Jacques Loussier

Jacques Loussier spent much of his career proving that Bach could swing without being flattened into a jazz standard. His Play Bach idea took off after Decca had shown little interest in him as either a classical or jazz pianist: he played Bach with his own improvisations, and the label suddenly heard something it wanted to record. Over the next half-century he kept testing the idea on composers from Handel and Mozart to Satie and Debussy.