Jo-Yu Chen: Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More

Pianist Jo-Yu Chen's artistic mission can be described in her words: "When the music is right, it brings us back to the true essence of music, beyond labels and boundaries."

But a discussion of labels and boundaries is necessary when addressing her album Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More.

First, some background: Chen has established a top-level jazz career since moving from her native Taiwan to New York City at age 16 to study at Juilliard. She released her first album, Obsession (Sony Music) in 2011, followed by Incomplete Soul (Sony Music, 2012). Both are notable works, but a major artistic step forward came with the release of Stranger (Okeh, 2014), followed by Savage Beauty (Sony Music, 2019). These are more than notable; they are excellent—a pair of releases that moved jazz into the forefront. Boldness, brashness even, came into play. Her classical training slipped into the backseat with the shift of her desire to express herself without the restraints of labels and boundaries.

Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More is another shift, a deep look back at her beginning in her classical studies, colored with an intrepid assurance drawn from her work in the jazz world.

Classical music is cerebral; jazz is visceral. A broad general assertion, one with many exceptions on both sides of the semicolon, and one that does not speak to the countless grey areas (boundaries are not thin black lines), but also one with roots in the truth. The classical masterpieces that Chen explores here could easily suffer from a freezing in time, becoming relics offering no wiggle room, no veering from the written scores, no allowance of flexibility in the revisitations of the work. Chen and her trio mates—bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Tommy Crane—bring in the grey areas of jazz's visceralism and soulfulness. For those not steeped in the experience of classical music, this sound, on a blind listen—the Jo-Yu Chen Trio's take on the masters—might not even be recognized as works from the classical world, even though Chen displays a playful virtuosity almost beyond belief, accompanied by Tordini and Crane who are adept and condfident partners in bringing a gut level zest into the proceedings.

What is there ot say about the works of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky and Ravel that we find here? Their art is time-tested. They are recognised geniuses. And Chen? She is at the top of her game in this boundary-crossing, bursting-with-life effort—something of a genius herself in her spirited interpretations of music coming from the classical side of the porous musical boundary.

And the music—her musical embrace of the masters—reaches beyond the boundaries to sound right.

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