What Happens When Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky Are Really Let Loose?
VEIN’s Swiss trio jazzes up classical music right and proper in ‘Our Roots’
Everything about Swiss trio VEIN’s new album, Our Roots, is thrilling, interesting, and immensely jazz-approved — based entirely on the classical music of Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, and Hans Werner Henze.
With the spare artistry of a traditional jazz standards trio — piano, upright bass, drums — Michael Arbenz, Thomas Lähns, and Florian Arbenz reconfigure the most memorable and moving of these iconic European composers’ works in milky renditions both pleasing to the ear and impressively pleasing to the technically proficient.
Our Roots is the fourth album in a classically-inspired series, scheduled for release March 18, 2022, featuring seven tracks extracting the best from both chamber music and jazz.
“Luce,” the first track, starts off with a proper classical theme — introduced on Lähns’ woeful, wizened bow and Michael Arbenz’s shadowy piano — signifying everlasting, voluminous grief along the lines of a fine opera about the inevitability of trauma, death, and dying. Then, the piano deepens and quickens its jazz resolve, spinning a most arresting, modern tune out of the dying embers of the past, which repeats, on and off, in and out of the classical motif from whence it came.
The driving rhythmic melody and harmonic dissidence flow ingeniously from that ethereal, introductory classical standard. Pianist Michael drops his divine-to-intense, turgid-to-fluid notes in a syncopated cascade of sonic color, the stuff we live for in any performance, across any genre.
“Restless” goes soft around the edges, in a passing likeness to contemporary, smooth jazz over a side-stepping Beethoven’s 5th tempo. Rhythmic movement here is a little more haphazard, playing with the abstract and the unconventional, yet thoroughly bouncy, dynamic, and vibrant.
Michael, again leads, as Florian dips and dives in, tucks and scatters, picking up on subtitles and underwritten frequencies, while Lähns differentiates between the scattershot of piano and drums, filling in his own granular solos on the fly.
“Dal” sends Florian around the classical/free jazz bend, with drops of Afro-Cuban left behind for Michael to press forward haltingly, with sensitive, prescient precision — as if considering his next series of moves carefully, benevolent god-like, joined in tandem by bassist Lähns arcing, stretching, toying with the feeling of elongated, hovering ecstasy.
The pianist eases the musical calibration to a very slow-moving, modern ballet, more in line with the classical part of this equation.
“Restless” was a clever, gentle prelude to Beethoven’s 5th, but “This is Beat-O-VEIN” is the real deal, alluding to very few illusions of the original. The trio weaves Beethoven’s famous four-note opening throughout, playing with and improvising bluesy, funky extensions in a musical tug-of-war between the piano’s ferocious, floral envoy and the soulful bass’s insistent, jam-packed, groovy dispatch.
“The Lovely Image” ballad floats prettily, awash in unshuttering bows, bristles, and Michael’s piano poetry, spilling in churning, oblique shapes. Three-fourths of the way through, the outlines of a nostalgic melody issues forth from his tender-hearted look back over his shoulder…perhaps more in line with a Burt Bacharach Broadway farewell — where the guy has to leave the girl behind for another senseless war…
“Betting Angel” coils around a musical brainteaser, a query inside a riddle that never ends, a most unconventional entry into a composition, which seems to point down and backward. As if the musicians are foraging for their own originality on the bones of the inspiration, pulling the entire composition inside-out.
The last track on the album, “On the Underground Road,” sends the VEIN jazz trio back home to the bells and whistles of straight-ahead, bristling, burnished jazz. All sticks and heavy, hearty grind, snippets of classical music resound in bits and pieces — in between Florian’s fast-hustling, heart-pumping dance grooves, undercut with equally scintillating feedback from Michael and Lähns, expertly pushing the envelope open.
At the halfway point, as is his manner, the stalwart VEIN pianist inserts the meaning of classical music and jazz into his grand-to-rugged fusion design, tying everything together in a blissful avalanche of clearly-calculated ideas and pristine flourishes.
Leave it to VEIN to leave on a high note.