Swinging Bach: Bobby McFerrin and Guests.(Video recording review)

Swinging Bach: Bobby McFerrin and Guests. DVD. Presented by Nina Ruge and Alan Bangs. With Bobby McFerrin, Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, Jacques Loussier Trio, King's Singers, German Brass, Jiri Stivin and Collegium Quodlibet, Turtle Island String Quartet, Quintessence Saxophone Quintet, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Christian Gansch. Leipzig, Germany: EuroArts Music International, 2000. 2050406. $19.99.

Crossover. The very word strikes a range of emotions from disgust to greed to benign satisfaction to curiosity and back to horror on the part of the music-buying public. Readers will recognize where they fit into this continuum. Those who look down their noses at music that takes from a variety of traditions and makes something else neglect centuries of musicians and composers doing the same thing. Today's so-called "crossover" music (which can trace its history back to any vernacular musician appropriating melodies by composers of art-with-a-capital-A music) is enjoyed by millions who simply enjoy music, and yet is reviled by those for whom classical, jazz, or a particular kind of ethnic music is their primary if not sole musical pleasure.

The concert under consideration here was held in Leipzig in 2000, part of the "24 Hour Bach" celebrations commemorating the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. This was an outdoor concert in the Marketplatz using several stages, plus a balcony for the remarkable German Brass. Thousands of appreciative people crowded the plaza despite rain throughout much of the evening, providing a palpable energy. Unfortunately the weather seemed to wreak havoc with some of the intonation, particularly that of the Quintessence Saxophone Quintet. Not everything on the concert was of the crossover variety, but everything was based at least in part on the music of Bach, who of course spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in ...