Way back in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Two Part Inventionsto serve as keyboard exercises for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Since then, Bach’s Inventions has become a rite of passage for generations of keyboard players. It’s an essential building block for millions of musicians as they refine their mastery of harmony, rhythm, and technique. It’s no exaggeration to say that much of our modern understanding of music is built upon these exercises.

300 years later, Dan Tepfer — ”a remarkable musician” (The Washington Post) with “a wide-open sensibility as tuned into Bach and Björk as to Monk and Wayne Shorter” (The New York Times) — has taken the architecture of these exercises and used it as a jumping-off point for a new project out March 17 on StorySound: Inventions / Reinventions, an album featuring performances of each of Bach’s beloved 15 Two Part Inventions interleaved in sequence with nine of Tepfer’s own free improvisations in the “missing” keys to create a new full, and fully transporting, 24-key cycle.