Both these violin concertos have been long-neglected for the same reason: their composers were much better-known for their achievements in musical theatre rather than for their works for the concert-hall. Robert Russell Bennett studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and his output includes seven symphonies. He also orchestrated some of the highest-profile musicals in Broadway history, including works by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. (Richard Rodgers modestly claimed that Bennett's skills in instrumentation had made his music 'sound better than it was'). Vladimir Alexandrovich Dukelsky changed his name to Vernon Duke at the suggestion of his friend Jacob Gershovitz - better known as George Gershwin. Duke received a rigorous training in classical music at the Kyiv Conservatory; was friends with Prokofiev and composed ballet scores for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as three symphonies. He remains better known as the creator of hit shows, such as Cabin in the Sky, and as the composer of numerous songs that became jazz standards, including 'April in Paris'. Chloe Hanslip, Andrew Litton, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra perform both concertos with aplomb, and Andrew Litton also takes the role of pianist in Bennett's Hexapoda.

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)

Silhuettes

SAKOBI is a new project of the Vilem Spilka Quartet. The band consists of Radek Zapadlo on saxophone, Vilem Spilka on double bass and Martin Kleibl on drums. Since they have been together for a long time in other ensembles, they are closely connected musically. Radek Zapadlo has been successfully active on the Czech jazz scene for two dozen years, most recently alongside Matej Benko, Ondrej Ruml, playing in the Cotatcha Orchestra, his own Four in Blue formation and the aforementioned Vilem Spilka Quartet. Martin Kleibl, after an eight-year stint with the Brno Philharmonic, oscillates in genre from classical to pop, plays in the OK Percussion duo with European-class marimbist Martin Oprsal, accompanies singer Petr Bende and is the driving force behind the Vilem Spilka Quartet. For the SAKOBI project, Vilem Spilka replaced his main instrument, the guitar, with the double bass, which he began to play during the pandemic of the cover band. The trio's debut recording is released by Bivak Records. All members contributed to the album not only as players but also as composers. Zapadlo contributed the melancholic dirgeCesta za modrým sluncem (Journey to the Blue Sun), while Martin Kleibl's Na ceste (On theRoad) is typical uplifting Latin jazz. Vilem Spilka added the rest of the repertoire, his individual opuses revealing a variety of musical and non-musical inspirations-from his native Brno to Japan, to which the cryptogram in the band's name refers. In the spirit of Japanese realities, the debut album is titled Banzai!, something like a shout of Hurrra or Yeehaw! Stylistically, the album is more or less unclassifiable, drawing on the traditions of jazz and other African-American styles, as well as folk music from Moravia and beyond.