DURING THE EARLY FIFTIES so much of my involvement with jazz came about because of my close friendship and professional relationship with John Lewis. We talked just about every day on the telephone, sometimes for hours on end. We discussed all sorts of musical matters and issues and problems, in a sense educating each other about our different professional areas, but also beginning to plan all kinds of collaborative ventures—new musical organizations, concerts, recordings, workshops—all with the intent of bringing classical music and jazz (also classical and jazz musicians) together, in a variety of mutually creative ways.

It all began very simply with exchanging and borrowing from our respective large and diverse record collections, also going to jazz and classical concerts together, comparing our sometimes divergent impressions, and hanging out a lot at the Carnegie Hall Tavern, where, incidentally, Charles Mingus soon joined us on a regular basis. Our mutual interests and activities led eventually over the next dozen years to our organizing a whole range of innovative joint enterprises, such as the creation in 1956 of the Jazz and Classical Music Society (the first such organization ever). The list of these collaborative endeavors is substantial. It included— most important—the founding in the late 1950s of the Lenox School of Jazz (a first in the history of that music), and the creation of a workshop-rehearsal band with a mixed group of jazz and classical musicians, an ensemble we maintained for about three years, but which we never presented in public. Also, in a broader sense, there was the emergence and development of a new musical genre called “Third Stream” (a term I coined in a lecture at Brandeis University in 1957), representing the growing rapprochement between the two musical mainstreams, jazz and classical, which when married and merged produced a third stream—that is, a creative fusion of classical and contemporary jazz techniques and practices.

John began asking me to make arrangements or orchestrations of some of his new extended compositions (again for jazz and classically mixed ensembles), as well as to organize recording dates for him, on which I soon became involved as a conductor, as the music he was composing increasingly demanded such directional supervision.