Fire up any online piano lesson or sheet music platform and one of the most popular pieces will inevitably be Beethoven’s Für Elise, the ubiquitous bagatelle that the whole world wants to play.
This being the case, it seems an unlikely target for the talents of Jon Batiste, a man steeped in the history of jazz and who likes to push and blur the odd musical boundary.
However, this isn’t Für Elise as you’re used to hearing it. It’s lifted from Batiste’s upcoming Beethoven Blues album, which puts a decidedly different spin on the Ludvig van canon. As the title suggests, its 12 tracks aren’t straight renditions of the great man’s work, but fresh takes that incorporate blues and gospel elements.
This is evident as soon as you listen to Batiste’s Für Elise, which is quickly bent out of shape with jazzy phrases and moments of reharmonisation. The piece’s familiar themes aren’t completely abandoned, though, and you also get the sense that centuries have dissolved and Batiste and Beethoven are in a room together, trading licks.
This, it transpires, was the intention: “The approach is to think about, if I were both in conversation with Beethoven, but also if Beethoven himself were here today, and he was sitting at the piano, what would the approach be?” Batiste tells AP News. “And blending both, you know, my approach to artistry and creativity and what my imagined approach of how a contemporary Beethoven would approach these works.”
Batiste says that his variations were created using a technique known as “spontaneous composition”. This means that, if you were to go and see him play them live, they’d sound noticeably different to the recorded versions.
“If you were to come and see me perform these works 10 times in a row, you’d hear not only a new version of Beethoven, but you would also get a completely new concert of Beethoven,” he says.
Circling back to the original compositions, Batiste believes that, while they’re often held up as being “pristine and preserved and European”, their roots actually lie elsewhere.
“On a basic technical level, he’s doing the thing that African music ingenuity brought to the world, which is he’s playing in both a two meter and a three meter at once, almost all the time,” he explains. “He’s playing in two different time signatures at once, almost exclusively.”
Beethoven Blues is available for pre-order now and will be released on 15 November.
