THE trio of drummer Steve Street, pianist Richard Hughes and double bassist Simon Smith gave an interesting performance, blending classical themes with jazz rhythms at the 2025 Lichfield Arts Jazz and Blues Festival.
With a swinging rhythm section and virtuosic piano flourishes, they kept the attentive audience entertained with uniquely original arrangements of music by such composers as Bach, Chopin, Faure, Elgar, Dvorak and Beethoven.
Although classical and jazz fusion has been done before, most notably in Jacques Lousisier’s arrangement of Bach and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, dance music and rock rhythms, it is still a sonic ground worth exploring – as this talented trio showed.
They started with fragments of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, which led into a sprightly jazz piece with syncopated chords and daring bass runs.
A run through of some Chopin showed the group’s musical pedigree, while a slow waltz during Bach’s Air on A G String allowed for the stately theme to be played to its best advantage.
Bach’s Prelude in C Minor was another showcase for piano, with it’s inventive arrangement and insistently nagging counter melody.
The familiar theme of Fauve’s Pavane was also well played, and the drum solo during a piece by Elgar was both stylistically fitting but also a good showcase for some inventive rhythms.
The jazz standard All The Things You Are had the opposite treatment to the other music, with it being played in more classical style, while the uplifting tune and rhythms of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Dvorak’s Humoresque and the closing reading of Mozart’s Turkish March showed that jazz and classical music are not the strange bedfellows that some purists might insist.
