Jo-Yu Chen, Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More Review

by Icrom Bigrad

On Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More, pianist Jo-Yu Chen extends her imagination to bridge genres, letting jazz and classical music drift. With her longtime trio, Chris Tordini on bass, Tommy Crane on drums, Chen reinterprets eight canonical classical works. She inhabits them. She listens for the echoes beneath the manuscript, the spontaneity behind the phrase, and invites listeners into that threshold where memory and creativity merge.

Each piece is less a transcription than a poetic dialogue across centuries, a constellation drawn not from staves and measures but from feeling and form, suspended in time and softened by dream.

Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More opens not with thunder but with a crescendo. Chen threads Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’s motif in a building storm before adding “Moonlight” through the jagged storm. What might have been a clash becomes a creative voice. The trio orbits the motif, in harmonic movement at first, building tension through layered voicings and rhythmic interplay. Each phrase lands with its own step in the direction of the combination of the two themes. One beckons mystery; the other pivots toward defiance. It’s Beethoven imagined, a reawakening, his architecture infused with the fluidity of jazz conversation.

A diaphanous ostinato dances just beneath the melody, giving this performance “Dance of the Reed Flutes” its translucent grace. Tordini lays the ground in murmuring patterns, while Crane paints the air with delicate brushwork. Chen’s phrasing recalls spun sugar, fragile yet deliberate, building the modal color with the melody leading to the release. The trio recreates Tchaikovsky’s dance, where each step stirs wind through the modal movements. There is rhythm, yes, but also harmonic movement in layers. Joy, but tinged with a kind of crystalline minor.

“Sonata No. 8, ‘Pathétique’ – 2nd Movement” has a beautiful use of space. An openness falls between the notes in a European jazz style. Alone at the piano, Chen becomes a vessel for what lies between the notes. Her touch is intimate, almost confessional. As the well-known melody emerges, reborn in suspended chords and adorning harmonies, one feels the centuries dissolve. She waits between phrases. She listens. Her re-harmonizations are not decorative, but reverent: a ballad of restraint, a meditation on time. You feel the spirit of Beethoven’s music, searching, tender, unguarded.

Tordini opens “Swan Lake,” gliding into the melody poised, shadowed, precise, the trio unfolds the theme. Crane’s brushwork feathers into the groove, and Chen answers with phrases that flutter, sway, and ultimately soar. The trio moves as a single breath, curving each section into a crescendo of a straight eight groove and letting the space between notes shimmer with its swing. Chen’s solo is inquisitive, teasing blues inflections and classical motifs into a lyrical ballet of its own. The performance sings with confidence, a reflection of the dance between the three players.

Chen approaches one of classical music’s most imposing themes, “Romeo and Juliet: Dance of the Knights,” with deference and curiosity. She finds the groove within the structures and bends it. By accenting tempo changes, the flow takes on new characters. Tordini’s bass solo has a new feel that builds to Chen’s march, a pulse that suggests funk more than formality. Crane’s drumming locks in beneath the piano’s taut voicings, and Tordini offers grounded, flexible support. The trio doesn’t strip away the weight of Prokofiev’s drama; they sculpt it differently. This is not Romeo at war, but Romeo wandering the city after dark, the rhythm of footsteps echoing unresolved thoughts of passion.

“Pictures at an Exhibition: The Old Castle” offers a slow-building waltz, cloaked in dusk. Tordini states the melody clearly, using a contemporary jazz perspective. Then Chen and Crane enter like mist curling around stone. The trio evokes not just a place, but a memory of a place, half-ruined, half-remembered. Harmonically, Chen uses tension and release to shape each turn, adding glimmers of modernism to Mussorgsky’s folk-infused lines. Her comping under Tordini’s lyrical solo is like light slipping through stained glass. Every note here seems to ask, “What once stood here?” And the answer is always a little different, a little more beautiful.

“Piano Concerto No. 2” is a new corridor of motion in the album’s flow. Chen’s interpretation doesn’t lean into the concerto’s virtuosity for its own sake. Instead, she redirects its angularity into the terrain of a smoky tango. The feel is seductive but edged with desire. The music is guided by Crane’s subtle metric shifts and Tordini underscoring the lines with a rhythmic width. Chen’s solo is impressive: tight, playful, yet layered with suspense. There’s an elegance in her command here, a confidence in letting the trio breathe while navigating Prokofiev’s thorny terrain with flair and finesse.

“Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte” reflects the trio’s craft in unfolding a mood with sounds. Ravel’s melody, already ghosted with nostalgia, becomes a vessel for Chen’s lyricism. Her harmonic palette glows, soft tensions and releases, lavender-tinged chords supporting long melodic lines that bend like willow branches into leaves of melodies. Crane’s brushes giving them shimmer. Tordini hums beneath it all. Together, they deliver a farewell that is not an ending but a gift of a mood.

Chen has made a nocturne in two dialects, spoken fluently, creatively, and with an unmistakable voice. For the listener, it offers new shapes for standard forms. Rendezvous: Jazz Meets Beethoven, Tchaikovsky & More is simply beautiful.