Artificial intelligence is taking over the world – unfortunately the world of music as well.
The internet is full of artificially generated nonsense: country outlaw Johnny Cash singing the ’90s Eurodance hit “Barbie Girl,” for example, or Frank Sinatra crooning “Gangsta’s Paradise.” And Black Sabbath, the heavy-metal pioneers led by the recently deceased Ozzy Osbourne, playing jazz … But hold on – there’s no algorithm at work here. This is the real, analog Adam Wakeman, longtime touring keyboardist for Black Sabbath as well as for Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band.
Back in 2013, Wakeman actually founded the side project Jazz Sabbath – a band that quite seriously answers the question: What would Black Sabbath sound like if they hadn’t helped create the genre of heavy metal, but played jazz arrangements instead? One acoustically impressive answer can be found on the band’s second album, Jazz Sabbath – Vol. 2.
It’s a high-quality, beautifully produced album – and also a special opportunity to once again pay tribute to the incomparable, one-of-a-kind Ozzy Osbourne.
The idea for the project was born late one night at a hotel bar during a Black Sabbath tour. A security guard asked Wakeman whether he could also play the band’s songs on the piano in the lobby. He could – and he did, playing until the hotel staff wanted to go home. Vol. 2 picks up right there and takes us back into the soundscape of that hotel lobby. The album feels like the musical accompaniment to a slowed-down evening in a stylish bar.
Right from the opening track – “Paranoid,” one of Black Sabbath’s best-known songs, originally of course sung by Ozzy Osbourne – you get swing, drive, tempo, and fun. These aren’t cheap copies of legendary songs. This is good jazz, played by one of the heavyweights of heavy-metal keyboards. The dark, heavy sounds of the originals become light and airy thanks to Wakeman’s delicate playing – especially once the horns come in, creating a surprisingly authentic New Orleans atmosphere.
Vol. 2 shows just how much more can be drawn out of Black Sabbath material. “Symptom of the Universe,” for instance, is originally a riff-driven, brutally hard piece of metal history. Here, wrapped in an acoustic sound, it suddenly sounds dreamy and melancholic, like something from the La La Land soundtrack. In addition to Wakeman, the mood is shaped by Jerry Meehan on bass and Ash Soan on drums. Meehan plays with Robbie Williams, while Soan has worked with artists such as Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, and Alicia Keys. On “Sabbra Cadabra,” for example, Soan casually opens with a 20-second drum solo before Wakeman interprets the familiar guitar riff on piano.
If the name Wakeman already raised an eyebrow: yes, the musicality and creativity are no accident. His father is Rick Wakeman, the influential keyboardist of the band Yes (“Owner of a Lonely Heart”) and a highly sought-after session musician who, among other things, contributed to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken.”
With Jazz Sabbath, son Adam has now created his own legend. The band’s performances are distinctly theatrical – in the literal sense of the word. For live shows, Adam Wakeman dons a gray wig and tells the story of the young musical prodigy Milton Keanes (played by Wakeman himself), whose song ideas were supposedly stolen by a metal band in the late 1960s. To support this fake backstory, the band’s releases are also available in mono editions and even on cassette. The whole thing is a perfectly produced joke that works extremely well.
And it pays off: Vol. 2 reached number one on the jazz download charts in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada in 2022. No AI-generated “Barbie Girl” by Johnny Cash has managed that yet. Thank goodness.
Jazz Sabbath – Jazz Sabbath Vol.2
Label: Blacklake
Format: LP, CD, Kassette, DL 16/44