About

I’ve always been surprised that there wasn’t already a website dedicated to jazzed-up classical music! After all, jazz musicians have been quoting from, improvising on and sometimes outright plundering classical music for generations. Yet trying to explore this music can feel like wandering through a tumbleweed-strewn ghost town... you might stumble across a half-answered Reddit question or an isolated album review – and there’s only so far that Googling ‘jazz’ along with the name of your favourite composer will take you!

Jazzed Up Classical is my attempt to change this and make all this music much easier for other people to discover: a dedicated home for jazz transformations of classical music. Somewhere you can browse the catalogue by classical composer or jazz musician, compare the jazz recordings with their classical originals and hopefully discover a huge amount of tasty music you never knew existed. And as a very welcome bonus, I finally have my own collection properly organised in exactly the way I always wanted, instead of relying on my mess of Spotify playlists!

The basic idea is simple enough: there has to be an identifiable, pre-existing classical work, and what happens to it has to belong recognisably to the jazz world – through improvisation, harmony, phrasing, rhythm or the way jazz musicians pull the original material apart and rebuild it.

The catalogue brings together albums and individual recordings from across the history of the genre, paired side-by-side wherever possible with the classical works that inspired them. There are also reviews to help guide you to the most essential and enjoyable recordings.

If you’re learning the piano, my own videos and playlists on the Learn page may help you to get inside the harmony, voicings and improvisational language of jazz – in particular, my ongoing tutorial series built around The Jazz Piano Book, along with transcriptions, technique and practice. You can also hear my own jazzed-up classical arrangements on the homepage, if you’re curious to hear my particular take on this genre!

It’s important to remember that this music did not suddenly appear as a clever European crossover experiment in the 1950s. For many Black musicians in early twentieth-century America, careers in the classical concert world were severely restricted or closed to them altogether, regardless of their training or ability. Eddie South is one particularly notable example: a prodigiously gifted, classically trained violinist who turned to jazz because the classical career his talent should have made possible was simply unavailable to a Black musician.

Hazel Scott made ‘swinging the classics’ central to her art, while Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Nina Simone, Don Shirley and many others brought serious classical knowledge into music that crossed the supposedly firm boundary between the two worlds. Their individual stories are very different, and I don’t want to flatten them into one convenient explanation. But in some cases, jazz provided a professional space in which musicians could claim, explore and transform classical music when its own institutions would not make proper room for them.

Nor can all the hostility surrounding early jazzed-up classical music be understood as an argument about musical taste alone. Race was plainly part of what made this mixture seem so scandalous to some audiences and critics, and that racial context belongs within the story of the genre.

I remember realising very early on as a kid that a lot of people viewed classical music as quite a formal, stiff, disciplined thing, and I felt very passionately about expressing it in a much more rebellious way... as something with real ‘juice’ and enjoyment! And so I think it was inevitable that I’d end up open-minded about where the ‘barriers’ might be between classical music and other styles. But also, my Mum was a jazz singer, so I grew up surrounded by jazz as well as classical music – I’m sure this also had an influence. And then I really got into playing electric guitar at fifteen, which led me into rock, metal, improvisation, and jazz – and I’ve been musically restless ever since...

Those classical and jazz worlds now come together in my teaching at Heart of the Piano, where you can find details about my piano lessons and listen to the Heart of the Piano Podcast. Over on my YouTube channel, I share my jazz and classical piano tutorials, along with my own jazzed-up classical arrangements.