THOMAS WILKINS & BRANFORD MARSALIS

The San Francisco Symphony gave the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On the Town in February 1946 with Bernstein on the podium. In the first episode, a sailor falls asleep on the subway and dreams of sweeping Miss Turnstiles off her feet. In the second episode, another sailor seduces a high-school girl in Central Park. The third episode is a cinematic grand finale in Times Square.

Erwin Schulhoff enriched his classical vocabulary by incorporating many musical trends of the 1920s and ’30s. His sly and syncopated Jazz Concerto: Hot-Sonate began as a work for alto saxophone and piano, and was later arranged as a concerto. In 1942 he became one of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His music was revived decades later, and he is now recognized as a unique talent of his era.

John Williams needs no introduction as a film composer, but he has also written numerous concert pieces. Escapades straddles both worlds: it is a concert work derived from the score to Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me If You Can. Williams described it as an impressionistic memoir of the progressive jazz movement that was popular in the 1960s.

Duke Ellington gained renown as the composer of such standards as “Mood Indigo” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” He was also a pioneer in employing jazz within symphonic structures. Harlem might be the crowning achievement in that strand of his work; it affords fleeting glimpses of the historic Manhattan neighborhood that has long been at the center of the Black arts and cultural scene.