"Paying solo is the most liberating thing for me. Being alone with the instrument gives me an incredible feeling of freedom," says Tania Giannouli, and this Greek pianist should know. After all, she studied classical piano and knows about the rigour of this interpretive discipline.
Her heart has belonged to improvisation for quite some time. Here she can juxtapose her experiences and preferences, the conscious and the unconscious, the lyrical and the expressive, the familiar and the challenging, and bring them in with passion. SOLO, her fifth album to date, brings together a total of twenty-four sketches, impressions and fantasies into a closed cycle of musical commitments. One could also describe this pianistic excursion as a sonic "psycho-gram", constructively drawn from personal perceptions that evoke an aesthetic radiance encompassing her Greek origins and a wide variety of personalities and encounters within and beyond the music world. There are sparkling piano runs, lonely room-filling notes, melodic phrases touching in their simplicity, and massive reverberating chords. Above all, it's her lightness of touch and playful musicality that distinguishes these recordings, the sensitivity with which Tania presents her material.
In 2018, she gave a spectacular performance at the Jazzfest Berlin, drawing significant international attention to her for the first time. Last year she appeared as Artist in Residence at the Enjoy Jazz Festival, where she performed in a variety of line-ups and received rave reviews, such as this one: "She proved to be a daring leader from the European periphery, restructuring and merging old and new, familiar and unknown, classical and improvisational elements in a lively and captivating way. She is not a typical jazz musician, but an energetic and determined player with an open and versatile musical spirit."
After several film and video projects and chamber music compositions, this album also serves as an impressive calling card that will surely open doors for Tania to bring her art to a wider range of music lovers. As she herself says, "SOLO is a very personal journey, a story told without filters, one I hope listeners will recognise, identify with and embrace with their heads and hearts."