Customer Reviews

Jazz Sebastian Bach

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32 years ago I was petrified to hear this group for the first time on the LP. Old Johann Sebastian never sounded better (outside some magnificent cathedral's organ, of course). He (JSB)really swings, AND HOW! Now - lucky me! - I was so happy to discover this favorite recording of mine remastered on CD. God! it's just as great as it used to be - only even better, much better! I taught the college course of Music Appreciation (for non-majors, of course). Listening to the classic Bach's renditions my students were polite, but ... not exactly moved. But then I put on this very CD - and WHAM! Everybody was tapping, fingersnapping and swinging with great immortal first-class top-rate SWINGLE SINGERS! Thank YOU, Mr.Ward Swingle - an American(!), who made an enormous contribution to the sophisticated and classy world of REAL eternal MUSIC. And - for the reference and for the information to another reviewer - the rest of the group are FRENCHMEN, all graduates of the world famous Paris Conservatory of Music. By the way, when the same people sing JAZZ classics they call themselves "Double Six of Paris" They are tops in every category. Also - check out for the crystal-clear heavenly soprano solo: it's Christine Legrand, sister of of Michel. What a gifted family! Enlight yourself and Enjoy the greatest music on Earth! Boris Gontarev.

I heard this when I was only a boy. At that time I only listened to rock and roll, but this captured my attention and drew me right in. My gosh, how grateful I am! This has to be some of the most exciting and electric stuff ever produced... I remember how I subsequently encountered Bach in his natural settings and I have never stopped enjoying this man's incredible imagination. The singing is some of the best and technically brilliant I have ever encountered. I would love to be able to play bass like the cool dude who is playing on this album. Man, would I ever! This stuff really moves....

I first heard the Swingle Singers in a Washington, DC music store as a teen. While I did not stop listening to rock, I had found an alternative source of music that I played when I needed creative inspiration. I bought all of their albums but with CDs now the primary media, I searched for a few years before I found the orignial Swingle Singers on CD. Well, I just lost my first copy of this album on a plane, I am purchasing my second copy ... I just have to have this inspriational music! Bach was a genius!

You should know that the overall sound quality on this release is not very good. A fair amount of clipping and just not a very "bright" recording... These outstanding musicians deserve better!

Twenty or thirty years ago I was fortunate to have two LPs by these gifted people! I remember that these singers were from Birmingham Alabama,or reference was to the city in some manner,and I was amused to see that in the review "my"city was spelled Burmingham.(smile) It was a wonderful in novation in a classical work and I was so proud of them! Ted Smith

I've been waxing lyrical about the Swingle Singers in my recent reviews (see Anyone For Mozart, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi?, Swingling Telemann, A Cappella Amadeus - A Mozart Celebration) and I'm going to do it again. I've contended that what they do is to return instrumental music to its very essence: the voice. It is often said (and I agree) that music (at least before the advent of the 20th-century atonal and serial avant-garde), even when purely instrumental, is vocal music transcribed for other instruments. Mozart's Piano Concertos have even been described as quasi-operas. Some composers have needed the instrument to compose (mostly the piano, but it was the guitar for Berlioz; Stravinsky once said something to the effect that ideas came to his fingers rather than to his mind) but many first hear those tunes in their inner ear and possibly sing them, before committing them to the music sheet. Therefore, classical instrumentalists are asked not just to play the notes but to "sing" them, e.g. to try and emulate the voice, even when their instrument is in essence a percussion instrument, whose acoustic properties are fundamentally different from the voice, like the plucked-string harpsichord or the struck-string piano (leading, by reaction, composers like Stravinsky or Bartok to assert the percussive nature of the instrument - which however was never at the detriment of singable melody). What the Swingles do is to reverse the whole process, and return these instrumental compositions to their vocal origin and essence. That is, I would suggest, what makes it so deeply touching, and irresistible.

I've also said that the arrangements of the Swingle Singers are to our humming our favorite tunes under the shower what a Picasso is to your kid's drawings. It is what we all do in everyday life, inadvertently, without even thinking about it, in a totally rudimentary manner, raised to the highest of arts. What makes the art of the Swingle Singers so unique and irresistible is a combination of factors: first, there is the pleasure common to any transcription: hearing the old warhorses in a new guise. It's like your wife showing up with a new, sexy lingerie: it adds new thrills to the old routine. I'm not necessarily a great fan of new lingerie, but I am a great fan of transcriptions (maybe that's why I'm divorced - no, don't take it seriously, it's only meant as a joke). Anyway, what I've called in another review this "old pal" factor is essential in the pleasure procured by their "Bach greatest hits" (or Mozart, or Vivaldi).

Then, there's the sheer joy of Ward Swingle's transcriptions, joined to the Swingle Singers' realization. This CD collates the two Bach Albums made by the Swingle Singers in 1963 ("Jazz Sébastien Bach" - published in the US under the title "Bach's Greatest Hits) and 1968 ("Jazz Sébastian Bach le volume 2" /"Back to Bach"); incidentally, it is the cover of the first French album that is used for the CD. And from the very first album (tracks 1-13), it is already all there: the silkiness of the timbres, the purity of the sopranos and their caressing, dreamy melismata over scatting or humming accompaniment (try the Sinfonia from the 2nd keyboard partita, track 9, the Gavotte from the 3rd Violin Partita, track 17, the duet in track 20 Adagio from the 3rd Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord BWV 1016, and the Prelude fro the Organ Choral "Now Comes the Saviour" BWV 659, track 22), the pitch-precision of the ensemble, the mind-boggling volubility of the fast movements, the tossing of pointillistic shards of melody between singers (never more breathtakingly impressive than in track 18, the famous Prelude in C major from WTC-1, but the vivace from the Violin Concerto BWV 1043, track 14, is no piece of cake either) realized so seamlessly as to sound as a continuous stream and abetted by the recording's great stereo spread. And there is the beat and swing they bring to the music. In those days, the Swingles used a jazz drum and double-bass section; when the group reformed in London in 1973 after the original, Paris-based ensemble had disbanded, they became a purely "a capella" ensemble: not that they dispensed with the jazz accompaniment: they sung it. Anyway, I NEVER find the jazz drums and double-bass superfluous or misplaced as they can be with other jazz or pop arrangements of the classics: on the contrary, I find their presence entirely organic, and they add considerably to the excitement in the fast movements and the poetry of the slow ones. The Swingles have not turned Bach into jazz, they've underlined and brought out the jazziness inherent to Bach (and it is a lover and big listener of Classical music speaking, not of Jazz or rock). It lends the music a degree of excitement or (in the slow movements) of beauty that... well, I can't say: "that is not present in the originals": sure it is present in the originals! But it is set here on another plane, and when I am listening I think that nothing can equal it (of course, when I return to the originals - or to the "piano transcriptions" in case of the keyboard compositions originally written for harpsichord -, I think nothing can equal those). And their partners were the best French jazzmen of those days (there was a strong jazz scene in France after World War Two): in the 1963 album they are Jacques Loussier's famous accompanists, Pierre Michelot double-bass and, for two tracks, André Arpino; the rest was Gus Wallez, the drummer of Michel Legrand (try his furious solo in track 12). In 1968 the partners are Guy Pedersen, Michel Legrand's usual bassist, and the drums are shared between the then young Benard Lubat (23 when the recording was made) and Daniel Humair (30), the recognized champions of their field (and still today, more than 40 years later!). Those four drummers are all skilful, imaginative and poetic.

Transcriptions of the famous aria from Suite no. 3 (track 3) or of the chorale "Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring" (track 16, not announced as such but titled, with typos which I correct here, "Choral from the Cantata "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben" BWV 147", which won't be very telling to most listeners) can become pretty corny, overbloated and sentimentally solemn (I've just listened to and reviewed Stokowski's orchestral arrangements); here, with the closed-mouth humming (in Aria) and the discreet brushes of drums and cymbals and slow, obsessive beat of the double-bass pizzicatti, they acquire a hymnal character that is simply beautiful and deeply moving. And I can extend that to many of the Swingles' Bach arrangements, and not just in the "slow" movements like the Prelude in F, No. 12 from the Well-Tempered Clavier book 2 (track 4), the introduction of the Sinfonia from the second keyboard partita, which the Swingles make sound like a plangent negro spiritual (track 9), or the Prelude in E-minor from WTC-1 - track 15); but try for instance the brisk "Fugue in C-minor", No. 2 from WTC-1 (track 6). Every burgeoning student of the piano has been made to toil over Bach's first two-part invention and so detest it for life, just like Clockwork Orange's with Beethoven's 9th; as a cure, they should try track 12!

And then, there is the singing technique imported by Ward Swingle from jazz but developed to levels that I don't know where ever encountered in jazz, and which represent his major contribution to contemporary vocal techniques: the Swingle's unique brand of scat. You might think it is simple (anybody can sing badabadabad under the shower), but it is actually very elaborate, and serves both to clarify the textures, to allow the jaws not to get blocked in the moments of virtuosity, and to give some hint of the original instrumentation.

Philips or whoever it is who holds the copyrights to these recordings has recently seen fit to reissue them "straight" from the LPs, short timings and all: Jazz Sebastian Bach, Vol. 1 and Jazz Sebastian Bach, Vol. 2 (and the other recordings from the original Paris Swingle group). A none too welcome way to milk us public, because the original LPs never timed more than 30 minutes, so two of them would fit easily on one CD. Indeed these previous reissues from Phonogram/Philips (the two albums "Going Baroque" from 1964 and "Anyone for Mozart" from 1965 were also reissued on a single CD, see link above, "anyone for Mozart, Bach HAndel Vivaldi") were the model of what should have been done throughout. This and other discs of the Swingles are emphatically NOT going to go join the dormant crowd on the long shelves of my music library. They are staying right here by the CD player.

[PS: Since the original, 1963 Bach album was very unspecific about the pieces played, and since Polygram has done no effort to better the description, here is the precise track listing of 1 to 13:

1. Fugue in D minor, Contrapunctus 9 from The Art of Fugue
2. Choral-prelude for organ BWV 645 "Wachet Auf, ruft uns die Stimme" (from the Schübler-Chorales)
3. Aria from Orchestral Suite 3
4. Prelude in F minor (not major as the track listing has it) No. 12 from Well-Tempered Clavier book II
5. Bourrée II from English Suite No. 2
6. Fugue in C minor, WTC I/2
7. Fugue in D major WTC I/5
8. Prelude WTC II/9
9. Sinfonia from keyboard Partita No. 2
10. Prelude C major WTC II/1
11. 4-part "perpetual" canon BWV 1073
12. Two-part Invention No. 1 in C major
13. Fugue in D major WTC II/5]

[PS 2: and a note of warning to those who would be reading the reviews of the entry for the Mp3 download of "The Originals - the Swingle Singers - Jazz Sébastian Bach", ASIN B000QQTGV2, published by a "Yoyo USA, Inc": be aware that by some of the mysterious vagaries of the all-encompassing Amazon "system", that entry is automatically linked with ASIN B0000046WP and that it is mostly the reviews the latter - in fact the reissue as a CD-twofer of the Swingle's two original Bach LPs - that appear thereunder. But this automatic linking is in fact close to deception, first, because the Mp3 download concerns only the first of these two albums, and second because, if the only reviewer of the mp3 download entry is to be trusted, the sonics of these is very mediocre.]

I still own and listen to my original vintage lp of the Swingle Singers doing Bach. It dates from 1964 and sounds infinitely better than this cd, even after the rough handling of my college days. Because I have an original recording in the old format, I can tell you the sound on this digital recording is atrocious. By comparison to the original this cd sounds horribly garbled and the beauty of the music and the voices is lost. I wish I had bought a used version and spent less. This is fit only for the trash can, I would not inflict it on some innocent person by reselling it used. Actually I put it in the trash can but pulled it out so I would have the correct cd title to post a review on Amazon. Bach is the greatest. The Swingle Singers are fantastic. Find some other recording to enjoy both (together preferrably).