A year ago last month, two DJs, some friends, and some innocent passersby would have been in attendance at The International, the bar and restaurant situated under the El along Front Street, in a zone where, more than most places, the sour past is meeting up with a sour future. But this was decidedly not that. This was an occasion for levity and curiosity alike: The International regularly features DJs (even in pandemic times, outside or online or any way they can) but they’d never before quite featured a set of selections quite like those at Bach 2 Bach. For as the invite indicated, this was to be Bach to Bach to Brahms to Stravinsky: All classical heroes, all vinyl, all night long. 

Ever since his emergence on the scene in the early 18th Century straight outta Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach — to say nothing of his canonical classical partners through the ages — has cast a wide influence, not just within classical music but over into the whole cloth of music and culture itself. This is the hypothesis that DJs Corey Duncan and Martin Khoa Sweeney set out to prove, and prove it they did. “[We play] all classical composers covered by rock/funk/jazz artists and such. I'd definitely say we focus real hard on Bach, because nobody gets covered nearly as much as he does and he translates so perfectly to many genres,” says Duncan. “But there's lots of Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel and other folks too. We mainly called it Bach2Bach because it was pretty catchy and let people know that it had something to do with classical music, which nothing at a bar ever typically would.”

On the resulting recording of their set, posted above, Bach and Co. aren’t everywhere in just classical and jazz, but they’re also, quite pleasinglyly, everywhere in crate-digging DJ culture — the set features Brian Auger, Jane Birkin, Attarazat Addahabia & Faradjallah, Bea Wain, Black Taffy and more. Together, they run the gamut of disco, funk, jazz, electronic and places beyond and in between. All rubbing elbows, and all strangely groovy.

And that’s what makes Bach 2 Bach so essential when you take it in as a mixtape — it is rigidity and ease in equal time, it is of the head and the heart together, it’s… got flow. If Johann himself were to somehow have appeared on the scene, Bill and Ted-style that day, what would he have made of it? Hard to say, but he did leave a clue: “To the glory of the most high God alone,” he once wrote in a book of his tunes, “and that my neighbour may be educated thereby.” 

In other words, “This is great. I’m Bach. We should listen to more Bach.”

– Joey Sweeney