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Hello everyone and welcome back to this new episode of Where is the Music podcast. Today I'm going to lead you through a short journey in the world of piano.

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We are going to link the work by some of the most influential pianists of our times to the broader musical context and see whether we can draw some general statement about the state of piano music today.

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The contemporary piano is the main character to set the stage. I'll start by introducing a song that will be the only case for today has actually little to do with piano. Let's listen to a couple of minutes of.

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Teardrop by the band Massive Attack from 1998 and pay particular attention at the curious mixture of instruments and styles. As you'll see, this will help setting the trajectory for today's episode.

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So you can hit a drum beat.

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A harpsichord, a sweet voice, and the melody and the piano a little bit. Each element seems to come from widely, far apart worlds.

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The drum beat, while not fast, sounds filled with latent energy. Assertive, almost aggressive.

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The harpsichord that seems really to come from a different time is a sound from the 18th century, an aristocratic instrument for the rich elite, a lost world of elegance and grace quite strikingly opposite to the raw energy.

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Of the drums.

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The voice has a peculiar style. The tune has an innocence so that he feels it could be sung by a child, and the Inflexion is folk. There is no aggressivity nor aristocracy whatsoever in her in her voice. It's just another world. Now it's a triangle.

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Of influences. Then you have this low piano notes that seem to add a touch of solemnity to the music which would not be achieved quite as well by a more natural choice of electric bass.

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Now let's listen to how this world is being interpreted by.

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Our first pianist of the day. Possibly.

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The most influential jazz pianists of our time, my favourite.

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Certainly Brad Mehldau. This is his version of Teardrop.

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So you now perhaps noticed how without the drums.

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The song aggressivity is gone.

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But not the assertiveness. This version highlights a feature I think of the original one. I think in fact the the melodic part, the sweet voice from that singer seem to emerge from the musical set.

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On the groove, the expressive context.

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In the piano version you have the sense that the improvised lines literally emerge from the flow of the music.

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Brad Mehldau himself cites Brahms as one of the greatest influences of of his work, and here we can hear why the whole piano is involved and almost orchestral texture. But more importantly, there is a.

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Long, melancholic breath, that transpires from from his version of nostalgia, sense of longing.

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That I find characteristic of Brahms music too. So this is the spirit with which I will conduct this musical journey. Music as a way to bridge worlds that have virtually little to do with one another. Artists that can put themselves in the middle.

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Draw a link between them in the spirit of exploration and playfulness.

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We're going to move on to a deeper infiltration between piano, music and folk. This next example is by Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan, who creates music in a.

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Dimension of crossover between styles and genres. He's often referred to.

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As a jazz pianist, but all sorts of influences merge from Middle Eastern ornaments and polyrhythms to progressive rock and heavy metal folk songs, etc. The recording, The Cave of Rebirth from an album from the album.

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An ancient observer.

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Is a perfect example of piano music that serves the melody in a similar way as piano music did in the lead repertoire of Schubert, Schumann, or in the popular songwriting world of many pop rock artists.

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Of our times. This time, though, the reason the rhythms are from a foreign place and there are no lyrics. Let's have a listen.

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How fascinating, right?

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If one wonders where does this music come from, one would have to say many places and possibly undefined time in the past.

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Certain artists, I sometimes think, do have the gift of inhabiting comfortably. Multiple cultures at once, and often don't seem to belong to the present time. But being close touch with some ancestral past.

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With regard to interferences between the present and the past, let's listen to this original recording by the duo Adam Baldych and Leszek Moszer. Violinist and pianist both Polish, who so playfully have a free flow.

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Conversation over a persistent bass line. Let's hear it.

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How delightful.

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The piece is called Passacaglia, which is a musical form actually that comes from the European classical tradition, perhaps Bach’s Passacaglia is the most famous example and has come to define. The term passacaglia has come to define.

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A piece of music that develops variations over a sequence of notes that stays unvaried throughout.

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You can hear in this one there is a certain base note played steadily consistently alternatively by both instruments and never stopping throughout the whole conversation. Our next piece involves.

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Once again, two worlds: one

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Is the inner creative world of a truly interesting jazz artist, a pianist called Yaron Herman, who has recorded variations on a tune that we all know too well, summer time it was composed originally by Gershwin, 90 years ago.

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I looked it up, 1934 was the year of composition of Summertime.

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For the opera Porgy and Bess, and since then it has been interpreted, interpreted in every possible way so. But so that summertime nowadays is usually linked to jazz itself, it's a favourite standard. It's become a musical icon of multiple generations of.

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Jazz lovers.

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So.

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To modify its notes, its chords, it would be sacrilegious, like putting moustache over Mona Lisa.

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Here how he does it pretty inspiringly I think.

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Remarkable playing. I think this is a variation on summer time called Blossom from the album Variations for piano solo by the pianist Yaron Herman. In a sense here.

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I Feel that Summertime becomes an opportunity for inner discoveries. It feels like we are witnessing the mind wandering of, of a troubled soul, peaceful yet unsettled. Feeling goes through this interpretation.

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The pianist uses this iconic tune to open up his inner world.

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The inner world of creative artists, to me is so interesting. It's the place where ideas are not ultimately defined nor distinct. They play with each other. They merge and separate. Improvisation is often just that, a free flow of ideas.

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That appear one after the other, linking in inexplicable ways.

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Opening the way to all sort of trajectories after the inner conflicts of the pianist we've just heard, let's follow the playful exploration lack of trajectory.

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Pure openness in this solo recording called my ideal one by the jazz virtuoso pianist Gerald Clayton from the album Bells of Sand from 2022.

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How interesting. I became personally very close to this approach to music making.

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Though for many years I lacked the genuine, authentic playfulness necessary to let things happen in Clayton's plating, you can hear the variety, the wit, the swing, the joy of experimenting in one direction, the change.

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The lightness in doing something, perhaps not aesthetically profound, but very.

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Meaningful for the spirit, which is to let yourself have a play.

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Let's go back to the fusion of piano music and popular music. In this next example, we hear the American pianist Vijay Hair, who is another kind of virtuous and takes nothing less than Michael Jackson.

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Song as the starting point for his expressive world to emerge. I like to point you towards the gentleness and lyricism of this plane. More importantly, notice how there is something odd in the rhythm. Here is Vijay Iyer.

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The song is Human Nature.

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In case you're wondering, the oddness in the rhythm is due to higher engaging in a combination of odd time signatures and polymeter, meaning multiple metres, while technical staff for technical musician I mentioned it because the song does have an unsettled.

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Feeling throughout.

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Noticed how he hesitated on the verse for quite a long time before entering in the more famous, more warm chorus. This unsettled, unsettled feelings given precisely by these odd rhythms, the odd time signatures which possibly.

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Tells us something about the.

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Song.

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If you know the lyrics they speak of, connecting with other human beings, of how special this connection can be.

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This piano version makes me think of how non-linear is our human nature and how challenging it might be to connect with one another.

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As the last piece of today, I chose recording from one of the most influential Italian pianist, the artist Stefano Battaglia. Certainly my favourite Italian pianist part of.

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An album from 2015, which is a song called Ecumenica, and the album takes the same name.

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The term ecumenica and English ecumenical is an adjective that applies when something represents a variety of Christian churches. The world of piano improvisation is linked to the one of religious rituals. In this case the Christian ritual, which is.

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Reference quite clearly in the beginning you will hear.

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Pretty simple linear repetitive melody in the style of Gregorian chant. Simple and pure, without ornaments, nor particularly remarkable or standalone harmony. This melodic, insipid leads to a literal explosion.

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Of sound and emotion. So get ready. We will listen to the whole thing and I'll be back afterwards with a couple of thoughts. This is Stefano Battaglia with Ecumenica.

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What at Journey, I think it's very hard to call this music jazz.

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I don't think that there is a jar category for these type of explorations. My sense is that the artist here uses the piano as a way.

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To channel something, the spirit, however, wants. However, however one wants to think about it. The opening melody which we heard at the end as well, is orderly and linear, almost without a character, somehow ancestral.

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It evokes quite a range of very powerful transformation that we heard throughout this is.

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More than 12 minutes performance.

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It reaches a level of forte that is not easy to associate with the music we hear in churches, especially in the Catholic Italy where the artist comes from. The beauty here to me is in the participation with the transformation process we witness.

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The unfolding of this great energy from a small cell.

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Into a powerful event which is thanks to the music, an internal one as a spiritual one.

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Perhaps to conclude our journey, if there is one link between all the music we heard today, it's this idea of intrusion of infiltration, a style or melody that used to belong to one culture. Now it appears in another showing to us listeners how.

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It has less boundaries than we expected.

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We inhabit cultural worlds filled with ideas, styles, habits, and symbols. Music can be the place for Latin foreign ideas, intrude, and infiltrated. The artist can be this vehicle for communion and sharing between diverse worlds or languages.

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Intrusion, infiltration and ultimately fusion.

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Jazz is perhaps the most appropriate genre where this sort of things can happen, exactly because of its permeability. While genres like classical music or rock seem impermeable to outside influences, jazz is from this point of view very permeable.

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To merge itself with other languages.

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So thank you for being with me throughout this journey. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to post the link with the playlist of everything that we've listened to today and each separate track. If you want to follow up the thread of one particular artist.

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Another and I would love to know what you think if you have recommendations for future topics of where is it for a where is music podcast. So look forward to that and I will see you the next time on here. Thank you again.