Francois Houle

With the Festival Chamber Orchestra. A Vancouver International Jazz Festival presentation. At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Friday, June 24

In the ongoing war between the two major intellectual traditions of western music, classical and jazz, the latter was once widely touted to win. Classical music had the schools, the cachet, and the cash, but jazz had energy and novelty on its side, and for a while it seemed the certain voice of the democratic future.

A few decades on, the warring forces have called an uneasy truce. And if there are any heroes in this aesthetic battle, they are those few brave souls who cried out that perhaps the way forward lay in a merging of the two styles. They were widely ignored during their 1960s heyday, these "third stream" visionaries, but time seems bent on proving them right.

Four days into the 20th annual Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the most promising new directions in the music are clearly those that cross cultural boundaries-and especially those that combine the intellectual clarity of chamber music with the emotional expressivity of jazz. Two different approaches to that task were on view at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on opening night, where they met with varying degrees of success.

First up was the French quartet Kartet-which, with its lineup of sax, piano, upright bass, and drums, looks like a jazz band but is really something else altogether. The luminous harmonies with which pianist Benoit Delbecq opened Jyvíƒ ¤skylíƒ ¤ have far more to do with the music of his countrymen Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen than with New Orleans or New York, and the band as a whole favours complex rhythmic structures over steady, swinging beats.

There were times when a little swing would have been welcome. Saxophonist Guillaume Orti, in particular, parcels out his notes with such precision that he comes close to being precious. Kartet's tunes would sing more if he'd loosen up a bit, but that's a very minor complaint when compared to the cerebral pleasures this band offers.

Conversely, more structure-and more rehearsal time-might have helped local clarinetist Franíƒ §ois Houle's sprawling XX, a jazz-fest commission. The piece began and ended well, springing up from silence and then subsiding into a churchy anthem, but in between were only flashes of brilliance. A few sonic memories remain: Houle popping the keys of his clarinet to achieve a weird, percussive burbling; Mark Dresser karate-chopping his bass to bring forth roaring slabs of sound. But given the massive amount of talent in this 16-piece band, why were its improvised passages not more effective? Saxophonist Evan Parker and cellist Peggy Lee, two of the most potent forces on the international improv scene, barely stood out from the collective murk, while percussionist Sal Ferreras and violist Stefan Smulovitz were often completely inaudible.

As his various recordings indicate, Houle has the resources to success?fully cross between the jazz and classical camps-but those gifts were not especially well deployed on Friday night.