Dizzy O'Brian

The other day I came up with the concept of ‘Third Stream Music,’ to describe what I was doing compositionally. By this I meant the stream of so-called ‘classical music’ combining with ‘pop’ or ‘jazz’ music.  One cannot ignore the cultures behind these; one might be called ‘refined or civilized,’ and one might be referred to as ‘more primitive or freer.’ I really started thinking about these concepts when I heard a radio interview with the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who said something to the effect that he admired American jazz and was working to incorporate this ‘primitivism’ into his own musical compositions. And I thought, well yes, hasn’t this been the conflict all along? Both sides have their negative and positive aspects and each side is guilty of magnifying the negative aspects of the other; you can be ‘civilized’ into a slave state and ‘primitive’ just means they don’t know any better. Or does it? I decided to Google ‘Third Stream Music’ because I felt that some...