Yuja plays Soviet jazz
Daily Comfort ZoneThe Soviet composer Nikolai Kapustin played most of his career in officially sanctioned Soviet jazz ensemble. He also had a quintet that played in upscale Moscow restautants.
Kapustin, who died four years ago, regarded himself as a classical composer.
Yuja Wang revives one of his pieces on her latest albujm.
It ain’t jazz if there ain’t improv, ’cause you just reading a transcription of someone else off your ipad.
Kapustin himself frequently said that his music was NOT jazz — it was music in classical forms using a jazz vocabulary. The harmony in his music goes way too fast for improvisation.
Great fun to hear this!
She has played this piece before as one of her encores.
Kapustin is a great composer and this piece in particular has an obvious debt to Prokofiev. Good choice of repertoire!
“Restautants” – get a proofreader please!
If she’s not improvising, it’s not Jazz.
What genre would YOU call it then?
Great playing! She’s almost dancing at the same time. There have been a number of recordings of Kapustin that have been coming out recently, I wonder how Yuja’s compares to Hamelin. I’ll get both.
Very enjoyable piece
I’d rather listen to his own recordings….
Unless a musician improvises in real time using a recognizably jazz vocabulary, he or she is not playing jazz.Yuja Wang does not play jazz. Playing a transcription of a jazz musician’s recorded solo is also not jazz.
Kapustin music is informed by jazz, but it is not jazz.
Jazz-like perhaps but not jazz.
Improvisation is the key.
That is rather like saying epic poetry is no longer epic poetry if it is entirely written out and not recited and improvised by a bard.
A term you are looking for might be written-out jazz. Kapustin, a career jazz musician in his own right, shows that one can indeed fully write out jazz successfully and even cast it in sonata form. Gershwin had his new and novel symphonic jazz 100 years ago, which sometimes combined written and improvised segments. Right from the beginning, jazz was a very free-wheeling concept, much more so than some of its modern fans realize. As for a “recognizably jazz” sound, the earliest examples of music calling itself jazz, recorded in the acoustic era, don’t even sound like jazz to most of us.
When one tries to circumscribe definition of jazz too narrowly, all sorts of contradictions and problems arise. Similar problems arose with the definition of folk music which had narrowed to an equally absurd degree by the 20th C. The first folk music collections from the time of Herder, who more or less invented the concept, included things like God Save the King.
There are no limits to anything Yuja wants to play. She has incredible musical and technical skills that are at the highest level of greatness! Bravissimo!
I don’t know why so many pianists are so enamored with this composer. To me, his music sounds just like old Japanese video game music from the 90s like Mario or Sonic. Or perhaps classical pianists are too insular, barely paying attention to other fields.
The music of Kapustin is simply amazing. A perfect blend of classical music and jazz. 200% of breathtaking music (100% jazz plus 100% classical music). Those who haven’t ever heard of this composer before, should try out the reference recordings of the Frank Dupree Trio.
Kapustin was a genius. Totally worth it.
Yuja has gifts!! This is excellent music.
Kapustin. Who knew?
Many, many people since Marc-Andre Hamelin and Stephen Osborne put out CDs of his music on Hyperion in 2004 and 2000 respectively. And Hamelin at least began playing Kapustin in concerts in the late 1990s. Many other CDs followed, including western issues of multiple discs of Kapustin performing his own music, and now Frank Dupree has issued 2 full discs of concerted works.
She plays like she is improvising herself on the spot.
Yuja played Soviet Jazz. Who won?
The piece sounds jazzier than Shostakovich’s so-called Jazz Suites. Can Yuja let loose in playing jazz the same way as Denis Matsuev’s can? His riffing on Billy Strahorn’s Take the A Train is staggering.
Kapustin never said it was jazz. As a composed piece infused with jazz flavors . . . it’s wonderful. And she does it up right. Her repertoire choices are one of my favorite things about Yuja. I see Albeniz is well-represented on the new record–This just gets better and better.