2004 American Pianists Awards winner Adam Birnbaum has created fresh, improvisatory arrangements of Bach for his latest album, "Preludes."

Whimsical album cover for Adam Birnbaum's

With a captivating blend of classical timelessness and fresh jazz improvisation, 2004 American Pianists Awards winner Adam Birnbaum offers a unique take on works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Joined by bassist Matt Clohesy and percussionist Keita Ogawa, Adam features twelve new arrangements of Bach's preludes on his appropriately titled album, “Preludes.” In advance of the album’s release by Chelsea Music Festival Records on October 13, 2023, American Pianists Association’s Lee Clifford spoke with Adam about the recording. 

Enjoy a video of the recording of Prelude in C Minor, complete with artwork by Cécile McLorin Salvant:

 

An edited transcript follows:

Lee

Adam, welcome. Good to see you.

Adam

Yeah, good to see you, too.

Lee

You've got a new album coming out next month. It's quite an interesting project that I know you've been working on for a long time. Preludes inspired by Bach, and I'm curious what was the inspiration for this album and how long have you been working on these arrangements?

Adam

I guess in a way you could say inspiration goes back to when I was a kid and started playing the piano because I didn't really. I started out by ear and so my parents would play records, Beethoven stuff. I would just pick things out and play around with them on the piano. But I didn't really know that they were written out at first.

Later I got a better instruction. I learned how to read music and all that, but I think my initial love for music was sort of just I loved all this classical repertoire and I liked to explore it and mess around with it partly because I couldn't play it as is at the time.

But looking at Bach we know that he was a great improviser. We know that improvisation was a big part of what he did. We just don't unfortunately have documentation of what it sounded like when he sat down and improvised. A lot of the preludes, the ones that I chose for this album, especially from Well-Tempered Clavier, Volume one, are the simplest pieces that sound to me like they could have really been improvisations, where he just kind of sat down and said, “All right, here's an idea.”

But then what can I do with that? Move it around. So all of his the pieces that I chose, I feel like they are already improvisatory in nature. I took that and rearranged them in various ways in a modern jazz context. And we improvise over the tunes and play off them almost like they're standards in a way, because they're tunes that are very familiar to people and they are kind of set standards in that sense of the word.

That's kind of how the whole thing started. Then through Chelsea Music Festival, I had a couple of opportunities to perform various versions of this. First, it was just three or four preludes. Then we expanded it to eight. Then at that time I thought, this would be a great album if I could expand it to maybe say 12 is a great number. That's half of the 24 in the book.

Then I got a faculty leave grant from Purchase College for a semester to work on the project, and that was where I was able to finally finish it last fall. I had the fall off and I finally put together all the arrangements, rehearsed them. We went and performed it in New York and then we recorded it in January of this year. Of course, the album's coming out.

Lee

Congratulations on a big journey!

So you talked about Bach in your kind of early love of this classical music. I know that Bach is beloved by so many jazz artists and there are different reasons why. What's your particular affinity for this composer?

Adam

I think there's something very simple and barebones about the way Bach writes. For instance, he doesn't write dynamic and tempo markings like other classical composers do. I always feel like with his works he's giving me license to interpret in different ways, and certainly even within the realm of classical interpretation, you have very drastically different versions of the same piece. Same notes, but Glenn Gould sounds nothing like someone else playing it.

It's just interesting. For me, it lends itself naturally to jazz because he's already kind of saying, look, here's a framework of a piece, but I always feel like there's a certain element to it that's suggestive where you can also tinker with it and it maybe could still work, maybe not so much like a five voice fugue.

There's a reason I didn't do the fugues on this record, and certain things are just so intricately written that it's hard to play around with them. The works that I chose all have that element where it's based on a simple chord structure that you could think about different ways or sorts of rhythmic, repetitive patterns that you can drop a beat from and turn it into 7/4 but it's still kind of has the same feeling as the original. Bach because he doesn't dictate quite as much on paper, he leaves much more space for the interpreter to be more imaginative with how they play it.

Lee

Your fellow Awards winner, Dan Tepfer, also does embraces a lot of music of Bach. Have you two connected on your mutual admiration.

Adam

Yeah, we talked about it. I saw him a gig in New York a few weeks ago, and I told him that I have this Bach project coming out and we were just kind of joking about it, I said, I stole your idea, but it was kind of facetious.

And he said, “Oh, yeah, you did. I was the first person to ever think of improvising on Bach!” But it's funny, you know, because so many musicians over hundreds of years have all had their own interest in kind of tinkering with Bach and playing around with it. There's the synthesizer thing in the seventies. There was Jacques Loussier, he did his own jazz version of it. Mine sounds nothing like that at all. But there are just so many different ways you can go, and so it's kind of cool. All these different artists can have different ways of interpreting his music.

Lee

So shifting gears a little bit, because I think you've done some other arrangements for Chelsea Music Festival. Can you tell me about your background with this festival? I know that the album is coming out on the Chelsea Music Festival record label.

Adam

Yeah, so the record label is relatively new. The festival has been around for a while and it's sort of this pop up festival that started off as just a thing in New York. It expanded. But the artistic director, Ken Masur, his concept is to surprisingly connect different genres and different things. They often have a chef in residence who might pair food with a concert, or they'll have visual art that goes along with music. And they love to take jazz. Every year there's been a theme, and I've had different themes over the years.

Once it was French and Japanese music, once it was Beethoven, once it was like a conceptual thing about time; there's always some kind of thematic element to the festival. And they asked me a bunch of times to come in and present a concert within that, given the theme. I really like the idea of the festival breaking down boundaries between different genres of music and other arts and making it more fun by having a very collaborative nature.

Often, I'll write arrangements for string players and some of the classical string players at the festival who are often heavyweight soloists or chamber players and they will agree to play my silly jazz arrangement with me in my concert. It's a cool way that different people can all kind of collaborate and come together, you know?

Lee

Yeah, I love that idea! You mentioned visual art and so that that brings me I know you've performed with Cécile McLorin Salvant in the past. How did her involvement as a visual artist for this project come about?

Adam

Yeah, it was just an idea because I know, of course most people know her as a vocalist, but I don't know if many people are aware that she's also a great artist. She's draws and paints and she embroiders…she does all kinds of different things: just all around a very creative person. And she did the album art for a colleague of mine, Melissa Aldana, a few years back, maybe two years ago. And I really like the artwork—it has a folksy kind of whimsical element to it.

And thinking about this project and what kind of artwork might represent it best, it came to me that it would be cool to have something whimsical and folksy to offset the serious classical nature of presenting Bach. I thought that she would be a great person to do the album art. So I approached her about it, and she was happy to collaborate.

It was a very easy collaboration. She made a few sketches, and right away we had some great stuff that Chelsea team went off with her drawings and they turned it into the album art.

Lee

Yeah, it looks great. And I see you've posted a couple of videos of the recording and that the visual theme kind of carries through to that as well.

Adam

Yeah, exactly. That was an element that Chelsea Music Festival decided to make like a little animated form of her drawings to include in the videos, which is I think it's kind of cool.

Lee

Yeah, very cool. All right, so the album drops October 13. Yeah. Any special plans for that date?

Adam

Yeah, well, we'll actually be doing the first of three CD release shows that day. We're playing in the Side Door in Old Lyme, Connecticut that night. The next evening will be at Scullers in Boston 14th and then that following Tuesday we'll be in New York at Mezzrow. So those three are going to be the three CD release performances. We tried to time it as best we could around the release date.

 

Lee

Yeah, that's great. Well, very cool. And what anything, you know, now that you've got to the finish line for this project, almost anything else on the horizon for you?

 

Adam

As far as my own personal projects, I'm not quite sure what's next because I'm still dealing with this. And, you know, I keep quite busy as a sideman and like I'm doing a lot of different gigs in the meantime with different artists who I work with. Between that and teaching and everything, I haven't thought that far ahead.

But I will say that what I do have hopes for is, you know, we have these initial release dates. But I think one thing about this album is I'm sure that a lot of jazz musicians will like it and that's great. I'm really actually hoping to connect with a wider audience with this record because I think a lot of chamber festivals and classical organizations will want to present this maybe as an alternative to the traditional programing they have.

Actually I'm already in discussions with a couple of those for future performances. So that's kind of what I would hope once we get this off the ground and get some reviews out, I think there's good potential for this to land in a lot of different venues other than the typical jazz clubs that I normally play and to reach audiences outside of the typical jazz audience, let's say.

 

Lee

Yeah, that's that would be great. Thank you, Adam. Anything else you would like to add about the album?

Adam

I feel like I should mention the other musicians on the record. It's very important to the whole thing. So Matt Clohesy is on bass. He's someone that I've collaborated with for many years in different bands.

He plays with me, for instance, in Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, which is a very progressive big band. We're actually playing tomorrow through Saturday in New York for the release of the new record of that ensemble. So that's where I first started playing with Matt, and he's just a rock solid bass player who is strong enough to hold it together, even in Darcy's music, where a lot of times there's all kinds of wild things going on and you need the bass player to be really solid. And you can set your watch to him, so he was sort of a natural fit to collaborate on this Bach thing.

And then Keita Ogawa is a percussionist who I also collaborate with originally with, I think with Dominick Farinacci many years ago, but he's making a big name for himself. He plays with jazz musicians, but he also plays with Snarky Puppy and very popular bands like that. Super successful, and he can fit into almost any musical situation and he seems to just know exactly how to make it work. I didn't want a traditional drummer for this project; I wanted someone who would provide grooves and colors, but in a different way, a little more subtle, chamber-like way. Keita really did that more beautifully that I could have imagined.

He brought so much imagination to these pieces, and a lot of the sketches I have for the arrangements really count on that percussive element to bring it to life, so to speak, to take that groove and turn it into something.

And I think, you know, when you hear the arrangements, a lot of times certain of these pieces might sound like Latin in nature. They might remind you of world music from Argentina, Peru or something. That's all because of all these different colorful elements that Keita is adding to the basic groove that I came up with to start.

Lee

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's good. So. So when you tour with the same trio be touring.

Adam

Yeah, For the album, yeah. They'll be on those three CD release dates. And like I said, we're kind of still working on future dates at the time being, but, you know, fingers crossed that they'll be available for whatever dates come up.

Lee

Awesome. All right. Well, we look forward to hearing the whole thing on October 13th, but we've got a couple of preview album tracks out now.

Adam

Right. The C Minor Prelude, the D-flat Prelude, and then there will be one more single, the E-flat Minor will come out in a couple of weeks.

That will be the last single previous to the full record release. You can find all the stuff, of course, on social media, all the usual places.

Lee

Adam, thanks so much!

Adam

Thank you, I appreciate it!

              

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