Bach meets Jazz – Jacques Loussier plays BACH

Bach meets Jazz – Jacques Loussier plays BACH

Subscribe & download the best scores and sheet music transcriptions from our Library.

bach jacques loussier jazz sheet music pdf

Jacques Loussier

Jacques Loussier (26 October 1934 – 5 March 2019) was a French pianist and composer. He arranged jazz interpretations of many of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, such as the Goldberg Variations. The Jacques Loussier Trio, founded in 1959, played more than 3,000 concerts and sold more than 7 million recordings—mostly in the Bach series.

Loussier composed film scores and a number of classical pieces, including a Mass, a ballet, and violin concertos. Loussier’s style is described as third stream, a synthesis of jazz and classical music, with an emphasis on improvisation.

Browse in the Library:

Total Records Found in the Library: 12472, showing 120 per page
Artist or Composer / Score nameCoverList of Contents
Waltz – Noce i Dnie OST (Nights and days)
Waltz For Debby Bill Evans (Musescore File).mscz
Waltz For Debby – Bill Evans (Complete) (Musescore File).mscz
Waltz For Debby – Bill Evans (Musescore File).mscz
Waltz From The Balet ‘coppelia’ (Musescore File).mscz
Waltz In A Minor F. Chopin (Musescore File).mscz
Waltz In E Minor Op. 39 No. 4 – Johannes Brahms (Musescore File).mscz
Ward-Jackson’s Gymnastics For The Fingers And Wrist – based On Anatomical Principles (By Edwin Ward-Jackson) 1874 sheet music score download partitura partition spartiti
Watermark (Musescore File).mscz
Watermelon Man (Musescore File).mscz
Waters of Irrawaddy (Hans Zimmer) from the movie Beyond Rangoon
Wave – Vou Te Contar Jobim (Musescore File).mscz
Wayne Shorter – Ana Maria sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras
Wayne Shorter Artist Transcriptions The New Best of free sheet music download Wayne Shorter Artist Transcriptions The New Best of
Wayward Sisters – Nocturnal Animals OST (Abel Korzeniowski)
We are the champions (Queen)
We Are The World Songbook we are the world
We Shall Overcome Essays on a Great American Song (Book) by Victor B.Bobetsky free sheet music pdf
We Wish You A Merry Christmas
We Wish You A Merry Christmas – Anonymous (Guitar arr. sheet music with TABs) We Wish You A Merry Christmas – Anonymous (Guitar arr. sheet music with TABs)
We Wish You A Merry Christmas – Guitar TABlature sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras
We Wish You A Merry Christmas (piano solo sheet music) free sheet music download
We Wish You A Merry Christmas Trad. English Christmas carol sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras
We Wish You A Merry Christmas Trad. English Christmas carol.mscz
Weather Report – A Remark You Made (Guitar TABS) Weather Report – A Remark You Made (Guitar TABS)
Weather Report – The best of Weather Report (Full score) free sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras Weather Report – The best of Weather Report (Full score)
Weather Report Best Of Weather Report Band Score Book free sheet music & scores pdf Best Of Weather Report Us Book
Weber – Der Freischütz (Ouvertüre) Piano Solo arr sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras
Weber – Der Freischütz (Ouvertüre) Piano Solo arr.mscz
Weber – Der Freischutz Overture piano solo arr. sheet music score download partitura partition spartiti
Weber op 65 Invitation to the Dance (Invitation to the Waltz)
Weber’s Last Thought – C.M. von Weber free sheet music pdf
Wedding Collection for Piano Solo free sheet music & scores pdf download Wedding Collection for Piano Solo
Wednesday Morning 3 A M – Simon & Garfunkel (Musescore File).mscz
Weight Of The World – Nier Automata Piano Collections (Musescore File).mscz
Weissenberg En Avril A Paris (April In Paris) Charles Trenet free sheet music partitura partition noten
Well Tempered Praise – Mark Hayes piano free sheet music download Well Tempered Praise – Mark Hayes piano
Well Tempered Praise II by Mark Hayes free sheet music download Well Tempered Praise II by Mark Hayes
Well Tempered Praise III – Mark Hayes piano free sheet music download Well Tempered Praise III – Mark Hayes piano
Well Tempered Praise Vol 4 Gospel Classics by Mark Hayes free sheet music download Well Tempered Praise Vol 4 Gospel Classics by Mark Hayes
Well-Known Piano Solos – How To Play Them (By Charles W Wilkinson) (1915) sheet music score download partitura partition spartiti
Wes Montgomery Wine And Roses By Henry Mancini Solo Guitar sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras
Wes Montgomery – Unit 7 Solo Transcription Wes Montgomery – Unit 7 Solo Transcription
Wes Montgomery – Artist Transcriptions for guitar by fred Sokolow free sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras Wes Montgomery – Artist Transcriptions for guitar by fred Sokolow
Wes Montgomery – Au Privave transcription free scores download
Wes Montgomery – Days of wine and roses transcription free scores download
Wes Montgomery – Take The A Train transcription free scores download
Wes Montgomery Essential Jazz Lines (Mel Bay) partitions gratuites Wes Montgomery Essential Jazz Lines (Mel Bay)
Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Artistry arr. by Zafar Soood with TABs free sheet music downloadpartitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Artistry arr. by Zafar Soood
Wes Montgomery Jazz No Blues Guitar sheet music partitura partition noten spartiti
Wes Montgomery The Early Years (Mel Bay) Jazz Guitar Solos Tablature free sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti partituras Wes Montgomery The Early Years (Mel Bay) Jazz Guitar Solos Tablature
Wes Montgomery The End Of A Love Affair Guitar Tabs partitions gratuites
West Side Story – Somewhere (Voice and Piano) Leonard Bernstein West Side Story – Somewhere
West Side Story (The Musical) Vocal Score Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim sheet music score download partitura partition spartiti noten West Side Story Vocal Score – Leonard Bernstein
Westlife – Cant Lose What You Never Had
Westlife – Flying Without Wings
Westlife – If I Let You Go
Westlife – Mandy
Westlife – You Raise Me Up Guitar arr. with TABs Westlife – You Raise Me Up Guitar arr. with TABs
Westlife Unbreakable Greatest Hits Westlife songbook free download sheet music & scores pdf
Wet Wet Wet – Love Is All Around
Wexford Carol (Musescore File).mscz
Wham , George Michael And Me By Andrew Ridgeley (Book) sheet music partitura partition noten spartiti
Wham Make It Big Piano Vocal Guitar Chords free sheet music partitura partition noten Wham Make It Big Piano Vocal Guitar Chords
What a Wonderful World – Thiele & Weiss sheet music download partitura partition spartiti
What a wonderful world – Louis Armstrong.mscz
What A Wonderful World (Lead Sheet With Lyrics ) Musescore File.mscz
What a Wonderful World (lead sheet) – Thiele & Weiss What a Wonderful World (lead sheet) – Thiele & Weiss
What A Wonderful World (Musescore File).mscz
What a wonderfull World (Jazz Standard) Guitar Tablature TABs What a wonderfull World (Jazz Standard) Guitar Tablature TABs
What A Wonderlful World (Lead Sheet) (Musescore File).mscz
What You’re Made Of – Même Si (Lucie Silvas – Grégory Lemarchal
What’s That Sound An Introduction To Rock And Its History By John Covach And Andrew Flory (Book) <img src="https://sheetmusiclibrary.website/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Yugo-Kanno-Il-Vento-Doro-Golden-Wind-212x300.jpg" alt="sheet music download" width="212" height="300" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-45541" />
When A Man Loves A Woman Calvin Lewis & Andrew Wright free sheet music & scores pdf
When Almonds Blossomed – Giya Kancheli When Almonds Blossomed – Giya Kancheli-1
When Almonds Blossomed (Musescore File).mscz
When I Fall In Love – Victor Young (Bill Evans Ver.) (Musescore File).mscz
When I fall in love Bill Evans version When I fall in love Bill Evans version
When I’m Sixty-Four (Beatles)
When Lights Are Low (Benny Carter) As Played By Miles Davis (Musescore File).mscz
When The Saints Go Marchin In – Gospel Traditional Folk song (Piano solo with Lyrics) When The Saints Go Marchin In – Gospel Traditional Folk song (Piano solo with Lyrics) SAMPLE
When The Saints Go Marching In – Fun piano arrangement When The Saints Go Marching In – Fun piano arrangement
When you told me you loved me (Jessica Simpson)
When You Wish Upon A Star (Musescore File).mscz
When You Wish Upon A Star (From The Film Pinocchio) Easy Piano Solo Arr. Sheet Music (Musescore File).mscz
When You Wish Upon A Star (Leigh Harline and Ned Washington) from Pinocchio Jazz Piano Solo arr. sheet music When You Wish Upon A Star (Leigh Harline and Ned Washington) from Pinocchio Jazz Piano Solo arr. sheet music
When You Wish Upon A Star (Solo Piano Arr ) David Dinh partitions gratuites
When You’re Gone (Avril Lavigne)
When You’re Smilling (Musescore File).mscz
Where have all the-flowers gone (guitar & voice) Where-have-all-the-flowers-gone (guitar & voice)
While your lips are still red (Nightwish)
Whistling away the dark (Darling Lili OST) Henry Mancini
White Album 2 Ending 3 Sayonara No Koto free sheet music & pdf scores download
White Christmas -Irving Berlin – Piano sheet music
White Christmas Irving Berlin (Musescore File).mscz
White Christmas Medley (Liberace)
White skin like the moon (Jane Eyre 2011 OST) Dario Marianelli
Whitesnake – Here I Go Again free sheet music download
partitions gratuites Noten spartiti
Whitesnake Guitar Collection with TABs sheet music partitura partition noten spartiti Whitesnake Guitar Collection with TABs
Whitesnake Is This Love Piano Vocal Guitar Chords Whitesnake Is This Love Piano Vocal Guitar Chords
Whitney Houston – Jesus Loves Me Sheet Music free sheet music download
Whitney Houston The Best Of free sheet music & scores pdf download Whitney Houston, The Best Of
Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You
Whitney Houston – It’s Easy To Play Whitney Houston Whitney Houston – It’s Easy To Play Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston – Saving All My Love For You
Whitney Houston – The Greatest Hits sheet music Whitney – The Greatest Hits
Whitney Houston – The Greatest Love Of All
Whitney Houston I will always love you Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You
Whitney Houston My Love Is Your Love free sheet music & score pdf Whitney Houston My Love Is Your Love
Who wants to live forever (Queen)
Whole New World Sheet Music, A – Alan Menken Noten sheet music score partitura partition
Why Jazz? A Concise Guide – Kevin Whitehead (book) free sheet music & pdf scores download
Wicked The Musical Sheet Music Full song Book Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz free sheet music & scores pdf Wicked the musical contentsWicked The Musical Sheet Music Full Book
Wieck – Piano Studies
Wiklund Adolf Fran Mitt Fonster (From my Window) Piano Solo sheet music partitura partition noten spartiti
Wild – Fantasy On Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess Wild Fantasy On Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess
Wild Gershwin Seven Virtuoso Etudes Wild Gershwin Seven Virtuoso Etudes
Wild, Earl – Gershwin Étude No. 4 based on Embraceable You Piano Wild, Earl – Gershwin Etude No. 4 based on Embraceable You Piano
Wilde Theme (Debbie Wiseman)
Wilhelm Kempff Musik Des Barock Und Rokoko – Nr. 13 Menuett G-Moll G.F. Händel (Musescore File).mscz

When Loussier began applying jazz improvisation and swing to Johann Sebastian Bach’s exquisite symmetries, some jazz pundits and fans dismissed it as a betrayal of an African-American music’s expressive earthiness and blues roots, aimed at an audience that preferred its jazz pretty rather than passionate. And from the classical angle, observers were liable to perceive the young Frenchman’s work as little short of vandalism.

The New York Times critic John Rockwell’s review of a Loussier concert at Carnegie Hall in 1975 reflected that distaste when he proclaimed: “There is a certain sort of sensibility that is actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularising’ Bach – or any classical composer, for that matter. This listener’s sensibility is one of those, and so he found the Tuesday evening performance at a sparsely attended Carnegie Hall by the Jacques Loussier Trio tiresome and offensive.”

Nonetheless, the success of concerts and recordings by Loussier and his Play Bach trio (originally formed with the eminent Paris jazz sidemen Pierre Michelot on bass and Christian Garros on drums) took off almost overnight from the group’s first appearances in 1959 – shifting millions of Play Bach recordings in the almost two-decade life of the original band.

The group’s suitably chilled-out, languidly hip treatment of Bach’s Air on the G String famously accompanied the Hamlet cigar company’s TV advertising from 1962, with cinema versions finally being banned at the end of the century, though these soundtracks did not include Michelot’s subsequent driving bass-walk and Loussier’s freewheeling improv theme-stretches.

Loussier, however, was no one-trick populist who had chanced on a hit formula and milked it. A piano virtuoso from early childhood, he attended the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris from his mid-teens under a celebrated mentor – the classical pianist and educator Yves Nat – travelled in the Middle East and Latin America absorbing musical ideas in his early 20s, and composed scores for more than 60 films and TV shows. There was also the tireless touring of the Play Bach trio – and after its breakup, he worked on both acoustic and electronic projects at his own Studio Miraval in Provence.

Born in Angers, in western France, Loussier began piano lessons at the age of 10, and within a year was fascinated by the music of Bach. When he heard a piece from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena at 11, he took to playing it incessantly. “I was studying this piece and I just fell in love with it,” Loussier told an interviewer in 2003. “Then I found I loved to play the music, but add my own notes, expanding the harmonies and playing around with that music.”

In this, as Loussier was later to observe, he was not subverting Bach but paying his respects to an improvising tradition to which the composer also belonged, even if classical music’s subsequent assumptions preferred to bury that unruly element.

Loussier’s potential had been brought to Nat’s attention when he was 13, and Nat supplied him with practice projects that the boy would visit Paris every three months to demonstrate. At 16 he entered the conservatoire, financing his courses by playing jazz in the city’s bars.

In the mid-1950s Loussier then took off on his travels, which included Cuba, where he stayed for a year. Back home, he found work as an accompanist, to the singer and actor Catherine Sauvage and Charles Aznavour.

Loussier later recalled that in 1959 he had told Decca Records that he was a classical pianist and they said they already had plenty. Then he said he was a jazz pianist and they said they had plenty of those, too. “Finally I started to play some Bach with my improvisations and they said, ‘What is that? Why don’t we make a record of that?’ I was still doing it out of fun. I never thought the public would like it. I was wrong.”

With Michelot and Garros, and with the American chamber-musical Modern Jazz Quartet as a significant and celebrated inspiration, the Play Bach trio made four hugely successful Decca albums between 1960 and 1963, launched a performance schedule rarely numbering fewer than 150 shows a year worldwide, and expanded the repertoire to include double-tracked recordings of Loussier parts on organ and piano, and arrangements of Bach concertos.

In the midst of it all, Loussier was also a sought-after composer for film and TV. In 1978, weary of travelling, he wound the trio up and retired to Studio Miraval to explore composition more deeply, experiment with electronics and studio techniques, and play host and offer recording time to visiting rock stars including Pink Floyd, AC/DC and Sade.

He wrote the full-scale symphony Lumières (with the countertenor James Bowman, soprano Deborah Rees and a rock rhythm section on its Paris premiere), concertos for trumpet and violin, strings suites, a ballet score and the crossover fusion works Pulsion, Pagan Moon, and Pulsion Sous la Mer.

But Bach’s 1985 tercentenary had already tempted Loussier back to the piano stool. With the jazz/classical bassist Vincent Charbonnier, followed after illness in the 90s by the comparably virtuosic Benoit Dunoyer de Segonzac and the percussionist André Arpino, Loussier formed a more broadminded, genre-fluid and technically sophisticated version of the Play Bach trio, which if anything amplified just how creatively musical his original vision had been.

Recording for Telarc from 1996, Loussier returned to his beloved Bach, explored Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in improv conversations with Charbonnier and Arpino, with an affectionate nod to the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django (1997), and Satie, with De Segonzac and Arpino (1998).

Interpretations of Ravel, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin followed (with the last-named occasioning Loussier’s first solo piano album in his 70th birthday year, on which he breezily threw flamenco, gospel, calypso and stride-piano into the mix), and ambitious Bach homages taking on the Goldberg Variations and the Brandenburg Concertos.

In 2002, the pianist’s life took an unlikely turn when he embarked on a lawsuit against the rapper Eminem for allegedly stealing hooks from Pulsion for the track Kill You from the Marshall Mathers LP – a confrontation eventually settled out of court. In a conversation that year with the writer Sholto Byrnes, Loussier seemed mainly miffed that the Americans had not asked him first, and typically claimed: “I like good music whatever it is.” He later registered an interest in Eminem’s music.

Jazz reference books have not been so generous to Loussier, but, a true jazz improviser rather than an embellisher of the classics, he sidelined the snobberies from both sides in his early years. He paid tribute to the composers he loved with unmistakable and expert devotion, performing long enough to see his inclusive vision of a music with far fewer borders come to pass.

Best Sheet Music download from our Library.

sheet music library

It’s nice to meet you.

Sign up to receive our new posts in your inbox.

This field is required.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.