| Jazz |
From Bach to Ellington, with Grace and Gravitas: Michael Arbenz and Andy Sheppard’s Daring, Intimate Jazz Dialogue.
At a time when much of the jazz world leans into spectacle and fusion, From Bach to Ellington is a welcome meditation, a live album so impeccably recorded that only the gentle swell of applause reminds you there’s an audience. Here, Swiss pianist Michael Arbenz and iconic British saxophonist Andy Sheppard offer not merely a concert, but a rare kind of conversation, deeply cultivated, intellectually sharp, and emotionally unguarded.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a journey from Johann Sebastian Bach to Duke Ellington. But in the hands of these two master musicians, this is no linear trek through music history. Rather, it’s a boundless exploration of style, dialogue, and resonance across time. With roots in classical rigor and jazz improvisation, Arbenz and Sheppard move freely between eras and idioms, bending structures to serve a higher musical truth. The album, recorded at the Bird’s Eye Jazz Club in Basel, a venue cherished by discerning German and Swiss jazz audiences—thrives in this liminal space, where silence matters as much as sound, and where listening becomes a shared act of creation.
Michael Arbenz, long celebrated for his solo albums such as Reflections of D (a luminous homage to Ellington) and Classicism, A Point of View, finds in the duo format a canvas that magnifies both precision and risk. The absence of a rhythm section strips the music to its essentials, revealing the sinew and breath of each phrase. Arbenz’s pianism is both architectural and fluid, grounded in classical training yet eager to venture into uncharted harmonic territories.
In Andy Sheppard, Arbenz has found a collaborator who is equal parts provocateur and poet. Sheppard’s career, marked by partnerships with Carla Bley, Gil Evans, and George Russell, places him among a rarefied class of postwar big band alumni. But here, in intimate dialogue, his horn reveals new shades, conversational, restrained, fiercely lyrical. A veteran of ECM’s golden era, Sheppard retains the label’s trademark sense of dramaturgy: long arcs, hovering dissonances, unexpected silences that speak louder than sound.
Their musical friendship began within the VEIN Trio, a Swiss ensemble with which they toured extensively across Europe, often expanding into larger formations. But it’s in the elemental space of the duo that their interplay flourishes. Free of arrangement-heavy charts and crowded textures, they unearth subtleties impossible in denser contexts. The result is less performance than communion, two minds, listening, reacting, offering and withholding with equal intensity.
There is also a quiet elegance in the production itself. The sound engineering is crystalline, preserving not only the notes but the spaces between them. Even the album cover, designed by Yuliana Chamorro, reflects the care and contemplation that permeates the entire project. One might even say this album feels more ECM than ECM itself, a label once synonymous with such exacting beauty but now marked by uneven output.
Make no mistake: From Bach to Ellington is not an easy listen. It asks much of its audience. This is jazz that resists casual consumption. It invites those with ears tuned to both counterpoint and swing, those unafraid to be led from cathedral to nightclub in the span of a single improvisation. For some, it may feel austere or cerebral. But for those who treasure music that seeks not to entertain but to elevate, this album is a quiet revelation.
When music becomes poetry, time slows. Phrases unfold like smoke rising in still air, leaving behind momentary sketches, suggestions of form, glimpses of melody. That is the atmosphere conjured here. Arbenz and Sheppard do not merely play; they suggest, they converse, they invite us in. Theirs is a dialogue of trust, of risk, of refinement. And for those willing to follow, it offers an experience that lingers long after the final note has faded.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, June 4th 2025
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Michael Arbenz – Facebook page
Musicians :
Michael Arbenz | Piano
Andy Sheppard | Saxophone
Tracklist :
Melancholia (D. Ellington)
Psalm (M. Arbenz, inspired by Bach’s Cantata BWV 146)
African Flower (D. Ellington)
Where It Springs Into Being (M. Arbenz, inspired by Bach’s Prelude in C)
Reflections in D (D. Ellington)
Warm Valley (D. Ellington)