Gwilym Simcock and Yuri Goloubev, The Forge

A classically trained pianist with a devastatingly fluent technique, Gwilym Simcock fell in love with jazz as a teenager, and has worked ever since on music that combines the strengths of both traditions. The crossover genre that he has in many ways pioneered in Britain (with American players Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, and the German Michael Wollny, working in a similar vein), refreshes the the compositional rigour of the classical tradition with some of the immediacy and improvisational freedom of jazz. 

Russian bassist Yuri Goloubev, Simcock’s partner for this concert (and the album they’re launching), has a similar musical background, with a stellar classical training and virtuosic technique. His fingered playing is by turns subtle and finger-smoulderingly agile, while with the bow he draws a sumptuously smooth tone from an instrument that can sometimes be the elephant of the orchestra. The two have played together for many years, and their rapport is more than telepathic: they are like the right and left hand of a pianist.

The music on this new album draws on the history and melody of the European classical tradition, though the style of performance is derived mainly from jazz. Fragments of classical melody are massaged, pummeled, flung between performers: imagine the ideal fusion of Brahms and Mingus. In the preview tracks released so far, piano and bass lilt alternately like a raft in a gentle swell, while a delicate pastoral melody floats through spacious pools of reflectiveness. 

Some crossover work can join fundamentally incompatible instrument sounds; it helps here that piano and double bass work so well together in both jazz and classical idioms. The album being launched at this event has already begun to accrue wondrous reviews. Schloss Elmau – where this album and Simcock’s previous solo album, Good Days at Schloss Elmau, were recorded – is a glorious Bavarian cultural hideaway, with its own concert hall, deep within a nature reserve. It takes a leap of imagination to move there from the gritty streets of Camden, but if anything can move you there, this piece can.