BACH TO BRUBECK Chris Brubeck – trombone, piano, bass and vocals Bill Crofut – banjo and vocals Joel Brown – guitar and vocals The London Symphony Orchestra Joel Revzen – conductor Koch International 3-7485-2 HI £££ Chris Brubeck: Variations on Themes by Bach, Concerto for Bass Trombone and Orchestra; Dave Brubeck: Koto Song, Unsquare Dance, Blue Rondo a la Turk; Crofut and Keith: Concerto for Banjo and Orcherstra; Scott Joplin: Easy Winners; TPT 60'05

Chris Brubeck, featured in this month's MusicTeachers.co.uk Online Journal, would seem an unlikely candidate for collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and, despite a monumental family name, he remains relatively unknown in the United Kingdom. His music is, essentially, what one might expect of a 'pops' composer and arranger – Las Vegas meets Star Wars and collides head on with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's kitsch, it's colour and it's spectacle, all suffused with an incandescent glow of jubilation, enthusiasm and an underlying (and ever-present) excitement. Brubeck is no Mahler, Shostakovich or Milhaud, yet there is something that makes his music equally appealing – his mastery of orchestration, evident on just about every track on the disc, displays such an exotic taste for colour and effect that it sets his music apart from many of his contemporaries. Take, for instance, the three arrangements of Bach preludes which open the disc. Countless composers have hacked about Bach's music almost since the time of his death; jazz has seen the Jacques Loussier input, art music the ravages of Busoni and, more recently, Maxwell Davies, to name but a few. Yet there is nothing in either Loussier or Brubeck's music that is pretentious – the only performances I have taken part in which the audience almost booed the performers offstage were of Max's arrangements (if one dares to use that word) of Well-Tempered Clavier preludes and fugues. Neither try to recompose, both take Bach as a starting-point for their own fantasy and, granted, in Brubeck we hear music which might be used onboard an aircraft to calm the nerves of over-anxious passengers, its inoffensive nature and startling colour still make it appealing listening.

Brubeck's own Concerto for Bass Trombone and Orchestra...sparkles with an overpowering sense of humour and feather-bedecked glamour, and has neither of the cynical utterances of William Bolcom nor the introspective cries of the more restrained Aaron Copland.

But there is still more to Brubeck than this, as seen in the arrangements of his father's music (Unsquare Dance, Blue Rondo a la Turk, Koto Song), which make for rewarding listening: new solos, in place of the more familiar versions of his father's recordings, are written with a keen ear and sense of style – they do not stand apart from the musical text and certainly do not make the listener baulk, a common experience with orchestrated jazz classics. Despite a somewhat odd choice of solo instrument, Crofut and Keith's Blues Suite for Banjo and Orchestra, arranged by Brubeck, takes the listener on a whistle-stop tour of twentieth-century American musical history from its first Gershwinesque strains through Dixieland, speakeasies, rock'n'roll joints, jazz clubs, big bands…all rolled into a well-packed and exciting ten-minute slot.

Central to the recording is Brubeck's own Concerto for Bass Trombone and Orchestra, an intelligently-written miniature that belongs firmly in the time-honoured tradition of American composers: it sparkles with an overpowering sense of humour and feather-bedecked glamour, and has neither of the cynical utterances of William Bolcom nor the introspective cries of the more restrained Aaron Copland. But not all is jazz – the third movement is more sober; subtitled 'James Brown in the Twilight Zone', it cleverly combines a strain from Brown's I Feel Good with elements that are reminiscent of (for those of us over thirty) Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone. Containing (unusually) both opening and closing cadenzas, the music abounds with middle-eastern elements – strange, twisted melodies of unison, which, perhaps more than elsewhere, demonstrate that Brubeck's style is quintessential.

Performances are stunning. The LSO, as usual, is in excellent form and a deep, infectious sense of enjoyment permeates. Brubeck is evidently a chip-off-the-old-block when it comes to playing jazz, and both written and improvised solos, especially the 'foggy-morning' one of the trombone concerto's second movement or the opening cadenza of the last, are sensitively executed with a superb technical ability and sense of style.

In these days, where both jazz, pop and art musicians find it echt to provide performances that remind audiences of how disturbing, if not unpleasant, life can be, a disc like this is an absolute treasure. A good one Koch!

Ian le Prévost