It is said that when the composer W.C. Handy heard his most celebrated work, the “St. Louis Blues,” being played by a symphony orchestra, he was struck by the mental image of a farmer plowing his field in a full-dress dinner jacket and tailcoat. Some 30 years later, when someone had the nerve to ask Miles Davis his opinion about the use of classical form and formalism in the Modern Jazz Quartet, he likened the effect to a great boxer stepping into the ring in a tuxedo.

Despite the contradiction they described, “symphonic jazz,” as it was termed in the 1920s in the wake of George Gershwin’s overwhelmingly successful “Rhapsody in Blue,” has stood the test of time. Since Gershwin’s era, composers have sought to balance the expanded canvases and large-format structures of European music (commonly known as “classical”) and the energy, rhythm, and improvisations of American music (commonly know as “jazz”). Two of the more successful efforts to find this elusive chord, “Symphonica” (Blue Note), by the saxophonist Joe Lovano, and “Across the Crystal Sea” (Verve), by the pianist Danilo Perez, were recently released