On today's date in 1919, a concert suite from Igor Stravinsky's "The Soldier's Tale" had its premiere performance in Lausanne, Switzerland—the same city in which the original theatrical version of Stravinsky's score was first presented in 1918.

In its original form, "The Soldier's Tale" was a kind of musical morality play scored for narrator and a small chamber ensemble. When Stravinsky wrote it, the world was still at war, and big staged productions were increasingly hard to arrange. In this score, Stravinsky also incorporated elements of American jazz, although what he knew of jazz was derived entirely from looking at sheet music rather than any firsthand experience of actually hearing American jazz artists.

Eighty years later, for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis composed "A Fiddler's Tale"—a companion piece to Stravinsky's work, scored for the same configuration of instruments.

''No matter what I do, I'm not going to compare myself to Stravinsky,'' said Marsalis. "That would be ridiculous. You have to accept who he is and do what you can do, and hope that what you do is on some level of quality."

Like Stravinsky's piece, "A Fiddler's Tale" also exists in two versions: as a theater piece with narrator, and as a purely instrumental suite. Both have been recorded, and both, not surprisingly, feature Wynton Marsalis as the trumpeter.