Any jazz piano trio that chooses to take on the repertoire of Johann Sebastian Bach must surely know that ultimately their work will come up against the considerable output of pianist Jaques Loussier, whose trio with Pierre Michelot on bass and Christian Garros on drums made the idiom their own, both commercially and aesthetically, not least with the five volumes of the Play Bach series recorded between 1959 and 1965 for the Decca label. So maybe the time is right to revisit this concept – certainly the blind Welsh pianist Alec Templeton's arrangement of ‘Bach Goes to Town’ for the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1938 convincingly demonstrated Bach, even with his mathematical-like complexity, could swing. Perhaps unsurprisingly Ilg includes a performance of Bach's ‘Air on a G String,’ here titled ‘Air’, which British audiences will forever associate with the Loussier version that became known as ‘The Hamlet Theme’ – the soundtrack of one of the best remembered advertising campaigns for a tobacco product on television, lasting until a ban removed such commercials from our screens in 1991. Ilg also presents his versions of ‘Sicilienne in G Minor’ – ‘Siciliano’ – and ‘Sarabande’ (from ‘Partita No. 1 in B flat Major’) that Loussier had previously recorded. Comparisons, as they say, can be odious but here can serve to underline how the thematic unity and contrapuntal intricacy of Bach's music can easily swallow the identity of a pianist who sets out to ‘jazz’ Bach. Initially, this was the fate of Loussier himself on Play Bach No. 1, which was recorded in 1959. But by the time of Play Bach No. 4 from 1963 and Play Bach No. 5 and the live concert Play Bach aux Champs-Élysées, both from 1965, he had found freedom within Bach's forms that allowed him to express his own jazz identity and sensibility. However, on B-A-C-H – a one-off project that follows Ilg's versions of Verdi's Otello, Wagner's Parsifal and Beethoven's Mein Beethoven – pianist Rainer Böhm might bring a degree of animation and well-crafted musicianship to the task, but he does not succeed in finding a voice within the music in the way Loussier had done.