Classical Soul, Vol. 1

Two worlds mingle on Classical Soul, where Alexis Ffrench breathes his trademark classical grace into some of the great soul hits he grew up with. The pianist dovetails arrangements of these classics, by Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Bill Withers among others, with a selection of his own music. The album juxtaposes solo tracks with moments where the piano is carried aloft by Ffrench’s often breathtakingly beautiful string accompaniments. The album was recorded at a number of locations including Brad Pitt’s studio at the Miraval estate in Provence and Abbey Road Studios in London—as a result, Ffrench has achieved a sound that’s simultaneously polished yet completely personal. “For me, this album is all about the music that I love,” Ffrench tells Apple Music Classical. “I really wanted to go back to my earliest days of coming to know music, or imagining music, and being part of that story when I was about four or five years old.” There’s perhaps even a Proustian element to Classical Soul, an attempt to bring back to life the complex associations these songs inspired in him. “I wanted to recreate this ‘inner symphony’, those feelings that I felt back then,” he explains, “born from the echoes of those soul classics, but reframed through this wellspring of hopefully timeless melody and tethered to my classical story.” On the surface, Ffrench’s classical story reads like any other gifted musician’s: organist at the local church in Surrey, England, he went on to study at the Royal Academy, the Purcell School and the Guildhall School of Music. But while classical music formed the foundations of his training, Ffrench harboured an equal passion for soul—Mozart and Bach on equal terms with Stevie Wonder and Jodi Mathis. Roberta Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly” inspires in him as much feeling and polish as when he takes on the famous motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in “Fate”, featuring beatbox from Kevin Olusola alongside members of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s string section. Each track on Classical Soul comes from a different time and creative impulse. “Soar” grew out Ffrench’s desire to write “a story of affirmation and celebration” for the Olympics: the cross-cultural “triple concerto” features Ffrench on piano, vocals from Congolese singer-songwriter Fally Ipupa, and Olusola on cello—plus gospel choir. The simple “Sö” was inspired by the made-up word of the title, which expresses “a kind of fragile beauty”. For the opening track, “The Way It Was”, meanwhile, Ffrench took himself to St Andrews, “a place of peace and tranquillity”, to record his piano improvisations. “I wanted to capture my true feelings in the moment,” he says.