This week's new AccuJazz channel: Third Stream

[AccuJazz]

This week's new channel is Third Stream. We're taking a pretty broad view of the subgenre, including "jazz with strings" and classical-influenced big band along with more pure Third Stream music. It would be cool if this thread could double as a "what's your favorite Third Stream album" discussion. My picks: Sketches of Spain, Abdullah Ibrahim's African Suite, Bill Frisell's "Quartet" album, "Scorched" by Sco and Mark Anthony-Turnage, "All Rise" by Wynton Marsalis. What are yours? Here's the AccuJazz press release thing:

Jazz and classical collide in the intriguing fusion that composer Gunther Schuller called "Third Stream." Many of the greatest jazz musicians have made forays into the idiom, and to make that great music available to everyone, AccuJazz.com Internet radio has just released a new channel that plays the best in Third Stream jazz 24 hours a day.

Though Schuller coined the term, "Third Stream," in 1957, there were jazz/classical hybrids going on long before that. Charlie Parker was a fan of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and some of Parker's most memorable recordings were with string orchestra. Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaborated to create monumental Third Stream music on "Porgy and Bess" and "Sketches of Spain," and other composers for big band like Stan Kenton, Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider have also contributed beautiful and challenging classical-influenced jazz.

Avant-Garde jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman, Evan Parker and Bill Dixon have also found inspiration in classical music, as have a number of younger talents like Brad Mehldau, David Sanchez and John Hollenbeck. There is amazing variety of classical-influenced jazz out there, and the place to hear it is the Third Stream channel at AccuJazz.com.