Alexander Scriabin's Ragtime Band

It’s 1915: The world in turmoil and at war. People everywhere have gone dancing mad. The transatlantic trade in musical styles continues unabated. In New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton's tinkering with ragtime and blues signals the dawn of a new creation: jazz! In New York, Russian émigré Irving Berlin is churning out hit after hit. In Paris, Debussy experiments with syncopation and jazz harmony, as the ‘cakewalk’ and tango fever sweep the French capital. In Moscow, the death of the great Russian piano-poet, mystic, synaesthete (look it up…I had to!) and monomaniac Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin was an eccentric Russian composer, virtuoso pianist and mystic. Best known for his piano works he was a fellow student of Rachmaninoff. He composed numerous symphonies and 10 sonatas as well as many short works. He was a small man, just over 5ft tall. He also had small hands, only just able to cover a 9th on the keyboard. He had an effeminate manner which he blamed on being brought up surrounded by women. He was also quite arrogant and bad mannered, an example of "Napoleon Complex" according to some. Mentally he was very eccentric. At times he thought he was God (being born on Christmas Day reinforced this delusion) and once he tried to walk on water on Lake Geneva and preached to the fishermen.

Independently of the Western modernists, Scriabin brought ‘chromatic harmony’ (similar usage in jazz) to a zenith of richness, complexity and emotional expression that he himself found frightening: he couldn't play his Sixth Sonata in public, finding it "nightmarish, murky, unclean, and mischievous". Scriabin wanted all of his pieces to transport his listeners to another realm; he knew he had to devise a new musical apparatus to do so. Scriabin's "mystic chord" (a specific voicing of the 7#11 chord, well known to any jazz musician worth his salt), was a collection of notes you hear at the start of a piece that floats "between consonance and dissonance" (very much like Thelonious Monk), meaning the whole work is suspended in a hyperreal realm of harmonic and expressive ambiguity. That combination of rigorous modernist exploration and tumultuous sensuality makes Scriabin one of the essential voices of the early 20th century.

Though he died just as jazz was being birthed and therefore didn’t hear Jazz as a music form, surprisingly his ideas appeared in jazz many years later. Inflections can be heard in Errol Garner’s style and in Tango music (‘Prelude for Left Hand Op. 9 no. 1); this was picked upon by Chic Corea in the 80’s (A minor Prelude Op. 11 no. 2 by the jazz giant Chick Corea review/listen) and more recently Corea has posted Youtube videos of his workshops based around his working of another of Scriabin’s works. This is where Dave Gordon got hooked on these ideas and took them a step forward in his 2015 project; bringing these musical strands together to create an amazing tapestry of music from boogie-woogie, tango and ‘choro’ rubbing shoulders with jazz interpretations of Scriabin's miniatures - his billets-doux to eternity - seen through the prism of popular music of the time.