Jacques Loussier, who was born in 1934 in France, started taking formal piano lessons at the age of ten in the town of Angers, finding his first J. S. Bach piece, the G-minor Prelude early on. He fell in love with the piece and he played it on the piano at home, 'tens, hundreds of times'. Sometimes he would add a note, sometimes drop one and so on, in a kind of free-wheeling roulette wheel, modifying. and sharpening the venerated canon, an adventurous mode of musical knitting.
This playful, experimental approach was something he gravitated to almost preternaturally, following studies at the Conservatoire National de Musique de Paris. He travelled the globe, listening to Arab and Jewish music, absorbing Latin American and Cuban music, and indeed he spent a year in Cuba.
Back in France, he began to accompany singers like Catherine Sauvage and Charles Aznavour. Privately, he worked away at that ad-libbing extemporising on the music of Johann Sebastian. Then in the 1950s, he was a young pianist improvising Bach with those innocative jazz flourishes, and the folks in the clubs began to sit up and take notice. In 1959, he formed his first Play Bach Trio, with Christian Garros on drums and Pierre Michelot on double-bass. There followed 15 years of tours, six million records sold, and numerous gold discs.
During the 1960s and 70s, Loussier gave over 2000 performances worldwide and he also wrote over a hundred scores for the cinema and television. He composed a Mass too, before returning to the music of Bach with which he seems inexorably bonded.
His first Play Bach album was released in 1959, followed by the other four, which had collectively sold a million copies in total by 1965, over six million by 2018. In Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney and New York, Jacques Loussier set tongues wagging, but the reaction was not always adulatory it seems - purists will be purists . .
Here then from Decca are the five albums in the popular Play Bach series, mixing, mashing, mulling and milling over Bach’s Toccatas and Preludes, cantata and fugue given the jazz injection, and all of it sprightly and con brio. Fun and gamesmanship but real, integral music-making in the end from Loussier and his storied trio.
