Adam Birnbaum

Baroque music, especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach, has long attracted jazz artists as a vehicle for improvisation, from the bebop era into the 21st century; in that spirit, New York-based pianist Adam Birnbaum presents his own fresh, improvisatory vision of Bach, having created jazz-trio arrangements of a dozen of the composer’s preludes and recorded them with bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Keita Ogawa. The resulting album, titled Preludes, will be released by Chelsea Music Festival Records on October 13, 2023. Preludes is Birnbaum’s fifth album as a leader; his previous release, Three of a Mind, was praised as “an eloquent dispatch from the heart of the contemporary piano tradition” by Nate Chinen in The New York Times. Along with fronting his own groups, the pianist has long been in demand as a sideman, performing with vocal star Cécile McLorin Salvant, drum master Al Foster, composer Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society and the venerable Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, among others. McLorin Salvant has become a big fan of Birnbaum, even painting the alluring cover image for Preludes. “This album provides a doorway to a new enjoyment of Bach’s music, through Adam’s surprising rearrangements and the trio’s beautiful playing,” the singer says. “The music is dynamic, innovative and moving.”

Birnbaum drew the material for Preludes from the first half of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s iconic, ever-inspiring collection of two books of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. Bach compiled Book I of the WTC in 1722, at age 37. This music has been a signal influence on composers from Mozart to Shostakovich and beyond; the pieces of the WTC have been performed not only by keyboardists of every era but also by players, and groups of players, on every sort of instrument and in countless styles, all over the world. (Such notable jazzers as John Lewis, Uri Caine, Brad Mehldau and Dan Tepfer are among those who have recast Bach in their own, very different ways, putting Birnbaum in great company.) To a rare degree, Bach’s compositions have proved to be virtually universal music. Birnbaum’s new album helps underscore that fact with interpretations that are lyrical, energized, delightful.

“I performed a first draft of my Bach arrangements at the Chelsea Music Festival in 2018, and the audience’s response was so encouraging that it gave me the impetus to make this studio recording,” Birnbaum explains. “I aimed for the arrangements to be true to what Bach wrote while still allowing for some twists of my own.” Most Baroque musicians, particularly keyboardists, were expected to be able to improvise, with Bach prime among them; and the way players of that period improvised wasn’t so dissimilar to the method for jazz artists. “When choosing which of Bach’s preludes to arrange, I picked those pieces that felt like they had originated as improvised ideas, with Bach at the keyboard,” Birnbaum says. “The treatment I gave them varies from prelude to prelude, but sometimes we’re improvising over the chord changes, which is essentially bebop. For a stretch of the C Minor Prelude arrangement, I’m playing Bach’s left-hand part as originally written while improvising a counter-melody with my right hand. Then, for the D Major Prelude, I’m customizing the melody, although it has the same shape as that of the original.”