A classical artist who plays jazz and pop in beguiling ways and one who I just recently came to know. His musical sensibilities come bleeding through in everything I've heard of his thus far. Someone to watch closely.
Stan Kenton's 1964 LP release Wagner/Kenton might well be the only jazz tribute album to Richard Wagner in existence. Until now that is. Unlike Kenton who attempted to match the excess - and came close - of the infamous German composer with his own bombastic brand of orchestral jazz, the F-IRE Collective multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas' tribute is a far more low-key, offbeat setting for jazz trio. What it definitely isn't is a ‘third stream’ jazz-classical fusion of any kind, and ostensibly it sounds like it has nothing to do with Wagner at all. The musical aesthetic might be best illustrated by the contribution of the musicians involved: Ewan Bleach is an early jazz and blues woodwind specialist but he doesn't so much jazz up Wagner's leitmotifs as entirely reinvent them. He's an old-school swinger who comes deliciously close to the romantic yearning of a human vocal so isn't a million miles away from the dramatic pathos that's generally attributed to the infamous composer.
Regardless, his playing is stylish throughout whether shifting in and out of idioms that resemble early swing, a blues or spiritual through to classical-sax, Brecht-like cabaret and Klezmer. The veteran Parisian pianist Benoit Delbecq, who's a prepared piano specialist, veers imaginatively and always responsively between free jazz, contemporary classical and largely pre-bop jazz – Ellington being the common denominator between him and Bleach. Thomas' resonant bass sonic mostly anchors the ship or triggers otherworldly ensemble textures that perhaps echo the tonal ambiguities of the subject at hand. You can see it in part as an affectionate parody: hence Wagner's famous ‘Wedding March’ has Chopin's ‘Funeral March’ dumped on top of it, the Tannhäuser Overture has been remodelled as an impressive pre-war swing standard, and the sleeve artwork is an illustration of the composer's skewered head. Jazz listeners will be happy to hear that you don't have to like Wagner to like Dick Wag but ironically it actually might be a good entry point.
Fred Thomas turns his fertile mind to the music of Richard Wagner, ahead of the launch of a new album on Babel. He himself plays bass and includes clarinettist and saxophonist Ewan Bleach, known from many of our Gypsy/East European nights. The pianist will be French maestro, Benoît Delbecq.
‘Dick-Wag: a Tribute to Richard Wagner’ is a new jazz trio dedicated to a notorious Bavarian composer many idolise and more despise. Comprised of the most unlikely collaborators, this tribute band attempts to reconcile itself to opera’s most depraved, politically divisive and love-hated little man. With huge dramatic scenes boiled down to discreet miniatures, each expressed on a single piece of paper and treated like found objects as a jazz musician might, the resulting improvisations teeter surreally between the playful lyricism of swing and the abstraction of modernist prepared piano grooves.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas has masterminded these profane yet respectful interpretations of Wagner’s sublime, bombastic, time-stopping, sexually suggestive and earth-shatteringly beautiful creations by assembling a seemingly dysfunctional trio of motley talents. The recording includes Benoît Delbecq who can miraculously synthesise with Ewan Bleach’s unparalleled sense of melody and tone, glued together by Fred Thomas’ foundational bass playing. Silly and serious in equal measure, ’Dick Wag’ serves up mercilessly blooded chunks hacked off masterpieces such as Tristan and Isolde, transforming them into grotesque parodies of Teutonic pomp, luscious jazz ballads, jingoistic marches and Ellingtonian jungle grooves. And if you listen closely, just audible between the cracks of these affectionate caricatures, is the unmistakable sound of Richard Wagner turning in his grave.
It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to record some of Bach’s solo keyboard music. Its emotional, intellectual, technical and spiritual demands seemed overwhelming. Twice I started only to quit the idea, daunted and feeling unready. Then, in a moment of lucidity, I wondered: when you’re dealing with the most miraculous body of human creation in all the arts, when are you ever ready? Life is short. Bach himself was not prone to procrastination. He produced a quantity and quality of music some consider literally unbelievable.
I recorded alone with a huge piano, trying to coax the monster-machine into behaving well. Why the piano and not something ‘authentic’? For one thing, it’s my first instrument, but ultimately it’s a tired question, certainly in comparison with the sheer wonder of the music itself. In the end, the most scholarly ruminations on the abstractness of Bach, or on the piano’s range of articulation, or on the futility of pursuing authenticity in the absence of an authentic audience, just can’t match the sonic revelation that, played with some imagination, Bach sounds good on a tenor banjo – more on that soon.
His music is the most transcendent, all-encompassing, wise and child-like thing I know. In the words of Bernard Chazelle, “Bach’s music is soft and gentle, often suffused with piercing tenderness. If his work has an unmistakable child-like quality, it’s because its spiritual aspirations, borne of faith, joy, grace, and wonder, call for the deepest seriousness – and no one is more serious than the child”. I have the immovable feeling – knowledge, almost – that Bach fathoms and encircles everything.
John Cage considered music from the past useful only to the extent to which it leads to the creation of new things, a view far removed from the occasional dogmatism of the historical performance movement. Though I value both viewpoints, my aim lies somewhere in between: to derive something personal from a combination of historical enquiry and poetic imagination, using fantasy to supplement the fragmentary knowledge that contextual study reveals. Furthermore, the violation of chronology – my choice and ordering of tracks – is an attempt to give this record narrative force.
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