A Lotta Sonatas
New albums from Ethan Iverson and Jon Batiste seek common ground between classical music and the jazz tradition.
Ethan Iverson - Playfair Sonatas
Shortly after the new year, pianist Ethan Iverson unveiled an energetic, imaginative album called Technically Acceptable. One of the year’s most delightful jazz releases, the succinct, spunky collection highlighted the breadth and elasticity of the classic trio format. It concluded with an original fifteen-minute piano sonata, briefly pivoting from jazz improvisation to the more buttoned-down world of classical music.
Turns out this wasn’t a curious detour so much as a preview of coming attractions. Mere months after the release of Technically Acceptable, Iverson returns with Playfair Sonatas— his first album that’s more or less solely devoted to classical music idioms, unless you count his play through of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, recorded with his old band The Bad Plus.
The new collection is named for its benefactor. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic made life all but untenable for touring musicians, Iverson struck a deal with impresario Piers Playfair, who agreed to provide the pianist with six months of rent-free studio space in exchange for six original compositions. The catch: Playfair got to choose the instruments to be foregrounded in each piece.
Playfair Sonatas is the fruit of that quarantine-era partnership, featuring six cohesive suites of music— plus a tone-setting “Fanfare” and valedictory “Recessional”— spanning just about 90 minutes total. Each sonata is presented as a duet between Iverson’s piano and one of Playfair’s chosen instruments: Violin, marimba, clarinet, trombone, alto sax, and trumpet. While each piece is through-composed, leaving no room for noodling or improvisation, Iverson did direct each featured instrumentalist to imbue the music with as much personality as possible.
The result is a transfixing, utterly charming set of music, different in spirit from the more pop-minded Technically Acceptable yet in its own way just as playful and exploratory. Indeed, a big part of the album’s appeal is how it neatly avoids the stuffiness that sometimes come with classical recitations. Playfair Sonatas is emotionally rich and direct, saturated in whimsy and melody. (Perhaps due to the blend of playfulness and melancholy, perhaps due to the anthology-like nature of these six musical short stories, or perhaps due to the album artwork from New Yorker veteran Roz Chast, the album bears a strange spiritual resemblance to Wes Anderson’s terrific movie The French Dispatch.)
Give part of the credit to Playfair, whose six chosen instruments ensure a diversity of tones and textures. In the spirit of Lars Von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions, what might have seemed like creative shackles turn out to be liberating for Iverson as a composer. In the liner notes for the album he confesses to being initially confounded at the inclusion of the marimba, an instrument seldom featured in sonatas— yet writing for soloist Makoto Nakura proved to be almost second nature. That easefulness is apparent from the marimba sonata, a tuneful and percussive album highlight.
Repeatedly, Iverson demonstrates a knack for highlighting the unique character of each instrument. His trombone sonata, featuring Mike Lormand, is at once comedic and melancholy; truly, the trombone is the Charlie Brown of the horn section, and Iverson perfectly frames its sadsack warble. The clarinet sonata, featuring Carol McGonnell, is similarly multi-faceted, conjuring both a carnivalesque whimsy as well as a darker, more sinister undercurrent.
Though Playfair Sonatas doesn’t provide Iverson any runway for extended, improvised solos, it nevertheless conveys something of his technical range and prowess. He is a generous host to each featured soloist, and in a violin showcase for Miranda Cuckson he plays with a cool minimalism that allows plenty of open space.
Iverson is not only a jazz savant but also a respectable critic and historian— his Transitional Technology newsletter is essential reading for anyone interested in jazz. One way he contextualizes these pieces, and helps listeners find their bearings, is by ascribing a section of each sonata to a different jazz luminary. These dedications are masterful, avoiding direct stylistic homage in favor of something more subtle and refined: One section of the clarinet sonata conjures the “music hall” sensibility of the late Carla Bley, while the alto saxophone sonata (featuring Taimur Sullivan) articulates something of the cool, clear tone of Dave Brubeck sideman Paul Desmond.
Playfair Sonatas caps a profoundly creative year for Ethan Iverson, but its real achievement is in offering a smart, sophisticated, and welcoming entry into the world of classical composition, accessible even to novices. Each sonata is a finely-wrought gem, tuneful and full of delight. Taken as a whole, it’s an immersive listening experience, bursting with joy and imagination.
My rating: 8 out of 10.
Jon Batiste - Beethoven Blues
In an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace, the Grammy winning pianist and composer Jon Batiste showed off a neat party trick— playing a few bars of Beethoven, then flipping it into a bustling New Orleans boogie. The display of cross-cultural virtuosity sent the clip viral, and ultimately served as the impetus for a full-length recording, the aptly-named Beethoven Blues.
The first in what is purported to be a series of solo piano recordings from Batiste, Beethoven Blues was recorded in just a day and a half. Many of Batiste’s more pop-minded records are highly conceptual in nature— think World Music Radio or his musical bildungsroman, We Are— but here, he’s doing something more instinctive. Think of Beethoven Blues not as some highfalutin treatise on the intersection of classical and jazz, but rather as a more spontaneous celebration of Batiste’s influences— the New Orleans traditions he was raised on, the classical compositions he was trained in, and the connective tissue between the two.
The off-the-cuff feel of the album gives it a certain ragged charm, but it also makes the album feel choppy and underbaked. The album opens with Batiste’s jittery version of “Für Elise,” a performance cut from the same cloth as his CNN showcase. Batiste’s pivots between straight-ahead recitation and rowdy blue notes is jolting, almost show-offy— as disruptive as a major beat switch in a dance music track.
That jolting feel is representative of Beethoven Blues as a whole, where the mash-ups of classical and jazz music are sometimes thrilling but seldom deep; the album is more about highlighting Batiste’s undeniable virtuosity than advancing a more sophisticated understanding of these idioms and how they intersect. It certainly feels less thoughtful and integrative than Iverson’s album; not for nothing, Iverson himself has described the Batiste album as “grimly populist.” It also pales in comparison to some of the more carefully-conceived cross-disciplinary piano albums in recent memory— say, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles.
Such is not to say that Beethoven Blues is absent rich ideas, and it is certainly not absent pleasure. For evidence of the former, consider the handful of original compositions that betray Batiste’s upbringing on classical music— songs that suggest, better than the mash-ups, how he has internalized Beethoven’s formalism into his own artistry. For the latter, skip to “Waldstein Wobble,” the album’s most irresistible jumble of runaway rhythms and fleet-fingered dexterity.
Even with these highlights, Beethoven Blues cannot help but feel surface-deep, in much the same way as the CNN clip that inspired it: It’s an album designed to provoke an immediate wow, but not to linger in the mind for much longer.
My rating: 6 out of 10.
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