Symphonic Jam Session

As the members of the San Diego Symphony filed onstage for the second half of their concert at the Balboa Park Bowl last week, they were impeccably dressed in black dinner jackets and black formals. But among them suddenly appeared four raffish young men in beige sports jackets and striped ties. They were the Dave Brubeck Jazz Quartet, there to perform in Howard Brubeck's Dialogues for Combo and Orchestra. It was the first time that a jazz group improvised in a concert with a symphony orchestra.

To jazzmen used to going "way out" on free-swinging improvisations, much of modern symphonic music has long seemed both sterile and inhibited. Composer Howard Brubeck, a college music teacher and brother of Pianist Dave Brubeck, wrote his Dialogues in an effort to un-inhibit things by wedding improvisation with formal music. Both the jazzmen and the symphonic musicians had some doubts about the project. "We can't memorize and play a piece we don't like the way a legit musician can," Dave said when he first heard Howard's plans. But he changed his mind when he heard Howard's fast-breaking, dissonant orchestral score. "It's O.K.," said Alto Saxman Paul Desmond. "Everything's out of tune."

To permit maximum improvisation within a prescribed form, Howard wrote four separate "dialogues," in each of which the quartet and orchestra treat a set of melodic and harmonic ideas. In the second dialogue, for instance, the orchestra (conducted by Howard himself) opened with a blueslike theme on the English horn with accompaniment from the cellos. The combo (Brubeck, Desmond, Bassman Norman Bates and Drummer Joe Dodge) then came in with a heavily accented "discussion" of the theme with orchestral string accompaniment, took off on a series of improvisations without the orchestra, then joined the orchestra again in a written variation on the main theme.

By the time the combo cut loose from the orchestra in the second dialogue, the audience was bouncing, the orchestra was grinning and one lady violinist was tapping out the syncopated beat with her foot. Some critics felt that the contrast between the styles of the orchestra and the combo was too great and that Composer Brubeck had written not a dialogue but a series of intersecting monologues.

Howard Brubeck's answer: in future compositions he expects to give both the jazzmen and the orchestra far greater opportunity to improvise. Mozart. Bach and other 18th century composers, he points out, left a great deal to the performers' discretion, sometimes providing only basic themes and certain harmonies. It is high time, he feels, that U.S. composers started to follow their lead.

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