It doesn’t take long for Jon Batiste to yank Ludwig Van from the Romantic-era parlors of Vienna to the red-light dens of Storyville. Just six seconds, to be exact, into this album centering on Batiste’s solo piano interpretations/interpolations of Beethoven pieces. That’s when he slides from the familiar lilt of Für Elise into a frisky, blue-notes-laced run with such elegance and grace that even the maestro himself would be delighted.
It’s the first of many delights, surprises and masterful turns. “Symphony No. 5 Stomp” takes the da-da-da-DUH into Cosimo’s J&M Studio—you can practically hear the drum part Earl Palmer would have played. Batiste himself let’s out a “whoop!” toward the end. With the “Moonlight Sonata Blues” he coaxes the blues from the original as if it was always there in the shadows and we simply couldn’t hear it. And then he follows that with his own “Dusklight Movement” (one of several inspired-by homages spread out through the album), exploring other shades of day turning to night. The manic frenzy Beethoven’s “Waldstein” piano sonata becomes a boogie-woogie—“Waldstein Wobble,” it’s called—so suddenly but so naturally that you have to try to remind yourself that Beethoven didn’t write it that way.
These sneak up on you, catch you off guard, make you gasp, make you laugh. The real marvel though, is not in the nimble shifts back and forth of the styles, but how Batiste blends, then braids them, makes them something new, something his. It’s not a conversation with Beethoven, but more of a melding of the two of them into one. Herr Professor Langhaar.
And these are not gimmicks. These are not novelties. This is about musicality and personality—two things Batiste, of course, has in abundance. He could have second-lined everything. But he didn’t. Not even the second-line stately procession of the Seventh Symphony’s second movement. Instead, he walks his “7th Symphony Elegy” down to the foot of Canal Street, the Euro-gothic of the theme flowing into evocations of American Southern church hymns. Rather than then turning from the sorrow as New Orleans funeral parades do, he let us sit with the feelings, let himself sit with the feelings with a brief visit to his own “American Symphony Theme” and its mixture of joy and fear seen in last year’s documentary as he dealt with career pressures and the stresses of his wife’s serious health issues.
Contemplation? Melancholy? These are Beethoven signatures that Batiste fully embraces. The stomps and boogie-woogies serve as punctuation. Even the short “Ode to Joyful” turns inward, while “5th Symphony in Congo Square,” a second fantasia on the theme, is more of a stroll through the Tremé and its history than a boisterous celebration. The full realization of this comes with the album’s end sequence. On “Life of Ludwig,” recapitulates the musical themes he’d already explored, as Beethoven did on his own intro to the Ninth’s chorale movement. That gives way to the album’s magnum opus, the 15-minute sonata “Für Elise – Reverie.” Where the album started with a frisky play on the original, this spins off into a somber, inward exploration of life’s beauty.
Now, jazzing up classics is hardly unprecedented. The Modern Jazz Quartet swung Bach nicely. Duke Ellington reworked the Nutcracker Suite for big band and B. Bumble and the Stingers—with Earl Palmer on drums—scorched those sugar plums with “Nut Rocker,” later revived by Emerson, Lake & Palmer (a different Palmer, of course). Electric Light Orchestra quoted the Fifth in its take on Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” while Walter Murphy’s “A 5th of Beethoven” ruled ’70s disco clubs. There are countless others.
Closest to home, many New Orleans pianists have interpolated classical themes in the local vernacular, perhaps most notably James Booker, who regularly riffed on Chopin and Beethoven, including Für Elise, certainly something Batiste was schooled on. But what Batiste has done here is as distinct as it is wonderful. And yes, the album title says “Vol. 1” of his piano series. There is more to come.
Stroll over Beethoven and tell James Booker the news!
Jon Batiste Jon Batiste
