Greek pianist Tania Giannouli has just released her first solo recording on Rattle Records. SOLO is a broad exploration of the piano universe.
Classically trained Greek pianist Tania Giannouli has traversed a musical path largely linked to jazz and improvisation but always with a keen interest in multidisciplinary crossings. She has collaborated with musicians such as Arve Henriksen, Maria Pia De Vito, Amir ElSaffar, Nik Bärtsch, Sun Mi Hong, and others. Her four previous releases for Rattle include "Forest Stories" (2012), a duo with Portuguese multi-instrumentalist Paulo Chagas; "Transcendence" (2015), where she lead an ensemble through an elegant mix of contemporary chamber music with hints of jazz and world music touches (and listed as one of best of that year by jazz.pt); "Rewa" (2018), a collaboration with New Zealand taonga puoro musician, Rob Thorne; and "In Fading Light" (2020), a trio with Kyriakos Tapakis (oud) and Andreas Polyzogopoulos (trumpet). All these albums have been reviewed here at jazz.pt.
Now, she has released her first solo recording, a set of improvised pieces that cross a range of musical and sound environments. The album beings with "Transportal", a spectral, ghostly tone before settling into a more definite form around a gradually evolving repetitive motif. After this nebulous beginning, the second piece is bright ("there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in", as Leonard used to say, quoted by Matilde); "Novelette" brings a classical candour, drawn between the solemnity of the left hand and the imagination of the right hand (do we hear Jarrett here?). In "Metal Snake", the third track, we hear Tania explore the inner workings of the piano while sketching out a thematic idea. In contrast, "Intone" is more conventional, with a solid structure that is subverted in the second half. "Two Notes" starts just so, with two notes, but on top of this repeated two-note base, other layers are added. In "Demagnitude", we begin to hear strange sounds drawn from inside the piano, with an object placed on the strings to beautifully subvert their tonality. In "Spiral", Tania explores a trepidatious rhythm, and in "Hidden", the ghosts return.
Throughout the twenty-four pieces on the album (seventeen of which are less than four minutes), we hear a wide range of approaches, techniques and styles. With this release, Tania Giannouli opens the book and expresses her enormous breadth as an improvising pianist and composer to offer a very impressive and interesting album for music lovers to discover.