Jacques Loussier is famous for the immensely popular jazz versions of compositions by J.S. Bach that he performs with his trio. This recording is the first ever of the pianist making a solo appearance. Loussier played interpretations of music by Bach, Vivaldi and Schumann in the intimate surroundings of the Subway jazz club in Cologne.

Born in 1934 in north-west France, Jacques Loussier seemed set on a career as a concert pianist when he entered Paris Conservatoire at 16. But Loussier loved be-bop as much as baroque, and cool-jazz as much as classical, and developed a unique blend of the two - this in an era when words such as 'fusion' and 'crossover' were more familiar to nuclear physicists and people on rural station platforms than music marketeers.

Loussier's gently swinging arrangements of Bach (very familiar to British TV audiences of recent decades as the music for the Hamlet cigars adverts) made him an international celebrity in the early 1960s, and he has continued to mingle styles ever since.

This performance from Cologne sees Loussier applying his deceptively laid-back style to one of the world's most recorded pieces of classical music - Spring and Summer from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons - infusing it with a new freshness and vigour, showing both in a new light.