Jacques Jacques Loussier

Avid Jazz here presents four classic Jacques Loussier albums, including original LP liner notes on a finely re-mastered double CD. “Plays Bach Volumes 1, 2 & 3”; “Jacques Loussier Joue Kurt Weill”.
Following in the footsteps of the renowned guitarist Django Reinhardt who had experimented with putting the swing into classical music before the war, here we present the French pianist and arranger Jacques Loussier with three volumes of his celebrated series, “Play Bach”. Accompanied as ever by Christian Garros on drums and Pierre Michelot on bass, Loussier shows us just how suited to the jazz idiom the music of the great classical composer was! Alongside the three “Play Bach” volumes we present the hard to find album “Jacques Loussier joue Kurt Weill” an album only released in France and up to now unavailable on CD! All four albums have been digitally re-mastered.

Pianist Jacques Loussier has certainly had an unusual career, much of it spent performing jazz interpretations of Bach's music. While his original works have been noteworthy, Loussier's most famous projects have been his transformations of Bach's music. In 1997 he tackled Vivaldi's Four Seasons, four concertos that he performed and recorded with his trio. As with Bach's pieces, Loussier pays respect to Vivaldi's melodies and the development of the works while swinging the music. He divides each of the concertos into three parts, improvises tastefully while keeping the themes in mind, and leads his trio through some uncharted territory. Loussier occasionally recalls the style of John Lewis and Allegro Non Molto from the Summer piece has some resemblances to Lewis' "Django." Due to Loussier's impressive technique, respect for both idioms and his well thought-out concept, this unique set is a complete success.

Pianist Jacques Loussier showcases his world-renowned fusion of jazz and classical music on five classic Plays Bach collections on Decca: these recordings, featuring the famous version of ‘Air On A G String’, have previously sold approximately six million albums.

Jacques Loussier has made a career out of playing classical themes in a jazz setting. Born in France in 1934, he came to fame in the late 1950s with his Play Bach Trio, a group that stayed together 20 years, transforming the themes of Bach into creative and melodic jazz. Since then he has put together another trio in which he interprets not just the music of Bach but Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and other classical giants. This set (which is subtitled Impressions on Chopin's Nocturnes) is a bit of a departure in that Loussier performs Frédéric Chopin's 21 nocturnes as unaccompanied piano solos. Nocturne No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op, 9., No. 2 is the most famous of these melodies although a few of the other nocturnes may be familiar even to non-classical listeners…

The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.
An acclaimed French pianist known for his jazz interpretations of classical works, Jacques Loussier rose to prominence leading his trio in the 1960s. A gifted classical musician in his youth, Loussier gravitated toward jazz and issued a series of innovative, genre-bending albums under the Play Bach title in which he reworked the music of Johanne Sebastian Bach…

This doesn't really work, but Jacques Loussier's attempt to make Mozart work as jazz is sufficiently complex enough to make you ask, as you're hearing it, why it isn't working, and maybe that's a worthwhile thing. As the liner notes point out, it is most often Bach among classical composers whose music has served as the basis for jazz experiments. Mozart-jazz is much rarer.

There's something ironic about the attraction jazz musicians all seem to feel for the work of J.S. Bach. It's not that jazz and classical music aren't related on the contrary, jazz itself is a fusion of the rhythmic complexity of African music and the harmonic complexity of European music it's that Bach's particular genius was for counterpoint, a technique that jazz largely ignores. You can't improvise without abandoning strict counterpoint, and yet to depart from Bach's contrapuntal structures is, often, to disembowel his music. So there's a certain tension in the air when jazz players take on Bach. All of that said, there's simply no denying the charm of Loussier's trio arrangements.

TAKE BACH is another in the history of recordings which treat the music of Bach in an experimental way. The approach of the Jacques Loussier Trio with pianists Güher and Süher Pekinel is one of melding Bach's concerti into jazz pieces through arrangement and improvisation. The idea is logical, as Baroque music is based often on a "figured bass," or set of symbols which the instrumentalist of the time (usually a keyboard player) would know how to interpret and build chords based upon the performance aspects of the time.

Jacques Loussier, of course, moved on from ''Play Bach'' a long time ago, although the wider musical audience no doubt has little recollection of him away from that context. Yet the pianist always had a rigorous intellectual grasp of his musical ends and means, even when the average album by his group was capable of selling half a million copies. In a sense, Bach was never the focal point of his musical discourses, although the great man's music remained the bedrock of Loussier's questings.

When Jacques Loussier gave the music of Johann Sebastian Bach the jazz treatment (as others, notably the Modern Jazz Quartet, had before him), it worked really well. The tumbling flow of Bach's contrapuntal lines, the square rhythms that just beg to be played with a swing feel - everything about Bach that makes his music the farthest thing from jazz seems to make jazz adaptations inevitable. The French composer Claude Debussy is a less obvious choice, and on this album you see why. Debussy was a much more impressionistic composer, and his music doesn't have either the rhythmic vitality or the sense of driving tonal logic that fuels the music of Bach. That makes it harder to fit his compositions into a jazz context. That Loussier succeeds as much as he does is a compliment to his sensitivity as a pianist and to his trio's ability to work with him intuitively…