Orbert Davis’ Chicago Jazz Philharmonic kicks off 10th anniversary season at Hyde Park Jazz Festival!

(Chicago Tribune article by Howard Reich; photo credit Antonio Perez)

More than a decade ago, Chicago trumpeter Orbert Davis and his longtime business partner, Mark Ingram, embraced a bold idea: Create an orchestra that could merge jazz and classical traditions, an idiom that musicians sometimes call Third Stream.

As Davis' Chicago Jazz Philharmonic prepares to launch its 10th anniversary season this month, the two men and their colleagues appear to have accomplished what looked nearly impossible when they started.

"I'm amazed that we're still in existence," says Davis, looking back on a long list of performances. "Every concert featured world premieres. We had a chance to showcase a lot of the best talent that Chicago has to offer.

"And we're right on schedule in terms of my vision."

That vision involved not just performing Third Stream repertoire but also training classical musicians to get comfortable with improvised jazz, and jazz musicians to become conversant in symphonic practices. The task is more challenging than it sounds, for jazz and classical players are not always educated in each other's disciplines, making it difficult for many to finesse jazz-classical orchestral scores by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, John Lewis, J.J. Johnson and other cross-genre adventurers.

Listen to the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, especially after all these years of work, and you're hearing an ensemble that sounds equally at home in both realms.

How fitting that its 10th anniversary season will be its most ambitious, with concerts in high-profile venues such as the Auditorium Theatre and Symphony Center, as well as a second trip to Cuba in December. In addition, the organization for the first time has commissioned a new work by someone other than Davis: composer Daniel Schnyder.

In many ways, then, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic has grown dramatically in the past decade. Its annual budget developed from almost nothing to $350,000 a few years ago, $550,000 during the past three years and $750,000 for the coming season. That figure includes its extensive education efforts, which bring Davis and his organization into 11 schools and include a summer jazz academy that recently served 110 kids.

That's a lot of action for an institution as young as this, and Davis — an optimist to the core — looks back on the past decade's struggles in thoroughly positive terms.

"The entire journey has been one amazing high," he says. "We could talk about the lows, but the lows were expected. It's generally just in terms of funding.

"The highs (are in) the music itself. One of the things I get a kick out of is watching the transformation of the musicians in the orchestra. Many of our classical musicians have never been in jazz situations, except in our performances. … It goes the other way for the jazz musicians, too, to be in a very structured (classical) setting."

Anyone who thinks all of this amounts to an arcane musicological discussion clearly has not heard the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in action. Epic Davis works such as "The Chicago River," "Havana Blue" and "Sketches of Spain: (Revisited)," an evocative reworking of the Miles Davis and Gil Evans masterpiece recently released on CD, expand the definition of Third Stream and reaffirm the music's viability in the 21st century.

What's next for the organization?

Two more recordings will be out in the next year, and, after that, Davis foresees the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic acquiring a building of its own for teaching, rehearsals, recordings and everything else it does.

"That's the goal, to have a place where students and composers can meet," says Davis, who does not dream small.

"There will always be challenges," he acknowledges. "We need to branch outside of Chicago more. … But there's already an international awareness of who we are.

"I'm less depressed about the challenges than I'm really encouraged about the possibilities."

For good reason.

CJP schedule highlights

Following are highlights of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic's 10th anniversary season. For more information, visit chicagojazzphilharmonic.org or phone 312-573-8932.

Hyde Park Jazz Festival: 6 p.m. Sept. 28

Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Parkway: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14

Cuban tour: Dec. 18-22

Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.: Feb. 6, 2015

North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie: 8 p.m. April 24

Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St.: 3 p.m. April 26