The cutting edge

‘A new world is opening up here, something we have never heard before, otherworldly, the future’, wrote the Dutch music magazine Glorieuze Klanken in 1955 about the music of American jazz composer Robert Graettinger. His sound world remains as challenging and full of imagination today as it was back then. In an interview, Werner Herbers called Graettinger’s City of Glass an impressive piece, with ‘at the end [...] a tutti chord, nearly twelve-tone, fortississimo, that explodes like a bomb and blasts into the hall.’ 

Werner Herbers was always searching for long-lost scores of mid-20th century progressive jazz. His efforts brought back into the spotlight jazz composers who, over 75 years ago, found inspiration in modern classical music. At the time, big band leader Stan Kenton asked arrangers to write contemporary ‘concert jazz’. Graettinger’s compositions were the most progressive of the new works. And contemporaries like Carisi and Seiber established a distinctive chamber music style influenced by jazz.