Jazz Sabbath

Milton Keanes, pianist for the British trio Jazz Sabbath, first emerged in early 2020 claiming that his group’s lost 1960s album had been plagiarized by heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath. In truth, Keanes is the alias of Adam Wakeman, longtime keyboardist for Ozzy Osbourne, and he came up with the idea for his fictional jazz combo while on a tour with Black Sabbath. The project’s debut, a collection of Black Sabbath songs arranged for a jazz piano trio, appeared in 2020, followed by a second volume in 2022.
In 2013, Adam Wakeman — son of legendary Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman — was on a European tour supplying the off-stage keyboard parts for metal icons Black Sabbath. During an off-night in Berlin, he was challenged by another Sabbath staffer to try and play the band’s set on a piano in the hotel bar. Wakeman’s solo piano improvisations around classic tunes like “Fairies Wear Boots,” “Changes,” and “Iron Man” planted the seed of Jazz Sabbath, a band whose colorful — and entirely fictional — backstory he fleshed out over the next several years.
Along with similarly pseudonymed bassist Jacque T'fono (Jerry Meehan) and drummer Juan Také (Ash Soan), the newly christened Milton Keanes appeared in a 2020 mockumentary claiming to be the original authors of Black Sabbath’s best-known songs, which had been cruelly plagiarized from their canceled late-’60s debut album. This provided the clever PR ruse for Jazz Sabbath’s self-titled album, which arrived on Blacklake Records in April of that year. The group’s inventive jazz arrangements of Sabbath classics fared well on the jazz charts and were successful enough to warrant a second volume in 2022. ~ Timothy Monger