Stan Kenton/Robert Graettinger - City of Glass
A 1951 collaboration between popular bandleader Stan Kenton and a forward thinking but unknown young composer Bob Graettinger, City of Glass is a completely ahead of its time combination of big band jazz and “Modern” composition. Imagine Stravinsky or Messiaen but with the ability to swing. The album was a concept work about a single day in the busy city and the music moves at lightspeed, clashing atonally one moment, swaying harmoniously the next. The strings create tonal skyscrapers, percussion rumbling traffic, pianos as people in the street.
Bob Graettinger says in the liner notes: “The way I hear music is in a series of constantly changing tensions. What I hear isn’t individual melodies or harmonies, but something more like abstract shapes in motion - physical things passing through time.”
Unfortunately Kenton’s popularity as a “swing” bandleader did not admire the album to anyone in the serious classical music community, and his usual audience certainly couldn’t dance to it, so the album was mostly ignored and lingered on the fringe. Even Kenton had his doubts in later years, saying "Well, I tell ya, it was either the greatest music the band ever presented, or the biggest pile of crap we ever played, and I still do not know which."
Graettinger, a very shy and private man, secluded himself into his writing, working on further music based off complex mathematics and notation system of color charts and graphs, very ittle of which was recorded or even released. He died in 1957, at the age of 34, from lung cancer- only 10 years after first working with Kenton.
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