When parallels meet

Fast forward to 2014. For years, music groupies have enjoyed the overflowing talent of MSU’s jazz and classical programs — but always separately. Friday night, the MSU College of Music arranged a historic meeting, like Apollo docking with Soyuz or Stanley meeting Livingstone. For the first time, jazz and classical forces joined, and they didn’t just shake hands.

The students tackled major music from (arguably) the greatest composers of their respective idioms, Ellington and Ludwig von Beethoven.

The night’s big payoff was the music that broke the flash bulb, Ellington’s “Harlem,” a swaggering, plaintive, multi-layered panorama of sound. The stage was crammed with over 100 student musicians, but no bald heads were exposed to harm.

Despite the forces involved, it was a tight performance of a tight piece of music. In the first seconds, a muted trumpet whinnied out a brazen challenge, shimmering strings rippled in response and the game was on.

A lot of people have gotten their idea of how to mix classical and jazz music from George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a classical piano concerto dressed up in jazzy sequins. Far fewer concertgoers are as familiar with Ellington’s major works, and that’s a pity. The dean of American jazz critics, Gary Giddins, called “Harlem” an “American masterpiece still largely unknown in America.”

Jazz is at “Harlem’s” heart, even though the work has little room for improvisation.

At Friday’s concert, there was a perfect balance between pleading, eloquent solos — too many to list here — and the rich soundscape around them. You got the feeling that anyone in the jazz orchestra or the symphony could stand up and stop the show. With the jazz band driving the bus, the feeling of swing was rooted to the earth, rather than being an afterthought or exotic touch. About five minutes into the piece, the brass section and drums led all forces in a swinging strut through neon-lit, rainslicked streets, accelerating into a hot chase and an overwhelming sonic pulsation.

Conductor Kevin Noe paced the music’s many turnarounds and mood shifts with split-second timing, building up an organic progression of voices and impressions.

As the juggernaut rolled to a climax, a giant, smeary note, like a tomato 30 feet wide, hit the wall and oozed to the floor, signaling the floor-shaking apotheosis of a hymn-like final melody. Shoulder to shoulder, the jazz and symphonic musicians pushed that melody to the skies, sounding as if they’d been playing together for years.

“Harlem” was the finale of a well-programmed pincer movement Friday night.

The concert began with a shorter Ellington piece, “Bula,” a super-saucy jazz take on Maurice Ravel’s already-saucy “Bolero.” It was a perfect opener for a cross-genre concert, taking full advantage of the forces on hand. Ellington’s “gutbucket Bolero” (his own description) grew from a solo drum tattoo to a raging flood, with the saxophones pumping out a wicked undertow.

The surge gradually spent itself and receded to the solo drum.

An effective bit of staging added to the feeling that a special event was unfolding. As the drumbeat of “Bula” wound down, the jazz ensemble filed off the stage. The final thunk of the drum led, without interruption, into the kick-on-the-door opening chords of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Duke, meet Ludwig.

The MSU Symphony’s take on Beethoven was lively, precise and — unless I drank the night’s conceptual Kool-Aid too fast — informed by the restless spirit of jazz. After all, the “Eroica” was Beethoven’s breakthrough symphony, criticized by an early reviewer a “daring and wild fantasia” that “loses itself in lawlessness.”

With Beethoven and Ellington bouncing off of each other all night, plenty of parallels came to mind. Both composers used hammer blow chords that demand attention. Both of them nestled yearning, lovely melodies in soaring castles of impregnable musical architecture. Neither of them was shy about waking you up and shaking you up.

At the premiere of Beethoven’s “Eroica” in 1805, somebody yelled out that he’d pay the musicians to stop. That didn’t happen Friday. Noe and the MSU Symphony gave it a meticulous and powerful reading, with total respect for its expansiveness and profundity, but the buzz from all that jazz seemed to make it swing a bit harder. I caught the cellists smiling and swaying at each other as the playful last movement popped off the stage like fireworks. Far from sounding musty and old in comparison to Ellington, Beethoven came off like a wild horse, impatiently kicking the door of the old Mozart-Haydn stall down. The pairing brought out the wildness and innovative spirit of both composers.

When the concert was over, Noe brought MSU’s jazz studies’ director, Rodney Whitaker, to the stage for a double bow. Earlier in the evening, Noe told the audience he and Whitaker had wanted to join forces for years and hoped this collaboration would be the first of many. Noe clearly loves jazz and he’s properly in awe of what Whitaker has done at MSU to build up one of the nation’s top jazz studies programs. The notion of future collaborations makes the mind reel. An evening of J.S. Bach and Thelonious Monk? Debussy and Dave Brubeck? More of Ellington’s big works? Kudos to Whitaker, Noe and the College of Music for giving us another treat to look forward to, if only once every few years. They have proven that, contrary to Euclid’s quaint notions, parallel lines do meet now and then.