Questioning Cool, Chamber, & Third Stream: Lee Konitz, Charlie Haden, and Brad Mehldau

FOR THE LAST TWO columns, we've ridden in the Wayback Machine to peer into how jazz has in practice been a kind of chamber music from its misty beginnings in New Orleans on up. And that's the journey we'll continue. But just to keep things, er, interesting, there's a longstanding term, "chamber jazz", that describes a subset of cool jazz, both styles often said to have more classical leanings than other jazz genres. Then there's "third stream," used for postwar experiments by the likes of Stan Kenton that merged, usually heavy-handedly, classical music and jazz.