Debussy’s Prléudes for Piano have perplexed and delighted generations of music lovers. Each prelude unravels like an enigma, ultimately unknowable and yetbursting with beauty and magic.

On Impressions of Debussy , jazz pianist Jeremy Siskind and saxophonist Andrew Rathbun combine with classical pianist Lori Sims to reimagine these musicalenigmas with spontaneity, exoticism, and virtuosity, giving a fresh look to these well loved master works.

Premiered at the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in 2016, Siskind and Rathbun’s newjazz-influenced arrangements of the Preludes toy with standard notions of Debussy’smusic in terms of form, pianism, and harmony, while honoring the crystalline and quirkycompositions of the French visionary. In fact, many Debussy pieces lend themselves tojazz – here, “Minstrels” gets a stride piano treatment a la Thelonious Monk, “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” is played as a lush ballad, and “Delphic Dancers” hints at bossanova. Throughout it all, the listener can gain new appreciation for the flexibility ofDebussy’s music and marvel at the improvisational adroitness Siskind and Rathbun put on display.

Pianist Sims is interwoven with these bold new takes, but her contribution isn’tless revelatory. A winner of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, a cowinnerof the Felix Bartholdy-Mendelssohn Competition, and the American PianistsAssociation Competition, Sims has plenty of technique and dynamicism at her disposal.This recording, however, shows her as a master of color and light, bringing humor,virtuosity, and wisdom to the preludes. She remarks in the liner notes that Symbolists,like Debussy, believed that “meaning would emerge [from sounds and thesubconscious] rather than explicitly described,” and Sims plays with the patience of that understanding.

Listeners to Impressions of Debussy will leave with a refreshed look at thePreludes. Rathbun, Siskind, and Sims have helped to welcome Debussy into the 21st century.