by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Christopher O’Riley is pretty excited that the Bad Plus are, like him, in this year’s Jazz Fest line-up. “I have a house in L.A., and they were playing at the Catalina, four nights, two sets a night. I caught every one of them.”

That revelation confirms the impression that O’Riley accepts no half measures in engaging music he appreciates. When he’s hooked, he’s hooked. “That’s kind of the thing, yeah. I should be a little more widely-listened, I guess.”

His humility is charming, but misplaced. His facility with classical music is matched by his informed assessment and intense appreciation of modern pop. Similarly to the Bad Plus, who give tunes by the Pixies and Black Sabbath complex and challenging jazz arrangements, he’s adapted Radiohead and Elliott Smith for solo classical piano (two albums of Yorke and co., one more recently of Smith’s songs). Amid his summer schedule of Shostakovich, Ravel and Mozart recitals, his Montreal shows will mix the two for four “decidedly different sets.”

O’Riley’s strategy for exploring contemporary pop’s classical possibilities is entirely intuitive. “Despite the fact that I’m not doing a record of theirs, there’s a tune of Radiohead’s I’m working on that I’m hoping I’ll be able to do by Montreal—it may or may not be ready in time—that they’re just now premiering on their tour, called ‘Videotape.’ That’s just to say, I work on whatever catches my fancy, and it happened to be a lot of Radiohead songs, initially, and then I got turned on to Elliott Smith. But even before that, I’d done a few Nick Drake songs.”

While O’Riley agrees that pronounced melancholy is a common factor between Smith, Drake and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, he’s more specific than that. “Radiohead and Elliott Smith have a commonality in the irony of their musical settings, much like Shostakovich had. A lot of his emotional and dramatic themes were sort of sub rosa, due to the fact that he was having to master irony in the wake of the Stalinist regime. You make the adaptation—it’s not direct expression, it’s indirect. And with Radiohead, you have for instance ‘No Surprises,’ an overtly pretty song which may or may not have suicidal overtones in terms of the lyrics. The one undercuts but also undermines the other—undermines, underlines.”

“With Drake, there are other things—the great jazz feel he had in his songwriting. The thing that totally sets him apart from Thom Yorke and Elliott Smith is his very subtle jazz phrasing. It’s not just his melodic writing, it’s the way he sings the melody that makes him an extraordinarily compelling musician.”

O’Riley’s also poked around at the odd Cocteau Twins or Tori Amos number as well. He doesn’t choose which artists to investigate, or when or how—they choose him. “I think it’s disingenuous to say, ‘Okay, now I’m going to do Nick Drake,’ or whatever. This Radiohead song is a perfect example. There are some Nick Drake arrangements that I’ve started on and I’m ready to go to the next level with one in particular, but then I heard this Radiohead song, and it just took over. That’s the way most of these arrangements take place.

“The only thing keeping me away from ‘Videotape’ is a lot of Shostakovich and Schumann.”

At Chapelle historique du Bon Pasteur on Sunday and Monday, July 2 and 3, 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., $22.50

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