Piano Plus: Two Enhanced Solo Piano Sets

Is the piano enough? Keith Jarrett, notably, made a big name for himself with his improvised solo piano outings. Jessica Williams composed, in real time, making magic alone at the keyboard. Fred Hersch has crafted masterpieces in the solo piano mode. The ever-versatile Brad Mehldau has produced many shining moments sitting down alone at the piano.

But the Norwegian artist Jon Balke and Italian pianist Alessandro Sgobbio are compelled to augment the things they create on the acoustic keyboard, Balke adding post-piano recording features with electronics and field recording sound designs, while Sgobbio has settled into playing live electronic mixes as he sits in the piano chair.

Jon Balke
Skrifum
ECM Records
2025

Norwegian pianist Jon Balke has performed in an array of ensemble configurations, notably as the leader of the Magnetic North Orchestra and as a member of bassist Arild Andersen's group that recorded Cloud In My Head (ECM Records, 1975). Still, he has formed a special bond with solo piano work to which he adds sound designs and low-in-the-mix field recordings of city life. This started with his ECM albums Warp (2016) and continued with Discourses (2020). This exploration continues, in a slightly different vein, with Skifrum.

Where the enhancements of Warp and Discourse were covert, requiring full attention and an increase in volume for full appreciation, Skifrum's additions to the piano sound are more overt, with Balke using an instrument called the Spektrafon (he helped develop it) to manipulate the sound from the piano, in real time. The instrument creates a resonance that can be dark and dense or as delicate as a feather in a small breeze—something radiating from the dark mouth of a cavern or wafting down from Heaven above. The Spektrafon's inclusion pushes the pianist to the sparest of piano approaches, with much single-noting, not much in the way of chords—those come from the shaping of the sounds coming from the Spektrafon. A beautiful, mysterious album. The sense that this is the beginning of a new journey for Balke hangs in the air.

Alessandor Sgobbio
Piano Music 3
Amp Music & Records
2025

As it is with Balke's Skifrum—creating the music in real time—so it is with Alessandro Sgobbio's Piano Music 3, the Italian pianist's third recording of intimate piano works. From the opening, "De Di Dono," a sense of profound spirituality swells and rises up. It sounds like music made in a cathedral, with a choir, in full, flowing vestments, singing in an adjacent room. The experience is deeply soothing. "A truce from the violence of reality," according to the album's liner notes author, Janique Perrin, proving that sometimes those writers get it just right.

The addition of electronics opens up a flavor of timelessness, as if Sgobbio is making music of eternity, shaping soundscapes that ring off of stone walls in an atmosphere of soft illuminations of winter sunlight shining through stained glass windows to spotlight meditative spiritual reveries, while the birds in the meadow on the other side of the colored glass are silent in deference to the beauty they hear.

Tracks and Personnel

Skifrum

Tracks: Sparks; Traces; Lines; Streaks; Lanes; Strand; Stripes; Ductus; Rifts; Calligraphic; Syllables; Kitabat; Skrifum; Tegaki.

Personnel: Jon Balke: piano, Spektrafon.

Piano Music 3

Tracks: De Dei Deo; Red Gold; Echoes; Dog On 5th Avenue; Dawns; Veils; Forte Rocca; Alang.

Personnel: Alessandro Sgobbio; Pianoforte Fazioli F278, live electronics.