Stan Kenton: City of Glass

"You're not supposed to understand it," Stan Kenton advised. "You experience it with your subconscious." Audiences, though, lacked his psychoanalytic insight. City of Glass' 1948 premiere reduced the Chicago Civic Opera House to stunned silence. An all-dissonance analogue to the "all-glass" architecture then redefining urban skylines, Bob Graettinger's modernistic magnum opus ironically suffered the fate of historic landmarks in the bulldozer's path: prompt demolition. Kenton never again publicly performed City of Glass in its atonal entirety, conceding: "It's very advanced music, and the average person can't take too much of it." Fortunately, Jazz.com visitors aren't average, and never shrink from challenges.