“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 bandleader turned to the music of Richard Wagner for his most unusual album, Kenton/Wagner, in 1964.
The album was the first project from Kenton’s Neophonic orchestra, a short-lived, Los Angeles-based ensemble that performed music combining jazz and classical elements. Lee Gillette, a producer at Capitol Records remembered primarily for his work with Nat King Cole, approached Kenton for an album of Wagner themes. Though he rejected the concept at first, Kenton became interested in the project and set about arranging Wagner’s originals—almost note-for-note—for a jazz orchestra.
“It took about three months to write all that music,” biographer Michael Sparke records Kenton saying. “What I had to do was take the guts, the important things, out of those Wagnerian scores, because a lot of those things last for ever.”
Jazzed-up classical music was nothing new for the time. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn had arranged bluesy and swinging versions of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, which remain attractive today. But jazz-Wagner combinations were rare. Alex Ross reported in his latest book, Wagnerism, that stride pianist Donald Lambert riffed on the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” in 1941. The enterprising Charlie Parker inserted themes from Song to the Evening Star in several solos. Prior to those examples, bandleader Paul Whiteman recorded a two-sided 78 entitled Grand Fantasia from Wagneriana—a sort of greatest-hits overture arranged by Hermann Hand—in 1928.
For Kenton, Wagner represented the pinnacle of musical achievement. His daughter Leslie recorded in her memoir, Love Affair, that Wagner was the only romantic composer Kenton listened to with any regularity. (He favored recordings of Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ravel, and possibly drew upon a theme from the latter’s Daphnis et Chloé as the basis for Artistry in Rhythm.) Members of Kenton’s orchestra also drew comparisons between the Kenton and Wagner sounds. “Stan liked that kind of bombastic, heavy music,” trombonist Jim Amlotte said. “And I thought he transcribed those [Wagner] compositions very well.”
But even for those who don’t have a taste for the original material, Kenton/Wagner consists of arrangements of themes from Tristan und Isolde, The Ring, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser that are, on the surface, downright bizarre. Latin rhythms underscore the Ride of Valkyries, the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, and the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser. The climactic point of Siegfried’s Funeral March takes on a powerful swing. The saxophones bring schmaltz to the Prelude to Act I from Lohengrin, which concludes with trumpeter Bud Brisbois playing the final statements in his screaming upper register. Gone are the depths and swirling mists of the original music.
The album divided opinion even from those in Kenton’s circles. “I did not like that Wagner album at all,” said trombonist Jiggs Whigham. “I mean, I like Wagner, but I’m a purist in that I don’t like to hear any jazzed-up Bach, even though Wagner’s music lends itself somewhat to the Stan Kenton style.”
Stan Kenton leading the Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra. Source: All Things Kenton
Noel Wedder, who puffed the project in his jacket notes for the album, also demurred: “Critical reaction to the Wagner experiment was strange,” he said. “The classicists were annoyed that Stan had deigned to move into their territory, and Kenton fans thought he had lost it by not sticking to what he did best: jazz. It was a project he wanted to do and thought he could do well. The album was both a critical and commercial failure—and I had to write the liner notes. An act of energy in itself!”
A critic for DownBeat gave the album one-and-a-half stars, praising the performances but casting doubt on the conception. “There is very little that could be called jazz, by any standards, anywhere in the album, and virtually no improvisation,” the reviewer wrote. “As a result, much of what is heard seems to fall into a no-man’s land from which the literal disciplines of the original Wagner concert music and the essential improvisatory freedom of jazz are both absent.”
But as Alex Ross reminds us, Wagnerism has a fractured legacy, and a number of artistic and intellectual movements that came in Wagner’s wake sought to recast his ideas in their own image. Kenton’s conception of Wagner was just another modern—albeit controversial—experiment.
A similar sacrilege took place in the mid-1990s, when Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players—a period-instrument ensemble—released an album of Wagner themes. Here, too, the music lacks the opulence of traditional readings. The Prelude from Tristan und Isolde is even treated as a brisk waltz on this disc.
Richard Taruskin, who reviewed the recording in The New York Times, saw such refashioning in a positive light. “There has never been an artist more wholly identified with psychic contagion and all its dark perils than Wagner,” Taruskin wrote. “Resistance to Wagner, which has always accompanied devotion to him (even within a single, divided mind, as many of us can testify), is founded on perception of that threat. These are the real stakes behind Mr. Norrington’s opposition of music to Wagner’s “mystic substance” and “swirling mists.” His performances, far from a historical restoration, are the exact opposite: an exorcism.”
So, too, seems Kenton’s perversion of Wagner’s music. The arrangements may be brash and wildly out of character, but they are a healthy break from rigid traditionalism—and simply fun to experience. If, as Ross states, Wagnerism served as a channel for celebrating the mythic elements of an imaginary past, then Kenton retooled that past for his own ends. And like Wagner, the bandleader had his own ideas about the music of the future.
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