Dan Tepfer Follows His Widely Hailed 2011 Goldberg Variations /Variations Album of 2011 with Inventions / Reinventions, His Latest Bach Exploration in Interpretation and Improvisation Inventions / Reinventions, to be released by StorySound Records on March 17, 2023, presents Tepfer performing each of Bach’s beloved 15 Two Part Inventions interleaved in sequence by nine of his own free improvisations in the “missing” keys to create a new full, and fully transporting, 24-key cycle. “A pianist who combines superb technique with a complex set of impulses: He’s a deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown.” — The New York Times 300 years ago in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach initially composed his Two Part Inventions as keyboard exercises for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. While remaining essential studies for burgeoning musicians, these pieces have also long been beloved listening for generations of music lovers attuned to recordings by iconic pianists from Marcelle Meyer and Glenn Gould to András Schiff and Angela Hewitt. For pianist Dan Tepfer, J.S. Bach has been a lodestar ever since he first heard a Gould record as a small child, with Bach fitting naturally alongside such other early inspirations as Thelonious Monk and The Beatles. Although primarily known as a jazz pianist — the leader of his own dynamic trios, as well as a long-term collaborator with the likes of saxophone icon Lee Konitz — Tepfer earned global renown for his 2011 recording Goldberg Variations / Variations, an utterly unique venture that saw him play Bach’s Baroque masterpiece in full as well as improvise his own variations on the composer’s variations. That album made the Billboard classical chart while also garnering rave reviews, with Tepfer performing the evening-length work in top venues around the world. Now, Tepfer presents his second, completely distinct Bach exploration: the album Inventions / Reinventions, which features him playing Bach’s Inventions in 15 keys, as written, interleaved in chromatic sequence by nine of his own free improvisations in the “missing” keys to create a new full, and fully transporting, 24-key experience, a 55-minute mix of the timeless and the contemporary. Tepfer captured Inventions / Reinventions in nighttime recording sessions that he engineered himself in an intimate salon next door to the Paris apartment where he grew up. Tepfer was raised in a cultured home, with his mom a singer at the Paris Opera and his grandfather a West Coast jazz pianist. He began classical piano studies by age 6 at the Paris Conservatoire-Paul Dukas. But, bred to blend his right brain and left brain with rare parity, he took a circuitous route to his music career, first earning a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. After playing extensively on the jazz scene in college and even enjoying a brief stint as an opera conductor, he graduated in 2005 from Boston’s New England Conservatory, completing his masters under the guidance of Danilo Perez. The lauded recordings, prize-winning performances, adventurous collaborations and technological innovations that have followed underscore the fact that Tepfer is an uncommonly ambitious thinker, leading France’s Télérama to call him an artist “who refuses to set himself limits.” Explaining the fundamental differences between the Goldberg Variations / Variations project and his new Inventions / Reinventions album, Tepfer says, “they might seem similar at first glance, a combination of playing Bach and improvising, but the two albums involve dramatically different concepts. For the ‘Goldbergs,’ I was playing each of Bach’s variations as written and then would react to specific elements within his variations, always improvising inside the pre-existing frame that Bach had set up for himself.” The Inventions project is something else entirely. It’s about Bach’s music, but it’s also about free improvisation. Tepfer improvises the frame itself, albeit within a very specific conceit of his own devising, based on an insight into the narrative workings of the Bach. “What I realized in studying the Inventions is that Bach was using the classic three-act form that storytellers have employed since the ancient Greeks,” Tepfer continues. “In the various Inventions, the protagonist is some kind of musical idea, which is often, but not always, a melodic theme. In the first act, we meet our hero, the musical idea, in the home key, a place of security. Then, suddenly, our hero is thrust into a foreign environment, a new key. We understand intuitively that our hero is no longer safe, and we automatically wonder if they’ll make it back home. This is the start of the second act, and our concern for the hero is really the narrative key here, because we’re now invested in the outcome. But it’s not so simple to get back home. Our hero will face many trials on the way. The second act is a quest, where the hero goes on a wild harmonic adventure through foreign keys. Of course, we do make it back home by the third act. But we’ve grown and learned along the way. What’s amazing is that Bach does this all in just a couple of minutes. These pieces are totally fascinating in the way he’s conveying dense musical narrative in such a short amount of time.” “With the ‘Goldbergs,’ my improvisations were essentially playing over chord changes, which is what jazz musicians do every day,” Tepfer adds. “But with the Inventions, I’m reacting to something more abstract, to the way Bach engages with storytelling. The themes in my improvisations on this album are things that I’m coming up with in the moment. They’ll be different in every performance. And, to be clear, I’m not trying to sound like Bach when I’m improvising, not at all. I’m trying to use the fundamental mechanisms of tonal harmony as Bach did, but to use them in free improvisation. The Inventions / Reinventions project, on a surface level, may be less epic than the Goldberg Variations / Variations, but it’s far more demanding for me as an improviser, because I’m creating all my improvisations from scratch. Another thing to note is that, as far as Bach’s music goes, his Inventions are far humbler than the Goldberg Variations. For me, that makes Bach’s Inventions a beautiful example of the difference between surface and subsurface, in that they seem like modest pieces on the surface, but the mechanism underneath is so powerful. And that’s what this project is all about: the subsurface of Bach, the mechanisms at play deep below.” Tepfer is no stranger to free improvisation. In 2009, he released the solo album Twelve Free Improvisations in Twelve Keys. He has also performed free improv on stage with drummer Leon Parker, and the pianist’s two duo albums with Lee Konitz consisted mostly of free improvisation. Yet even with all of that, the ever-modest Tepfer felt that he had still “just been following my nose” in this area. Now, thanks to his breakthrough via Bach’s Inventions, and the composer’s method of musical storytelling via tonal harmony, Tepfer has discovered a surer path for creating what he describes as “convincing harmonic adventures in real time — freely and spontaneously, with no preconceptions.” Playing Bach alongside his own free improvisations is a meditative journey for Tepfer, one that he hopes listeners will join him on. Another thing he hopes people who listen to Inventions / Reinventions sense is “a continuity of music experience,” he says. “As someone who has spent his whole life in music, these two genres — classical and jazz, which most consider to be so different — are two sides of the same coin to me. There may be different veneers on the surface, but the underlying mechanisms of melody, harmony and rhythm are very similar. When people who listen to the album hear music that was composed 300 years ago juxtaposed with music that was just improvised in the 21st century, I hope they feel the kinship between the two. Ultimately, to me, that Duke Ellington quote about how there are just two kinds of music, ‘the good kind and the other kind,’ rings true.”