Béla Bartók’s influence on jazz via folk-inspired rhythms and complex harmonic structures provided a blueprint for modern improvisation.
You can discern that sense of harmonic Innovation through his “axis system” of harmonic substitution.
Bartók used polymetric structures, asymmetric patterns and high energy that aligns with jazz.
His night music fed into Third Stream aesthetics – a term suggested by Gunther Schuller – and when you consider particularly on the European chamber jazz scene how much of this jazz classical hybrid is around at the moment the influence of composers like Bartók recurringly still counts.
Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs (ECM, 1984) were directly inspired by the études in Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.
And Germany born London scene pianist Bruno Heinen who has in the past been inspired by Stockhausen and Vivaldi on work that he splices with a voracious jazz appetite returns this spring with his band The W inspired by Book 6 of Mikrokosmos.
Their earlier album Portrait (Ubuntu, 2023) was a revelation. But The W enter another dimension entirely here that is just as stimulating.
On Heinen’s website there is a brief explanation as to the thinking.
“Bartók composed these books of short pieces as an educational tool to teach his own son at the piano. In this album, Bruno uses cells and ideas taken from book 6 of Bartók’s work, as well as lyrics in the form of quotes from Bartók himself, to create a new suite.”
I had a pre-release listen some time ago and returned again to it today. It is first class, dark and brooding, full of jazz-rock/classical/prog interest and dramatic intensity from Vogel particularly, the abstraction and detailed harmonic exposition is compelling.
If jaded and searching for inspiring new music it’s a pick-me-up.
German classical label TYXart Records are the issuing record company involved.
