The neon sign at the front of the club trumpeted ‘Jazz Corner of the World’. This was Birdland, the Bayreuth of bebop, the most famous jazz venue in New York City, in easily the most famous jazz city on the planet. Friedrich Gulda would – like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday before him – have been greeted at the door by Pee Wee Marquette, the club’s mythic master of ceremonies – a tuxedoed four-foot midget whose gender remains a matter of conjecture to this day. And as Gulda mounted the bandstand (in a foggy basement where cash registers trilled like mechanistic mezzos), and kicked off modern jazz classics like ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and ‘Bernie’s Tune’, his persona as a classical pianist who had recently recorded Beethoven with Karl Böhm and Chopin with Adrian Boult apparently counted for very little.

‘I am the most important creative Viennese musician of the second half of our century,’ was Gulda’s own stark assessment – delivered in a letter to a doubting critic – of his qualities as pianist, jazz improviser and composer. Self-confidence was never a problem, clearly; but that a pianist who had built his reputation as an interpreter of Bach and Beethoven could in a flash decide to become a jazz pianist and, in 1956, persuade jazz impresario John Hammond, who managed Count Basie and Benny Goodman, to swing him a gig testifies to levels of chutzpah that tipped resolutely into the red. And the live recording that was cut that evening at Birdland shows Gulda playing immaculate jazz time, his ear cocked towards the keyboard style of Bud Powell – delivering more than convincingly on his high opinion of himself.

But 15 years after his actual death in 2000 (in 1999 he faked death, got high on the laudatory obituaries, then staged a triumphant resurrection concert), what to say about his legacy? So much of what Gulda advocated – the relentless two-way traffic between classical music and jazz, concerts that might open with Viennese waltzes or Mozart sonatas and end with jazz, or, in his later years, a set of glitterball Techno collaborating with DJ Vertigo and twerking dancing girls – makes viewing him as a precursor of current crossover culture tempting. But I’m not sure that the Gulda project was ever about mashing jazz into classical music, governed by some nebulous belief that genre categories only ever existed to be dismantled. On the contrary: playing across styles sincerely and with such technical élan reasserted the importance of genre as musical and cultural identity.

Born in Vienna in May 1930, Gulda made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1950 following an impressive sweep of competition wins. Received wisdom at this early stage of his career supposed that his pianism was rooted in Backhaus and Schnabel. His Beethoven sonata cycle recorded between 1953 and 1957 has familiar fingerprints. This is ‘hot’ Beethoven, Gulda’s peppery touch and rhythmic groove owing something to the objective approach of Backhaus while feeling for terrain that Gulda could call his own; but peak Gulda/Beethoven arrived with the piledriver momentum and granular touch of his 1967 cycle.

He loved the music, but his disillusionment with the culture that surrounded classical music became total. Discovering jazz and then taking an active performance role in the music – even going as far as to master the baritone saxophone – changed things; ‘The rhythmic drive, the risk,’ he would say, ‘(was) the absolute contrast to the pale, academic approach I had been taught.’ And it all became jazz as attitude. His 1960s Waldstein Sonata comes with an improvisational flow that utterly overhauls, some would say for the worse, Beethoven’s tempo scheme; the opening movement of the Moonlight Sonata is staged with a freeform rubato that, for me, evokes Thelonious Monk in ballad mode.

For all his worthy efforts, Gulda landed himself with the moniker ‘the terrorist pianist’, unfairly implying that his aim was to destroy, when, of course, he was motivated by cooking up fresh ideas to bring to the table. His proto-Bono mode of dress and jazzman’s sense of programming (often to have no programme, deciding what to play in the moment, segueing from a Mozart sonata into free improvisation; or inviting Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea to share the spotlight) certainly put the jazz cat among the purist classical pigeons. But the urgent structural clarity of Gulda’s early 1970s Bach Das wohltemperirte Clavier, or his rhythmically alert and determinately non-stuffy Mozart piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic under Abbado, is the work of an artist entirely sure of his vision, challenging us to think again at the stylistic exclusion zones we place around music.

Key recording

Mozart Concerto No 20, K466 (from ‘The Mozart Tapes – Concertos and Sonatas’)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Claudio Abbado

(DG)