Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Blindfold Test: Buster Williams
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Bach improvisers Alan Ferber (left), Jody Redhage Ferber and Mark Ferber.
(Photo: Courtesy East Central College)Confluence turns out to be a fatefully apt and multilayered concept and title for the new album released by the Ferbers on Scarlet Tree Records. For starters, said Ferbers are twin brothers Alan and Mark, the trombone-and-drum siblings who have been jazz scene mainstays for years, and Alan’s cellist wife Jody Redhage Ferber. Stylistically speaking, the confluence factor concerns a creatively devised and vibrant crosstalk between jazz and classical chamber music traditions — specifically, the Baroque grand master J.S. Bach.
Many a jazz-meets-classical hybrid has been attempted over the years, and not all have worked out in the translation. Mark Confluence as a success story in progress with family bonding, braving new musical challenges and COVID-lockdown woodshedding all in the mix.
As the classically trained Jody noted, “This collaborative album was very long in the making. As twins who started playing their instruments as pre-teens, Alan and Mark have been collaborating most of their lives, and Alan and I first began playing Telemann and Mozart duets together 20 years ago, as neighbors in Brooklyn.”
The collaboration became more serious, and official when Jody and Mark played on Alan’s 2010 album Chamber Songs and Alan joined Jody on her 2013 Rose & The Nightingale album Spirit Of The Garden. A bonafide working duo solidified after they played together at the 2017 Salzburg Jazz Festival.
By now married with a son, the pair got to work. “After our toddler’s bedtime,” Jody said, “we workshopped stacks of potential tunes, pulling not only from our originals, but also tunes from various projects of different genres on which we had been side musicians — discovering and developing tunes that held potential to be musically compelling for this oddball instrumentation.”
J.S. Bach’s 300th birthday was a catalyst driving them toward the master’s oeuvre — especially the landmark Cello Suites. Bach, Jody said, “pushed the collaboration in a new direction, when we were tasked with reimagining Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 in C Major for duo, in which we teased apart this seminal work, infused improvisatory elements and reworked the baroque dance movements with playfully crooked asymmetrical dance meters from Eastern Europe and lively cross-rhythms from the Afro-Cuban tradition.”
Alan pointed out that “since Jody comes largely from a classical background, and I come from a jazz background, we are always looking for common ground if we want to play together. For us, Bach’s music served as a good starting point as the music lends itself well to both ensemble playing and improvisation. Beyond that, we looked for repertoire that shared these qualities — well-written melody and countermelody that encourages interplay between two linear instruments.
“Bach’s music is the gold standard of musical composition so it makes perfect sense that it is so stylistically malleable,” Alan continued. “It just seems to work in any frame. Bach was known to be a virtuosic improviser himself, so I would imagine that for those lucky enough to have heard him live, it would, at times, have been hard to discern the difference between what was previously composed and what was being composed on the spot.”
The influence of blending Bach with contemporary music by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga, a formative hero of Jody’s, fed into the couple’s conceptualization process. “In a way,” Alan remarked, “Confluence is our exploration of a similar format in a chamber jazz style.” The Ferbers also join a sizable roster of famed jazz artists who have been drawn to Bach’s work, including Dave Brubeck, Keith Jarrett, Lee Konitz and Brad Mehldau. As Alan commented, “So many artists have explored this rich terrain in projects combining Bach roots and modern improvisation.”
An auspicious suite of this new body of jazz-classical material premiered at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, but just on the brink of the 2020 pandemic lockdown. “With the pandemic extending long past what was originally expected,” Jody said, “the silver lining that we could play chamber music together at home as a family was the impetus for further tinkering with the Bach, leading us to also include Alan’s twin, Mark, on drums. We liked the result so much that we decided to record the Bach, along with a set of complementary pieces.”
The long-honed brotherly empathy of the twins is a bold feature of this trio. Alan notes that Mark “plays with a dynamic sensitivity that always supports and never overwhelms the other instruments. The addition of Mark certainly accentuates the dance elements of the movements and allows for more freedom of expression by Jody and me.”
Interwoven into the Bach-oriented fabric of the album are arrangements of tunes by McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans and Kenny Wheeler with cameo extra-trio contributions by pianist Adam Maness, saxophonist Chris Cheek and guitarist Matt Sewell. All the musicians were sharing St. Louis as a homebase at the time of the recording.
Confluence is being released on the Scarlet Tree label, run by Jody. She explained that the label’s aim is “to support the evolution of chamber music and jazz improvisation, and the goal going forward is to be a home for compelling projects which braid together artists coming from these backgrounds, pushing more ‘orchestral’ instruments into jazz contexts, and more classical musicians into improvisation.
“In a way, it’s also drawing a circle back 300, 400 years to when improvisation was an integral part of classical music. The overarching goal is to center the musicians in a creative space of personal expression requiring the mindfulness of staying in the moment and reacting like an improviser — rather than being glued to a compositional plan from the page. When musicians are open, magic can really happen, and I love seeing the elan of musicians when they step outside their comfort zone and collaborate with people from outside of their stylistic silo.”
The Ferbers continue to evolve the project, and the innate challenge remains. “We have to be musical Olympians to have our chops in shape to perform this music,” Jody said. “We’ve created a project that forces us to stay sharp in our performance and chamber skills, and is also a blast to perform live.” DB
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