Pianist Enrico Pieranunzi and arranger Michele Corcella complete offer a beautifully orchestrated collection of John Lewis’s best.

In the specific field of jazz/classical music crossover, the 1920s were crucial. They gave us one of the first, absolutely extraordinary, works of the genre: the famous “Rhapsody in Blue.” John Lewis moved in the same direction as Gershwin, but from a very different vision and experience. Indeed, Lewis was an excellent jazz pianist, but above all Lewis, besides being a great jazz player, was deeply in love with the music of Bach and from the earliest years of his career onward made the blues/Bach pair the banner of his artistic life. It is to this musical conception and to the compositional art of John Lewis that, a little more than two decades after his passing, “Blues and Bach” wishes to pay tribute. His tunes have been reworked and orchestrated for the occasion with an ensemble that, in some ways, is itself a crossover within a crossover (jazz trio plus string quintet and woodwind quintet).

REVIEWS:

If jazz is by now a respectable genre, it’s partly thanks to John Lewis. Never knowingly overwrought, this American pianist had his roots in classical music, bebop, and the Birth of the Cool. A Bach devotee, he incorporated fugue and counterpoint into his work. Here two Italians, the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi and the arranger Michele Corcella, complete the journey with a beautifully orchestrated collection of Lewis’s best.

Pieranunzi is one of Europe’s great jazz pianists, greatly influenced by Bill Evans. His luminous tone and elegant, linear phrasing is a superb foil to the warmth of Corcella’s arrangements. On Vendome, the most Bach-like piece, Pieranunzi slips easily between frisky fugue and sophisticated swing as the strings scurry alongside. On Django the violins handle the baroque counterpoint as the trio dig into a down and dirty blues. 

Some wonderful sound pictures are drawn on Skating in Central Park: a Satie-like figure falls like snow and the piano waltzes over the drummer Mauro Beggio’s powdery brushes. Woodwinds swirl and strings sparkle. By contrast, Spanish Steps and Jasmine Tree are proper workouts with lively trio improvisation slotting into complex orchestral structures. Strings often weigh down a jazz group — here they make it more exciting.

Two bittersweet ballads were surely included for sentimental reasons. The Italians handle Lewis’s Milano gently, the piano wandering easily through a shifting chamber-music cityscape. Lewis didn’t write Autumn in New York (it’s by Vernon Duke), but his band the Modern Jazz Quartet recorded it and was formed in NYC. Pieranunzi swaggers along as skyscrapers of sound stretch upwards around him. Classic classical jazz.

-- London Times (Chris Pearson)