only way to make jazz survive was to fuse it with the jagged sonorities of modern classical music. So it was perhaps a surprise to Kenton fans that the band...