WATCH: Adam Birnbaum Digs Bach

Renowned pianist releases video for jazz trio interpretation of “Prelude in D-flat Major”

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 Ron Hart 0 Comments Adam Birnbaum, Bill Evans, Brad Mehldau, Bud Powell, Dan Tepfer, Jazz, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Lewis, Keita Ogawa, Matt Clohesy, piano, Preludes, Uri Caine

Adam Birnbaum (Image: Fully Altered Media)

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach has always provided a wealth of inspiration within the world of jazz from the bebop era on through to the future sounds of now.

Especially in the consort of jazz piano, as such renowned men of the ivory as Bud Powell, Bill Evans, John Lewis, Brad Mehldau, Uri Caine and Dan Tepfer have all provided their own distinct takes on the music of Bach through the decades. And in that spirit, New York-based pianist Adam Birnbaum presents his own fresh, improvisatory vision of Bach, having created jazz-trio arrangements of a dozen of the composer’s preludes and recorded them with bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Keita Ogawa.

The resulting album, titled Preludes, will be released by Chelsea Music Festival Records on October 13, 2023. Preludes is Birnbaum’s fifth album as a leader. The cover art was created by acclaimed vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, with whom the pianist has collaborated in the past.

“This album provides a doorway to a new enjoyment of Bach’s music, through Adam’s surprising rearrangements and the trio’s beautiful playing,” the singer says of Preludes. “The music is dynamic, innovative and moving.”

Adam Birnbaum Preludes, Chelsea Music Festival Records 2023

For the material on this album, Birnbaum drew the material from the first half of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s iconic two-book compendium of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. He was only 37 when he compiled Book I, and its DNA can be found in the bloodstream of just about any musician who ever touched a keyboard, from Mozart on through. And Birnbaum’s Preludes only further adds to the immortality of these compositions with a newfound sense of energy and adventure.

“I performed a first draft of my Bach arrangements at the Chelsea Music Festival in 2018, and the audience’s response was so encouraging that it gave me the impetus to make this studio recording,” Birnbaum explains. “I aimed for the arrangements to be true to what Bach wrote while still allowing for some twists of my own.”

The proclivity to improvise at the keyboard indeed dates back to the Baroque era, and on Preludes, Birnbaum – a Steinway artist who teaches at SUNY Purchase – had that sense of freedom in mind when selecting the material to interpret.

“When choosing which of Bach’s preludes to arrange, I picked those pieces that felt like they had originated as improvised ideas, with Bach at the keyboard,” Birnbaum says. “The treatment I gave them varies from prelude to prelude, but sometimes we’re improvising over the chord changes, which is essentially bebop. For a stretch of the C Minor Prelude arrangement, I’m playing Bach’s left-hand part as originally written while improvising a counter-melody with my right hand. Then, for the D Major Prelude, I’m customizing the melody, although it has the same shape as that of the original.”

These interpretations should appeal as much to fans of the straight-ahead jazz piano tradition as they do listeners of chamber music.

Check out a video of Birnbaum, Clohesy and Ogawa performing “Prelude in D-flat Major” below.