Gunther Schuller, principal advocate of the Third Stream, leading the Mingus Orchestra at Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday night.
With his professorial bearing and the economical flicker of his baton, Gunther Schuller might seem like an unlikely guide to the music of Charles Mingus. But Mr. Schuller collaborated with that dynamic bassist and composer as far back as the late 1950s, and over the years he has developed a profound understanding of the Mingus oeuvre. The best parts of a repertory concert at Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday night were those Mr. Schuller conducted. The music sounded bright and clarified in his presence.
Mr. Schuller, who just turned 81, is the principal advocate of the Third Stream, a term he coined in the late 1950s to describe a hybrid of jazz and classical music. For Thursday’s concert Mr. Schuller wrote new arrangements for three lesser-known Mingus compositions that align with a Third Stream ideal. He conducted them with a 10-piece ensemble called the Mingus Orchestra, one of three official legacy bands that hold court on alternate Tuesday nights at the Iridium Jazz Club.
The most provocative of the compositions was “Half Mast Inhibition,” composed by Mingus when he was 17 but not recorded until 1960, with Mr. Schuller conducting. It’s an accomplished chamber work, episodic and austere. In his updated arrangement Mr. Schuller made many small adjustments of timbre, beginning with a cello invocation now played by a bassoonist, Michael Rabinowitz. The piece moved smoothly from a frantic march to a sumptuous dose of Orientalism, and on through a flamencolike waltz.
“Noon Night” was much simpler but nearly as effective. A moody and coloristic ballad, it appears in “Epitaph,” an opus that had its premiere, under Mr. Schuller’s baton, in 1989, 10 years after Mingus’s death. With a smaller ensemble at his disposal, Mr. Schuller toned down the sweep of this song, so that it was more a portrait than a panorama.
This same technique of simmering reduction was evident on Mr. Schuller’s arrangement of “Taurus in the Arena of Life,” which abandoned toreador flash to focus on some sophisticated voicings. Vincent Chancey, on French horn, improvised sure-footedly over the burbling pulse of the bassist Boris Kozlov and the drummer Donald Edwards.
Throughout the concert’s first half, the Mingus Orchestra, led by the saxophonist Craig Handy, played arrangements by Sy Johnson, who listened from a seat in the house. “Tonight at Noon” was busy and frenetic, while “Eclipse” was airy. On “Chill of Death” and “Todo Modo,” some uneasy dissonances threatened to slog down the ensemble; both pieces could have used the professional services of Mr. Schuller.
Elsewhere, though, the Mingus Orchestra snapped to action. The first piece of the second half was “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” with an arrangement by Mr. Kozlov that began briskly and then turned into an actual fugue. This was a joke of sorts, a signifying riff on the theme of Mingus the High-Minded Composer. But as the tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake proved in a surging solo, it was also serious business.
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