Mixed Media

CD of the Month

Tales of the Jazz Age

What a time! The "Jazz Age", as it was experienced in Paris, especially by literary figures such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller, and the Irishman Joyce: Pierre Solot paints it in the most vivid colors in the booklet while his pianist colleague Florian Noack provides the appropriate music: right at the beginning, a Charleston by James Price Johnson that will knock your socks off. There are also a few typical jazz numbers by Fats Waller, but also a Five o'clock Foxtrot by a composer from whom one would least expect such a catchy dance: Maurice Ravel.

The Belgian-German pianist, who created most of the arrangements heard here for the first time, gently immerses himself in the piece, as if it were actually a dream. Noack finds an individual tone for each of his Tales, lets Wagner's Isolde groove captivatingly in Isoldina, and interprets Kurt Weill's Tango Ballade in such a way that you'll always be listening, even while dancing. Highly interesting and always entertaining: the examples by Gershwin, Spoliansky, and Schulhoff. At the end of the CD, Leo Ornstein makes a dramatic entrance with his piano study Suicide in an Airplane, composed in 1918. He evidently wasn't tired of life, though: He died at the biblical age of 109.

Hartmut Regitz

Clement Doucet, George Gershwin, Francis Poulenc among others: Tales of the Jazz Age with Florian Noack, piano; www.ladolcevolta.com