Third Stream

Third Stream refers to a loosely affiliated group of composers whose music spanned the influences of both Classical and Jazz. The Classical-influenced innovations of Cool Jazz in the 1950s led significant numbers of classically trained composers to take interest in jazz. At the forefront of this movement stood Gunther Schuller, who argued that these new musical innovations represented a "Third Stream," formed from the two "streams" of Classical and Jazz. Schuller's influential piece "Transformation" fused jazz improvisation and twelve-tone compositional techniques. In a similar vein, prominent composer-bandleader Stan Kenton relentlessly searched for new tonalities, aiming to present the audience with as diverse a sound palette as possible. Third Stream composers radically expanded the language of jazz and effectively fused it with the classical Avant-Garde; jazz-classical hybrids have continued to the present day, in the ambitious avant-garde compositions of Anthony Braxton and the sweeping orchestral suites of Wynton Marsalis.