255: The Contemporary Fortepiano, by the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio

Rembrandt Frerichs Trio (The Netherlands)
The Contemporary Fortepiano (2018)
15 tracks, 70 minutes
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One musical cross-section that intrigues me in particular is the continuum of styles between Western classical music and jazz. It’s a meeting of two highly complex musical forms, each with their own, often rather antithetical, ways of performance, composition and ceremony, but which can permeate each other’s worlds with beautiful results. We’ve examined it a little bit before with the Modern Jazz Quartet and Miles Davis and Gil Evans as they voyaged the Third Stream in the 1950s and 60s, but today’s album shows how musicians are still exploring the jazz-classical continuum with exciting results in the 21st century.

To see them from a distance, the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio may look like your standard jazz trio – keys, bass, drums. But get a little closer, and really listen to those timbres, and the standard becomes unique: the instruments they play are all from the baroque era of European music. Bandleader Frerichs plays the fortepiano, an almost-forgotten cousin of the modern piano with a slightly more muted tone but with the ability to have a sharper attack somewhat like a harpsichord; Tony Overwater plays the violone, the forerunner of the double bass with six strings and frets; Vinsent Planjer plays a self-designed drum set called a ‘whisper kit,’ using historical drums and percussion whose sound is somewhat softer and more spacious than a standard drum kit. With these unusual sonic textures at their disposal, the trio can approach various musical styles from a different angle, and by doing so illuminate different and unexpected connections.

As such, it’s not just jazz and classical that the trio work within on this album. For the most part, they have created a tridimensional music that draws on the art music of three cultures, the European (baroque), the American (jazz) and the Arabic (maqam). There are further stylistic journeys throughout the album – through French musette, Latin jazz, Armenian folk music and more – but it is those three traditions that permeate and mingle most often, and in the most pleasing ways.

Just by bringing their instruments into play and playing classical music with jazz harmonies, or jazz melodies with a classical construction, would have been an interesting enough experiment, but the profundity of the trio’s music comes from a purposeful lack of distinction between the two artistic traditions. The pieces here are solutions rather than mixtures – they cannot be pulled apart into their component parts, too deeply entwined are they. Somehow by bringing in the third, Middle Eastern dimension, the jazz and classical elements are bound tighter, as all three styles can work with each other for mutual influence, like musical trigonometry.

Although it wasn’t the trio’s first album together, The Contemporary Fortepiano is an amazing statement for modern developments in jazz-classical music, musical fusions in general and, yes, a bold new contemporary repertoire for the fortepiano. The Rembrandt Frerichs Trio’s intelligent and subtle experimentation continues, too, with this year’s album It’s Still Autumn in collaboration with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor solidly within my favourite albums of the year so far. They’re playing with Kalhor at London’s Southbank Centre in October; it’s sure to be a whirlwind of intense invention and brooding, twisting, worldwide art. I can’t wait.