Terence Blanchard. Credit: Cedric Angeles.
Terence Blanchard, Ethan Iverson, Aaron Diehl, Helen Sung, Natalie Tenenbaum and other luminaries talk about the issues surrounding the jazz/classical divide—from technique and theory to conservatory culture and diversity.
“I didn’t know you were allowed to play the piano like that.”
So recalls the acclaimed jazz pianist and composer Helen Sung, upon seeing Harry Connick Jr. play solo piano as a breather during his big-band set. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Sung had only heard jazz on Charlie Brown specials or Sesame Street.
At the time of the Connick gig, Sung was finishing her undergraduate program at the University of Texas at Austin, hoping to be a concert pianist; she’d had zero contact with its jazz department. From there, she devoured music by everyone from Fats Waller to Anthony Braxton—but when she tried to sit down and play the stuff, she “completely froze.”
“I thought improvisation meant you just played something completely original, that had never been played before,” Sung admits. “Until I realized, No, this is something that has syntax and vocabulary.” Once she got into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now named for Herbie Hancock), she was off to the races. Fast forward to today: Sung is an award-winning practitioner based in NYC, with her musicianship hailed by the New York Times and beyond.
Sung has told the Connick story time and time again, but her eureka moment remains poignant and instructive. Although exceptions are out there, it’s fair to say that in American academia, jazz and classical are generally siloed into separate disciplines.
And while they certainly can be independent spaces, they’ve historically blended more than some might think—from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to the Third Stream movement, the Modern Jazz Quartet and beyond. Lil Hardin, wife and collaborator to Louis Armstrong, began as a classical pianist. Charlie Parker loved Stravinsky. To say nothing of Wynton Marsalis, Dave Brubeck, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the flutist James Newton or the Pulitzer-winning composer-musicians Anthony Davis and Tyshawn Sorey. Similarly, jazz strategies have been part of classical tradition since before jazz existed; Mozart and Beethoven were enthusiastic improvisers. Check out the histories—and modern-day evolutions—of both forms, and further examples will roll on and on.
So what—or who—is served by a separation of these art forms? Without a doubt, jazz and classical tap into different areas of an artist’s knowledge and creativity at different moments—a kind of right-brain/left-brain scenario. But it’s also true that the imagination and technique required to excel in both idioms can be extremely compatible. Why, then, are these genres so often divided?
Speaking with jazz musicians from throughout the landscape, it’s clear they don’t give it much credence. “I don’t really think about it like that, to be honest,” says saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, whose Jazz Improvisation course at Yale School of Music—itself a classical music conservatory—is about evenly split between jazz and classical students.
“It’s all music,” says trumpeter Terence Blanchard, a generation-defining jazz great who writes operas like the groundbreaking Fire Shut Up in My Bones and has completed dozens of lauded film scores, including many for Spike Lee. “The thing that’s missing is experience. Some orchestras don’t get a chance to play certain types of music, and you can hear that in their phrasing. … Some things haven’t been part of that language, and they need to be.”
Likewise, a solid understanding of classical music—its values, its conventions, its priorities—is a game-changer for any jazz cat who wants to perform on a higher level. “When you’re improvising a solo, really, you’re composing,” Escoffery says. “Literally composing 10 minutes of music in 10 minutes, in real time. So it takes a real understanding of compositional techniques and harmonic structures.”
If you’re reading this, perhaps you’re an educator or student, curious about where jazz and classical can intersect in your practice. Here’s where nine leading musicians and educators fall on this subject.
Helen Sung: ‘What Do You Want to Say?’
Coming from a classical background, Helen Sung’s experience as a jazz artist has drawn her to one conclusion: “I think in the end, music is all the same,” she states, “in the respect that it’s about sound; it’s about personal voice.”
Classical music, Sung continues, is all about “recreating the vision of a composer who’s external from oneself.” When she entered the Monk Institute, she was shocked at the expectation that she write her own music: “Because I always considered myself a pianist who played the music written by composers like Bach and Mozart and Beethoven.”
Accordingly, Sung initially found jazz to be a “terrifying” proposition. “It’s asking you, through this piece from the Great American Songbook, ‘What do you want to say through it? Who are you?’” she says. “And that’s a very, very different mindset.”
She thanks the estimable bass elder Ron Carter, who periodically stopped by the Monk Institute, for “challenging” her. (Mr. Carter’s homework: one brand-new composition, due every two weeks.)
And as her compositional skills flowered, Sung began to see the forest for the trees. “It’s very much a composer mindset,” she says, “where instead of being presented with a finished picture that you want to faithfully, accurately, beautifully represent, you take the raw materials, use them as a launching pad, and present something perhaps more personal and direct.”
Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol: ‘Internalize,’ Don’t ‘Exoticize’
The Turkish American pianist, multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol grew up with Beethoven and Mozart and Chopin waltzes around the house. His mother was, and is, a classical music teacher; at just 4, perched on the piano bench, he began to plink out those melodies himself.
The first 10 years of Sanlıkol’s musical life were steeped in Western classical music. With regard to his musical interests, classical led to classic rock which led to Chick Corea. (Weather Report, too.) At 16, he heard someone describe the saxophonist Charlie Parker as a genius. “I was curious why,” he says, “so I went and found a CD.” That recording turned out to be 1952’s Norman Granz’ Jam Session #1, featuring fellow heavyweights like alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges, tenor player Ben Webster, pianist Oscar Peterson, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Ray Brown and drummer J.C. Heard.
This bebop language was altogether new to him. He listened over and over—connecting with the tunes, whistling their melodies. He worked with a jazz teacher in Istanbul for a year, then, at 18, enrolled at Berklee. Today, he’s full-time faculty at New England Conservatory, where he investigates classical and jazz and how they interweave with the Near and Middle Eastern sounds that flow through his blood.
Wherever you land in that calculus, his advice holds: Rather than skimming other musics, learn their “dialects” deeply. “Being a straight-ahead player doesn’t mean you can talk funk,” he says. Which also applies to classical music: “You can be a total 19th-century nerd, which means you’ll be totally removed from the world of early Baroque in every way you can possibly imagine.”
Musicians need to roll up their sleeves, Sanlıkol argues, and try to understand every wrinkle in these forms that they can. “To be able to internalize something means being a good student. You have to study it, listen to it, give whatever time is [necessary],” he says. “Think about things more in depth, rather than exoticizing them.”
Aaron Diehl: Blur ‘What Is Improvised and What Is Written’
Aaron Diehl, one of the leading younger voices to work at the highest level of both jazz and classical, also thinks along these lines.
In contrast with the category-consumed marketplace, “Many artists draw from a number of musical influences,” says the pianist, composer and bandleader, who collaborates with jazz royals like Cécile McLorin Salvant and has performed as a soloist with some of the nation’s most important orchestras. “And when you’re dealing with nuance, it’s very hard to put those things in boxes.”
Diehl has loved European classical music since he was a child; he grew up with Bach, Vivaldi, Brahms and more on CD. His grandfather was a jazz musician, which meant “both idioms were part of my musical diet from an early age.” His aesthetic has proved roomy enough to include jazz masters like Benny Golson and Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, as well as the jazz-classical alchemists who came before: John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite. Diehl’s albums have boldly mixed jazz and classical repertoire, and his live programs have melded original compositions with Bach and bebop from Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Miles Davis and others.
“It’s my responsibility to connect the dots in certain passages—the listener does not know what is improvised and what is written,” he explains. “And that’s sort of the goal, right?”
Etienne Charles: ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Perspective’ Are King
As “classical brain” versus “jazz brain” goes, trumpeter and educator Etienne Charles wrote his 2022 Afro-diasporic opus San Juan Hill: A New York Story “with both brains happening at once.” “I wanted the orchestra to do what they do best,” he explains, “and I wanted my band to do what we do best. The happy medium was through rhythm.”
This is a core concept that he applies to both worlds: “Continuity of intensity of rhythm—not sacrificing any type of rhythm for some sort of virtuosic line.”
He also points out that improvisation has historically been part of the classical tradition, specifically in Western European chamber music. “And I think that is one of the biggest changes in conservatories: You see so few musicians that improvise,” he says.
Charles calls out the dearth of orchestras commissioning music from jazz composers—and, conversely, jazz bands commissioning music from classical composers. “The musicians are always eager to try stuff on what we call the ‘other side,’” he reflects. “So, one [aspect] is opportunity. Then, two, getting a little more perspective on what created these art forms, and understanding that it’s part of a bigger picture.”
After all, he explains, in Western music there are only 12 notes.
Natalie Tenenbaum: ‘Follow Your Internal Compass’
In the course of Natalie Tenenbaum’s Juilliard classical piano education, faculty encouraged her to eschew improvisation. She listened, and for a four-year-stretch, “I didn’t really do anything that involved creativity, collaboration, improvisation and exploring on my own time,” she says.
Only after Tenenbaum got out of conservatory did she spread her wings—“study with other teachers, reach out to others and try to play in other sorts of opportunities and configurations.”
“One of the sentiments I had as a young music artist/professional was that I was always trying to fit into different spaces,” she told the blog No Dead Guys. “But [I] always struggled since I never felt like I could only work in one space.” She’s forged a career in cross-pollinating classical and jazz with electronic music, vocal experimentation and visual experiences.
Fast forward to 2024, and Tenenbaum has released Standard Repertoire, Vol. 1, on which Tenenbaum interprets pieces by Bach, Liszt, Debussy and others through her personal lens, alongside tracks featuring such forward-looking artists as the rapper D Smoke and the innovative cellist SUUVI.
“Don’t go after what others are telling you to do, or what you think you should be doing,” Tenenbaum advises. “If the extent of your artistry is solely, purely classical music, but you’re interested in something else, just do it. Opening up new pathways will make you a better musician and artist overall.”
Daniel Pardo: Transcend the ‘Rules That Cannot Be Broken’
Daniel Pardo, a Colombian-born flutist with extensive academic credentials, imparts to his students the idea that agreed-upon boundaries in music education must not always be sacred. “As we learn musical concepts, I think there should be a disclosure that says, ‘This works here, this works there; try this flavor here, try this flavor there,’” he says. “Because if we’re not careful, we just learn rules that cannot be broken in any way.”
For example, in Baroque music: “According to this tradition, you can go I-IV-V, but you can’t go back to IV after V,” Pardo says. “It’s good to learn that maybe that was not the practice at the time, but that is actually the flavor with something that happens later.”
Indeed, jazz’s innate spontaneity helps Pardo break down boundaries for his classical thinking. “We’re trying to emulate things that were done 200 years ago. … It becomes a bunch of restrictions, and many times it may feel constricted,” he says. “Whereas jazz is fresh: OK, let’s communicate. Let’s move people. Let’s do things.”
Mark Gross: The Importance of Theory and Harmony
So many roads lead back to Duke Ellington, and several participants in this piece quote the master himself: “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”
Ellington was also deeply influenced by classical music, and Mark Gross—Director of Jazz Instruction at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, including their Jazz for Teens program—points out that the maestro emulated those “nuances and sounds and colors” in writing for his musicians.
“What’s the intention of music?” says Gross. “Whether it’s classical, jazz, pop, whatever—[the finest musicians] had the ability to convey a story. Before I really took that deep dive into jazz, the classical experience gave me that awareness.”
On both sides of the fence, that storytelling ability is only enhanced by technical know-how. “Long story short,” Gross says, “every good musician really understands theory and harmony, in terms of their own instrument.”
And again, he continues, “good music is good music; bad music is bad music.” Which means that, through his work as an educator, Gross remains open to “the influences of my students’ generation.”
Ethan Iverson: ‘Not Enough’ Dialogue Between Worlds
“I am generally pretty relaxed before performing,” says Ethan Iverson, an inventive pianist, Blue Note recording artist and former member of the Bad Plus. “But I can get a bit more nervous when I have to play classical music in public … literally thousands of notes in a certain sequence. In jazz there is so much more wiggle room.”
In November, Iverson will release Playfair Sonatas on the Urlicht AudioVisual label—six “substantial, fully notated pieces” for trumpet, saxophone, trombone, marimba, clarinet and violin. “The sessions were done in two days; about 90 minutes of written notes. I was exhausted after that effort in a way I would not have been by two days of jazz recording,” he says. “It really is a different kind of brain!”
Still, there’s a tremendous need for alignment and communication. “The worlds talk to each other more these days, but not enough,” Iverson says. “That was the point of my controversial essay [in the New York Times], ‘The Worst Masterpiece: Rhapsody in Blue at 100.’”
Iverson argues strongly that the classical academy in America needs to expand its understanding of the blues, swing and groove—defining principles of great Black American music, especially jazz. Too often, he says, the improvisation that occurs in classical music ignores jazz heritage: “It would help their Mozart and Mahler if they knew Ellington and [Thelonious] Monk.”
Terence Blanchard: Bridging the Gap, at Long Last
Blanchard holds the distinction of being the first Black composer to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera—his Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which premiered in 2021. And he notes that the visionary William Grant Still—known as the “Dean of African American Composers”—was rejected three times.
“And one of the comments from one of the people on the board was ‘Doesn’t have what it takes to write real opera.’ … That’s scary to me,” Blanchard says. “We missed out on three great operas because somebody didn’t understand how advanced and forward-thinking those operas were at the time.”
However glacially, these barriers are wearing down. “This is changing by the mere fact that I’m in the world,” says Blanchard. “By the mere fact that I have two operas done, that is changing.”
Blanchard’s not going anywhere, and the “talk” Iverson refers to must continue. Only through rich, good-faith dialogue of all sorts can the “classical brain” and “jazz brain” converge and become what they’re meant to be: a whole mind.
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