“Swinging” Bach has a long and occasionally honourable pedigree, from Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach ensembles of the 1950s and ’60s, through the Modern Jazz Quartet and on to any number of current musicians whose opinions tend to start with “If Bach were alive today…”. Bill Dobbins gets as far as the third paragraph of his booklet note apologium before resorting to this lazy device, and continues, “he would certainly be involved in jazz, since jazz is the music of our time that combines a richly evocative chromatic musical language with the creative discipline of improvisation”. Well, yes, to a degree. However, there are any number of provincial church organists and composers writing and improvising to the highest level of their abilities, and I can’t help thinking it’s no less reasonable to say that Bach, transplanted two and a half centuries into his future, might well be ploughing much the same furrow, as (dis)content as he was in 18th-century Saxony and pulling down a reasonable living working for the greater glory of music, the church and God in some or other order of preference.

Dobbins is of course correct that Bach’s music and jazz styles share a rich chromatic language; but the irony of the situation is that in order to interpolate crunchy jazz chords into Bach’s choruses and arias, his important inner voices are often stripped out. Bach more than any composer conceived his music horizontally as well as vertically, which is to say that the forward-moving interaction between each “voice” is every bit as important as the way the chords stack up. To skew this fine balance in favour of the vertical is largely to negate the point and perfection of Bach’s music.

Which isn’t, however, to say that there isn’t a great deal that’s enjoyable in this re-imagining of the Christmas Oratorio. Viewed as an interpretation of one of Bach’s great vocal works, it may leave much to be desired; viewed as a performance by these particular musicians that takes Bach as a jumping-off point, it provides 100 minutes of musical fun.

The most effective moments, perhaps surprisingly, are the recitatives, with rippling guitar arpeggios underscoring sustained reeds and the pretty persuasive “Evangelist” of Philip Lawson. “Schlafe, mein Liebster” is rendered as a close-harmony sad ballad, while sharper characterisation is offered by the Latin-tinged rhythms of the contrapuntal “Lasset uns nun gehen gen Bethlehem”. The Swingle-ish sound of “Ich will nur dir zu Ehren leben” may be more of an acquired taste. Occasional forays into the soprano range were ill-advised. The musicians play as well as may be expected. The likes of Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Gardiner et al may be more revealing of the awesome mastery and mystery of Bach’s oratorio. Some documentation is a little slapdash: “Zewiter Teil”, anyone? Still, it’s close enough for jazz.