Myka and ensemble guide flow of Third Stream music

The term “Third Stream” surfaced in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s as a description for works that blended elements of jazz and classical music. Although the phrase was new, the idea wasn’t, since composers from Scott Joplin and George Gershwin to Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein had already found ways to link the two.

Nearly half a century later, the fascination with Third Stream persists, even though the term itself is now rarely used. But it’s a label that kept coming to mind Sunday night during the performance by oboist Myka with the Orion Winds, soprano Cristina Linhardt and a jazz quartet led by pianist Gerald Clayton.

The program at the Jazz Bakery included well-crafted compositions by Mike Scott, Sandro Albert and Jorge Estrada, written for varying combinations of instruments. But the focal points of the evening were three works attempting to find the common flow between jazz and classical music.

Astor Piazzolla’s “Cafe 1930” a characteristically dark-themed tango-driven piece, was rendered with appropriately atmospheric qualities. Rachel O’Kaine’s “Ivan’s Longing,” receiving its world premiere, is described by the composer as “a metaphoric film score for a film that continues to play repeatedly in my mind” -- the Macedonian picture “Before the Rain.” Inspired by the film’s allegoric aspects, O’Kaine’s music attempted to portray the raw passions of a country ravaged by war and civil unrest. That’s a challenge for this sort of instrumentation, but there were moments when the dissonant dynamics of her harmonies and the often urgent rhythmic undercurrent successfully captured her imagined images.

The true Third Stream highlight of the evening, however, was Billy Childs’ “A View of the City,” a work that achieved a convincing balance between its intricately composed passages for the woodwind ensemble and the improvised soloing from Clayton, bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Nate Wood. Although one might have wished for more development of the woodwind segments, there was no denying the brilliance of the jazz artists.

Clayton continues to take his playing to a new level at virtually every performance, and Woods is rapidly establishing himself as one of the Southland’s hardest-swinging, most inventively gifted drummers.