Beethoven

Beethoven gives a jazz musician small ideas with enormous consequences: a four-note motif, a repeated rhythm, an ordinary waltz transformed through 33 variations. Variation was central to his craft, and it gives arrangers permission to worry at a theme, pull it apart and discover what else it can carry. Uri Caine’s period-instrument Diabelli Variations and Jon Batiste’s much freer response to the symphonies show how far apart the answers can be.