In music, there are all kinds of variations in which one genre is combined with another. However, a blues symphony is new. Wynton Marsalis composed it and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Jadar Bignamini has now recorded it. The result? Thrilling!

Wynton Marsalis comes from a family of musicians, is a jazz trumpeter and composer and has long been an icon of traditional American jazz. Black Codes (From The Underground) and numerous other albums bear witness to his creative power and musicality, but also to his conservative, sometimes conservative attitude, which rejects modern jazz, free jazz and other varieties of jazz after the 1960s. On the other hand, he has no fear of contact with classical music, as his most recent work shows.

Unusually for a symphonic composition, the Blues Symphony has seven movements. However, a glance at its titles quickly reveals the background to this - a historical outline of the development of jazz up to the aforementioned 1960s: Born in Hope forms the prelude, followed by Swimming in Sorrow, the Reconstruction Rag, a Southwestern Shakedown, the Big City Breaks, Latin American influences in Canzon y Mambo, Choro y Samba and the Dialogue in Democracy.

Each movement displays orchestral fullness, elements of the blues are sprinkled throughout the string and wind passages, the Detroit symphonists shake, whisper, clarify, jubilate, all in excellent quality, which at 192 kHz and 24 bit leaves no detail out and allows the ear to participate in the well-spaced orchestral playing on a large stage.

Despite all the sonic goodness, the melange that Marsalis has created will spark discussions as to how this should be categorised. Is it another manifestation of the traditional jazz approach, now ennobled, as it were, by its performance on a classical stage? Or an interesting experiment with two styles that are almost diametrically opposed in terms of music history? Whatever the case may be.

Marsalis has definitely utilised the possibilities of the symphonic orchestra to express fullness, drama and life. The music builds on the tried and tested systematics of classical music, integrates surprisingly modern compositional approaches of the classical genre and repeatedly weaves clear blues passages or the blues scheme into all of this.

For some, this music may seem strange at first hearing. Others, however, will notice when they look at the cover that another fitting suggestion is made in the name of the theatre:

Paradise. (Thomas Semmler, HighResMac)

Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Jader Bignamini, conductor