The Sound of Surprise

By Loren Schoenberg

I had the great pleasure recently of hearing Jeremy Denk (DMA ’01, piano) play the first book of J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. It was done with such spontaneity it sounded as if it was being improvised, although I knew full well he was adhering to the score, albeit with all the personal interpretive gestures at his command.

Not long afterward, I had the pleasure of an extended conversation with Jeremy as part of a program that the National Jazz Museum in Harlem does regularly with Stanford University. We began by discussing the maxim that when interpreted with the right spirit, the best improvised music sounds improvised-composed and the opposite is also true. Implicit was our agreement that there’s no such thing as the “best,” though that term served as a basis for discussion.

Jeremy reminded me that people forget that Bach was known primarily as a great musical director/organist and improviser during his lifetime, albeit in the relative backwater that was 17th-century Leipzig.

Digging Into Bach
In the days following my talk with Jeremy, many of the topics we discussed continued to echo in my head, and I decided to dig further into the life and times of Herr Bach. I found that many of Bach’s elders expressed great disfavor of his extended “preluding” (aka improvising) during church services. And his keyboard compositions that are now held as artistic masterpieces were regarded for more than a century as strictly for academic/technical use.

To me, the intersection between jazz and Bach finds its closest point in tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins’s bedrock contribution to the jazz language, a legacy heard in virtually all jazz solos to this day. Hawkins’ original instrument was the cello, but by the time he turned 18, in 1922, he had transitioned to the most popular instrument of the day, the sax.

Hawkins spent a good part of the 1930s touring Europe, where he became enamored of Pablo Casals’ recording of Bach’s solo cello suites, even to the point of carrying some of them (gingerly, as they were fragile 78rpm discs) in his saxophone case. By the end of his European stay, in 1939, Hawkins was given to playing an unaccompanied solo version of “Body & Soul” as an encore. And shortly after he returned to the U.S., Hawkins recorded a version of the tune that became an immediate jazz classic and opened the door to a new way of harmonic improvisation in jazz.

Years later, Hawkins was asked how, as an elder statesman, he was able to stay contemporary, making records with younger innovators such as John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. His response caught many by surprise. ”I spend at least two hours a day listening to Johann Sebastian Bach, and man, it’s all there,” he said. If (young musicians) ”want to learn how to improvise around a theme, which is the essence of jazz (adding blue notes),” he continued, ”they should learn from the master. He never wastes a note, and he knows where every note is going and when to bring it back. Some of these cats go way out and forget where they began or what they started to do. Bach will clear it all for them.”

The similarities between Bach’s verticality and Hawkins’ melodic outlines are striking not only to the ear but also to the eye when viewed in manuscript. Recently, second-year undergrad Esteban Castro played the Hawkins solo on the harpsichord with Bachian phrasing, and the similarities jumped right out.

The Sound of Surprise
In the midst of our Stanford discussion, Jeremy went to the piano to illustrate a point about the varied ways he approaches the famous opening measure of the Well-Tempered Clavier, stressing different accents and phrasing as the harmonies elide into one another. And suddenly it struck me why the two experiences enter the ears and the brain with the same sort of spontaneity that clearly inspired Bach and Coleman Hawkins. It’s been suggested that Bach the musician has more in common with today’s jazz musicians than with those of any other idiom.

The art of improvisation has sadly been bled out of “classical” music (I use the quotation marks to express the inadequacy of the term, and one could also write “jazz,” but that’s a topic for a separate discussion) with only a few notable exceptions—most recently the work of Aaron Diehl (BM ’07, jazz studies) and that of a handful of others. As Dana Gooley notes in his essential book Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music, the written and the improvised were once joined at the hip. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that relationship were to be brought back to bear for all of today’s young musicians? These are just some of the questions raised by Jeremy Denk’s deep dive into Bach.

Loren Schoenberg, who joined the jazz faculty in 2001, is also the founding director and senior scholar at the National Jazz Museum