In a career
that spans more than a half century, pianist and composer Jacques Loussier has
built an enormous body of work by blurring the lines between classical and
jazz. Beginning in 1959 with his Play Bach Trio, and later with alternate
lineups that explored numerous other classical artists, Loussier and his
various collaborators forced musicians and audiences of both jazz and classical
music to re-evaluate the boundaries – and indeed the similarities – between
their respective genres. Along the way, he has sold more than six million
albums worldwide.
Fifty
five years after those bold first steps with Play Bach Trio, Telarc celebrates
Loussier’s upcoming 80th birthday in October 2014 with the release of two
collections that provide a cross section of his masterful fusion of classical
tradition with the jazz idiom. My Personal Favorites: The Jacques Loussier Trio
Plays Bach and Beyond Bach: Other Composers I Adore – two specially priced 2-CD
sets, each with tracks chosen by Loussier as personal favorites – are scheduled
for a May 27, 2014, release on Telarc International, a subsidiary of Concord
Music.
Personal
Favorites: The Jacques Loussier Trio Plays Bach:
The Bach
collection principally features the trio that Loussier formed in 1985. “His
personal selection of pieces from his Bach repertoire looks back on the one
hand to his earliest triumphs, but also shows how the trio has developed and
responded to the music over time,” says jazz
historian Alyn Shipton, author of the liner notes for both collections.
“So, while the opening ‘Air on a G String’ is clearly recognizable as having
affinities with his original recording from the Play Bach era, as the improvisation
develops, there is a conversation between Vincent Charbonnier’s bass and the
piano that would not have been part of the 1959 trio’s remit.”
“My
interpretation of ‘Air on a G String’ was featured in many Benson & Hedges cigar commercials
on television between 1964 and 1999,” Loussier recalls, “and my music was
suddenly exposed to millions of listeners. There were nearly 100 TV spots in
all. They were very funny, especially the last one, which most people will
remember.”
The
collection also includes some noteworthy “firsts” in Loussier’s career with the
Play Bach Trio. Prelude No. 1 in C Major from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” is
the first Bach piece he ever arranged in a jazz context. Bach’s Toccatta and
Fugue in D Minor, meanwhile, was the piece the trio debuted in Paris in 1959.
In
“Pastorale in C Minor,” piano and bass double and then alternate the lead
before going into a jazz passage where the bass takes on a walking role beneath
the piano. Loussier’s choices on the CD, says Shipton, are an interesting mix
of oft-requested Bach favorites and the composer’s own preference for slightly
lesser-known music where the players bring their own personalities into the
recipe.
“Italian
Concerto” mixes a variety of elements in a way that never loses sight of Bach’s
original, but which includes many original touches. “These include the sense of
more than one tempo in the opening movement, for example, or the dramatic
bleakness of the central Andante, with bass pedal notes and atmospheric drums
creating a landscape that goes a great distance beyond Bach’s,” says Shipton.
“The joyous conclusion is everything that its fans love about the trio:
precision, delicacy, and hard-hitting swing, yet in a context of familiarity
for the classical audience, and with moments of departure into a more abstract
style.”
The
collection also includes pieces that reflect the most contrasting moods from
Loussier’s ambitious Goldberg Variations album. After the opening aria comes
the impressionist treatment of Variation 2, and the uptempo Number 5. “It all
comes together in the longer exploration of Variation 25,” says Shipton, “which
as well as showing how the trio can be loyal to Bach while traveling a long way
from its original, it can create a musical scene that is entirely its own, and
testament to the creativity of its founder.”
My
Favorite Composers:
The
Vivaldi concerto here – the second of the Four Seasons quartet – demonstrates
how successfully Loussier applied his jazz approach to a classical composer.
Instead of the strong harmonic development of J.S. Bach, with its affinities to
jazz structure, Vivaldi deals in songlike melodies.
“Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons was our first CD after a long series of Play Bach recordings,”
says Loussier. “It was quite different from what I’d been doing, and I wondered
if it would be possible to make Vivaldi swing in the same way I had done with
Bach, who is an interesting composer but not easy to improvise. After making
that album, I decided I could do anything with any other composer.”
“There’s
a direct connection between the summery feeling Loussier was aiming for in the
opening of the Vivaldi and the laid-back calm of Gymnopedie No. 1 by Eric
Satie,” Shipton explains. “Gnossiene No. 1 is more rhythmic, but overall in
these pieces, Loussier uses the originals as an opportunity to add his own
compositional touches, altering a harmony here, adding a subtle melodic
flourish there.”
“I chose
to record Satie’s Gymnopedie’s because this is already a swinging piece – like
Bach is, but in a different way,” says Loussier. “But I felt very much at home
with this unique piece of harmonistic and relaxing music.”
The
baroque adventures in music by Handel and Scarlatti on these CDs sit closer to
Jacques’ original experiments with Bach. Indeed, the Scarlatti has great
affinities to the work of his first trio. And so, too, does the Mozart Piano
Concerto No. 23 in A Major.
The
remaining pieces on the album are a testament to the variety of material that
Jacques has explored. The charming simplicity of Schumann’s songs leads to a
catchy inevitability about the arrangement of ‘Of Foreign Lands and People,’
whereas the selections from Chopin’s Nocturnes reveal Loussier’s skill as a
solo unaccompanied musician.”
For
years, Loussier has been consistently celebrated for his versions of Ravel and
Debussy, both of which are included here. “I was fascinated by the avant garde
minimalism of ‘Bolero de Ravel,’” says Loussier. “The constant crescendo, a
repetitive and insistent theme in the orchestral version of the piece, created
a new challenge when reinterpreting the piece for only three instruments!”
The
Debussy album, meanwhile, remains “the masterpiece of the latter-day trio,”
says Shipton. “Listen to ‘Clair de Lune,’ and revel in its liquid beauty as you
join Jacques in celebrating his 80th birthday.”
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