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The Jacques Loussier Trio: Laeiszhalle, Hamburg 4.1.2009 (TKT)


It comes as no surprise that they opened and closed the concert with pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. Fifty years after he founded his original jazz trio and released the first of many Play Bach recordings, 74-year-old Jacques Loussier still turns to the great master for inspiration. The entire first part of the concert as well as the encore consisted of pieces by Bach.

Loussier not only keeps returning to Bach, he also keeps selecting evergreens often thought to have been rendered meaningless by countless elevator Muzak versions as well as being overplayed elsewhere. Whether the trio played jazz versions of the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, a pastoral sinfonia from the Christmas Oratorium, the “Air on G String,” the entire Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, or the first movement of the C minor concerto for two pianos (the encore), it delivered each of the works from the aura of kitsch to which they have often been relegated, bringing them to life again. The joy of the music was simply infectious. This was not only due to Loussier’s skills as an arranger and pianist. He has found outstanding, congenial musicians in Benoit Dunoyer de Segonzac (double bass) and André Arpino (drums), who also added subtle rock elements to complete the trio’s homogeneous sound.

Loussier once said that Bach was the first jazz musician. While much of jazz does indeed have its roots in the daring harmonies found in Bach’s music, and even though Bach himself was an ingenious improviser, Loussier’s dictum is obviously nonsense. The truth in the statement, however, is that Loussier’s trio is able to free the deep emotions in the original music from the German composer’s Baroque need of taming them. The emotions do change in the process of course – piousness, for example, may turn into an introspective, meditative, or impressionistic mood. As a result, they may often no longer be as profound as they are in Bach, but they are always truly felt and sincere: the Jacques Loussier Trio does not deliver mere “jazzercises” but makes listeners realize how alive the musical work of a composer is whom too many sadly mistake for a mathematician. Baroque artists may have needed to control nature. Listening to the Jacques Loussier Trio, however, we discover that at the root of Baroque music lies not the human mind but the human heart.

And so it makes perfect sense that the trio likes to select standards from the Top 100 of Classical Music list. After all, we need the familiar as a point of reference to realize that our perception can change. This applies not only to the works of Bach. In the second part of the concert the trio played its versions of a Vivaldi violin concerto (“Summer” from The Four Seasons), Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” and Ravel’s Bolero, whose sexual charge was transformed into what seemed to be an almost drug-induced urgency and obsessiveness at times.

After a number of appearances in Germany, the trio will move on to Italy and Hungary. Even though the Hamburg event was barely advertised (not a single poster, not even a concert program), the concert hall was well-attended, with the average age of the audience being noticeably younger than usual, ranging from people in their twenties to listeners in Loussier’s age range. Normally known for being rather reserved, the Northern Germans gave the trio standing ovations. The verdict seemed to be unanimous: the Jacques Loussier Trio rocks – or rather, it still swings.

Thomas K Thornton


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