They’re just following where the music wants to go, and trusting that Bach, four hundred years on, still has somewhere new to lead them.
Michael Arbenz – Piano, Moog Synthesizer; Florian Arbenz – Drums; Atom String Quartet: Dawid Lubowicz, Mateusz Smoczynski, Michal Zaborski – Violin; Krysztof Lenczowski – Cello
Michael Arbenz has spent his career moving fluidly between classical precision and jazz instinct, and on J.S. Bach Suite III – A Living Organism, that balancing act finds its most vivid subject yet. Working with his brother Florian on drums and the remarkable Atom String Quartet, he treats Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 as a seed, something with enough life in it to keep sprouting new shoots and growing in directions Bach never mapped.
“Sonic Prelude” opens with strings that could pass for Bach himself, all poise and symmetry, until the piano wanders in with a jazzier gait and low thumping bass sounds start pushing up from underneath. By the piece’s close, the classical and jazz threads have tangled so thoroughly they’d be hard to pull apart, two styles of music trying to get along, even when it sometimes sounds like they’re not quite managing it. The strings quietly reclaim the room at the very end, as if to remind everyone they’re still guests in Bach’s house.
“Upbeat Bounce” starts with a few notes picked out on violin, just enough to suggest a country hoedown warming up, before the piece pulls away into something harder to pin down, hints of classical, brushes of jazz, none of it settling long enough to claim the tune. The piano takes over with a searching solo that settles into an easygoing jazz groove, while bass and drums lock into a rolling funk pocket underneath. The strings, easy to lose track of amid everything else going on, have worked their way up to a real presence by the piece’s end.
“Inner Engine” is where the record shows its most compelling face. Repetitive high piano notes and layered Moog textures overtake a drum rhythm that could have come from a New Orleans street parade. Piano notes and bowed cello lines intersect, the violins adding tremelos against a droning synthesizer that sounds like distant pulsating thunder. By the end the strings have peacefully drifted back in, as if nothing unusual had happened at all.
Things stay serene on “Respire.” The quiet piano flurries sound less like technique and more like daydreaming, the kind of loose patter you’d tap out on a desk while staring out a window at nothing in particular. The violins trace a melancholic melody alongside a classical-sounding piano line, and the whole piece settles into something lovely and peaceful, the calmest spot on the record.
“Final Spin” closes with the quartet doing most of the talking, the cello solo sounding like a double bass, plucked violin notes hovering over simple piano chords, and unwavering drumming anchoring the mix. The Moog starts to pulse beneath a lone violin, the low blasts building until it sounds like a prog keyboard tearing the room apart. It’s an exhilarating way to end a record that began with such formal restraint.
What makes A Living Organism work isn’t the novelty of Bach-meets-jazz, which has been tried plenty of times before. It’s that Arbenz and his collaborators never seem to be making a statement about genre at all. They’re just following where the music wants to go, and trusting that Bach, four hundred years on, still has somewhere new to lead them.
