Shai Maestro At Barcelona El Molino

Shai Maestro
El Molino
Barcelona, Spain
May 16, 2025

The Barcelöna Concert?

The intense crimson decor of El Molino, once a café-concert hall devoted to revue and cabaret, now a splendidly renovated space dedicated to all genres of music—with a special emphasis on contemporary jazz—hosted a special night with Shai Maestro. This marked his first concert in Barcelona following the release of his latest solo piano album, Solo: Miniatures & Tales (Naïve, 2025), after settling in Catalonia.

It would be a mistake to frame the acclaimed pianist and composer's new phase as merely a deep dive into the probably most widely celebrated version of Keith Jarrett—the one known for his solo concerts in Central Europe recorded in the '70s. Yet it would be equally inaccurate to deny his numerous and fortunate connections to the musical language of the genius from Pennsylvania. Several factors contribute to the former perception, among them Maestro's association with ECM Records and his recent inclination towards solo piano improvisation, leading to a quick comparison that begins to fade as soon as one listens attentively to his recent productions. Additionally, it doesn't help that some outlets have claimed that The Dream Thief (ECM Records, 2018), his first collaboration with longtime producer Manfred Eicher, "is the best Jarrett album in a long time not by himself." While one might appreciate such a phrase's witty or provocative tone, this statement undervalues the artist's uniqueness and overlooks his many other influences. There is as much Jarrett in that recording (e.g., "My Second Childhood") as there is Robert Glasper in "The Forgotten Village," Brad Mehldau in "New River, New Water," Paul Bley in "These Foolish Things," or Steve Kuhn in the title track or the later theme "Prayer," featured on Human (ECM Records, 2021), his second disc for the German label.

Still, his eloquent, lyrical language transported parts of the concertgoers from Barcelona's venue to Cologne's opera house on the night of January 24, 1975—the legendary evening of The Köln Concert (ECM Records, 1975), the most commercially successful solo piano recital in jazz history. Without making any direct comparison, it is unquestionable that Maestro did occasionally employ some strategies the American famously elevated to the status of his musical brand: rhythmic climaxes that begin almost inaudibly before exploding in a flurry of sound, unexpected harmonic shifts, lyrical right-hand explorations that suddenly introduce fresh air into a congested sound space. However, the Israeli pianist demonstrates a preference for what is easily recognizable or assimilable, yet not banal (that "cinematic" label often used when discussing his output), along with a clear rejection of showy virtuosity and overly dry abstraction. Equally important, his tonal universe has, until now, had a significantly smaller presence of the African-American legacy compared to that of the one to whom Ornette Coleman once said, "Man, you've got to be Black." These elements firmly distinguish him from his alleged primary influence.

In any case, Maestro uses those tools—just like many contemporary pianists do—not to mimic but to transform, making them his own and embedding them into his distinct staging and soundscape. Before each movement, he reflects silently for a few seconds, as if transported miles from the room. While playing, he gestures, hums, abruptly pauses to decide on a new direction, celebrates his discoveries, or mourns his—supposed—missteps. Some of his signature moves include sketching out fresh, completely on-the-spot melodic lines that initially sound wrong and that mischievously unravel the musical fabric being laboriously woven, or introducing unexpected chordal changes that open portals in the scenario that, contrary to expectations, are often not crossed. In these moments of spontaneous creation, the player challenges himself, setting traps that force one hand to quickly reconcile with the sudden detour taken by the other. All of it live, alone, in front of a packed house: no safety net or crash mat. And this, as we'll see, reflects his life philosophy.

Eastern Miniatures & Meditative Tales

Before an engaged and captivated audience—mostly aged between 20 and 40—a relaxed, seemingly distracted but actually hyper-focused Maestro announced, after the second segment, that he wouldn't be "playing my latest album" since most of it consists of improvisations. Fair enough—and even desirable. Still, one could argue that he did, in a way, deliver it, breaking apart and rearranging the building blocks of that record as though manipulating a sonic puzzle fully completed and then smashed moments before the performance began.

The concert opened luminously with a playful right-hand cadence that transitioned into intense Eastern-influenced passages. A lower-register interlude, senza misura, opened vast soundscapes suggestive of that ambiguous genre known as Americana. Over this, the Israeli built striking chord changes and out-of-the-blue melodic flights that evolved into a tender, deeply arpeggiated interpretation of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," concluding with an intimate coda that led into new high-pitch explorations, almost in lullaby mode.

After the stylistic diversity of the first 15 minutes, the second piece marked a sharp contrast. Maestro began it standing, muting the piano strings while plucking them percussively, murmuring a simple, folk-like air—a kind of processional mantra that slowly harmonized a damp-soil foundation over which he traced minimalist digressions with his musically bare feet. At this point, a possible second association with Jarrett hovered over the room—this time more thematic than stylistic. To settle it, we must revisit the overlooked Gurdjieff: Sacred Hymns (ECM Records, 1980), the Allentown-born's release of compositions by Russian-Armenian philosopher, mystic and composer G.I. Gurdjieff. There, we find some thematic and spiritual parallels with Solo: Miniatures & Tales—plausible connections that seemed to take shape when the pianist announced his deep relationship with the LAC (Catalan acronym for "Laboratory of Contemplative Arts"), a center located on the surroundings of Barcelona that is linked to a Buddhist retreat house (Casa Virupa) and serves as a haven for artistic creation and philosophical reflection. This entity organizes an intriguing festival during the summer solstice called A Rite of Summer that previously featured figures like Magnus Ostrom, Jan Bang and Eivind Aarset. Maestro has collaborated with this center for over two years, conducting residencies, master classes and workshops. In them, he's developed ideas such as the intrinsic link between life processes and creative ones, and his firm belief that improvisation can help us better accept adversity—or what we used to call mistakes—by incorporating them into our path.

The third number condensed a thick nostalgic mist in the room, filling it with a lyricism based on classical but jazzed up through impulsive convulsions. It began with unmistakable echoes of those Jarrett encores designed to soothe still hungry audiences, only to morph again before our eyes, revealing the performer's progressive transformation into his own musical animal. As he completed his mutation, we realized it was a prelude to an intense reading of the track "Gloria" from his latest recording, where the familiar hand-duel returned—one harmonizing the other's last-second inspirations. Much harder to recognize was the following, heavily deconstructed version of "All the Things You Are." But listeners already familiar with his recent solo work had the tools to glimpse it. Maestro entered a kind of trance, taken over by a frenetic, obsessive-compulsive exploration of his piano's lowest tessitura—a percussive avalanche in dark tones that nonetheless contained both the song's original opening bars and elements from "Monkey Mind (Chaos Is an Intimate Thing)," another piece from the same album. The oppressive rhythmic tension gradually dissolved through an ascent from the low to the mid-range, finally emerging in the complete tune, sculpted in waves that no longer shied away from the high register. That was the most furiously exploratory moment of the evening: an interpretation rooted in the marrow of the composition and its emotional suggestion, more than its explicit line or harmony. A demanding execution—both for an audience partially stunned by the whirlwind and, certainly, for the artist himself.

Positioning and Homages

About an hour after the concert started, Maestro spoke again to introduce "When You Stop Seeing," a theme from Untold Stories (Motéma, 2015). Composed over 15 years ago, it was born, he explained with visible dismay, from the frustration caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Words like "unacceptable," phrases like "hell on earth" or "we cannot allow this to happen" resonated through the hall as forcefully as any of his most fierce moments at the piano. His position, far from ideological or religious, stems from a commitment to human rights and a deep empathy for "the other side." The piece, he said, serves "as a reminder not to give up on hope, on humanity, and on compassion, believing we can live a different future." The subsequent performance sharpened the differences between low and high registers with powerful dynamics, perhaps to emphasize the existing division as much as possible. From there, he moved into a sweetly melodic passage where the piano mimicked the strumming of a guitar, over which his right hand cried out against injustice. It reached moments of profound beauty, finally reconnecting with the opening motif—similar to the horror that stubbornly still hammers the daily lives of thousands of innocent people.

That marked the concert's official end. Yet, responding to insistent applause, the soloist returned for two brief encores: the first, a reimagining of "Aba (For Gil Maestro)," a song dedicated to his father, with dainty, imaginatively looped motifs. The second, possibly another homage—this time to the audience itself: a gentle air drawn from "From One Soul to Another," also from his latest disc but already included in The Stone Skipper (Sound Surveyor Music, 2016). In quiet communion, he invited those present—wordlessly, just with his gaze—to join in humming the lullaby-like tune. What began as a timid murmur became an audible chorus, which Maestro subtly gospelized before closing it with a definitive, classicist cadence. There was no third encore, though the pianist, all humility and warmth, returned once more to take a final bow, noting the time as the unarguable cutoff. In truth, there could not have been a better ending to an excellent evening of solo piano that wisely balanced unscripted material and composition, sensitivity and technique, and, above all, non-disruptive explorations with the irresistible charm of deeply evocative, suggestive melodies.

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