“City of Glass” – Stan Kenton

Album: City of Glass

Artist: Stan Kenton

Year: 1951

Genre: Avant-Garde Jazz, Third Stream

Grade: A

Stan Kenton’s 1951 LP, City of Glass, is probably the bandleader’s most experimental record. The music is filled with dissonance and polytonality and nods to German serialism. More out there than anything by Coltrane or Coleman. However, your enjoyment level will depend on your appreciation, or tolerability, for such deliberately difficult music. City of Glass isn’t an easy listen, that’s for sure — it hardly sounds like jazz, and it’s barely recognizable as classical. Played by a 40-piece big band containing a string section, the suite is the epitome of high modernism.

Kenton and composer Robert Graettinger had been looking to push the boundaries of big band ever since their songwriting collaboration began in 1947. Their first single was “Thermopylae,” a haunting piece of exotica that reimagines Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare” through the prism of Charles Ives. After that came “Everything Happens to Me,” in which June Christy croons the melodic standard over an eerie, atonal backing track. The natural next step was to leave jazz behind altogether and completely commit to twelve-tone Elliott Carter-style avant-gardism. And that’s how we ended up with City of Glass.

The reason I love this album is simply because of how advanced (i.e., experimental) it is. As a fan of Ives and Carter (and Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), the combo of sonorous tone clusters and big band instrumentation is a match made in heaven. Especially when played with such gusto. The Stan Kenton Orchestra, which includes big names like Art Pepper on alto saxophone and Maynard Ferguson on trumpet, always delivers top-notch professionalism, and City of Glass is no different.

However, this may also be a turn-off for some. City of Glass completely ignores established jazz traditions and strips away all traces of blues and soul and improvisation. Even though there are swingin’ rhythms and Spanish tinges in the piece’s second movement, most of the suite is based in abstract anti-melody. If you want your music to have palpable human emotion, then City of Glass is not for you. The album works best—or rather, the album only works—as an exercise in intellectual theory. It’s stimulating, but it’s also quite cold. Make of that what you will.

Personally, I love City of Glass, and I respect Kenton’s bold ambitions to completely break with established convention. No other popular musician, aside from Duke Ellington and his extended suites in the 1940s, was even attempting to change an entire genre like Kenton does here. He provides us with a bold and brash expressionist Third Stream alternative; one that never really caught on, yet still sounds brand new.

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Accolades

• Top 10 Albums of 1951 — #8