Ramsey Lewis Interprets The Beatles, Playing Solo On Posthumous ‘The Beatles Songbook’ (ALBUM REVIEW – Glide Magazine | CPT PPP Coverage

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Covering Beatles songs is certainly not new, not new to jazz, and not even new to the late Ramsey Lewis, who was during the mop head four’s heyday in the mid-sixties. Consider the many jazz artists that have covered the Liverpool boys, from Count Basie to George Benson to Grant Green to Wes Montgomery to McCoy Tyner to Lee Morgan.  Even in 2018 on Impressions of Pepper we heard from contemporary artists such as Shabaka Hutchings, Makaya McCraven, and Antonio Sanchez. We could go on for pages.

So, what’s the big deal about Ramsey Lewis’ The Beatles Songbook aside from the sentimentality of his recent passing?  It’s that it’s solo piano, something that Lewis rarely did until the onslaught of the pandemic offered little choice. So, we have Lewis in the most possible intimate setting for the first installment of his solo at home recordings, Volume One of The Saturday Salon Series to kick off 2023. These are the same monthly webcasts during the pandemic that Lewis dubbed “The Saturday Salon.” This writer also believes that the timing may just be related to recent double sets issued in late November from Ahmad Jamal, as the two pianists are often thought of in the same conversation. 

The quality of the recording is of ‘homemade’ style, with a single microphone in the piano, which adds to the warmth, as Lewis puts his own bluesy stamp on songs that most would not associate with bluesy tones or riffs such as “Blackbird” and “Golden Slumbers.” Surely “Hey Jude’ has those gospel and soulful roots as Wilson Pickett taught us long ago, yet Lewis finds his own reservoir of deep feelings in the tune. The NEA Jazz Master has long held a reputation for melody and his signature stately tempos. Among the many pianists, he may well be the most likely choice to be covering these tunes – he’s done it for more than fifty years. Yet, the solo presentation from the comfort of his own environs, seems to have inspired new harmonious colors and a penchant to draw almost equally on both his classical and gospel roots in an effort to breathe new emotion into these insanely familiar tunes. 

Lewis has through his career covered many more than just the dozen represented here but apparently, as he knew his days were numbered in September of 2022, he personally made these selections, which give them extra gravitas. They are lifted from the 2020 livestream.  The opener, “Here, There, and Everywhere” is a prime example of his classical colorings while “And I Love Her” sparkles with harmonies and further delving into the tune’s memorable four notes in the chorus. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is the only non-Beatles song, described by many as perhaps the best melody ever written, is a natural choice for the maestro. No track extends much beyond four minutes and all twelve combine for only thirty-seven minutes which means few tunes received any extended improvisation.  In fact, there are four – “Rocky Racoon” and “Yesterday” among them, where Lewis sticks to the melody without any real soloing. Two clear highlights are “A Hard Day’s Night” where he augments the bounce of the original and “Michelle” where he digs in to reveal the tune’s deeper emotional aspects.

As stated, this is Volume One, so we can expect to hear more posthumous releases from the iconic Ramsey Lewis and given his predilection toward popular music and his need to connect to audiences during the livestreams with familiar fare, expect more of that to follow as well.