JON BALKE “Skrifum”

Jon Balke
Skrifum
ECM, distr. Ducale

Personnel:
Jon Balke (piano, Spektrafon)
Recorded in Copenhagen, November 2023

Artistic and personal achievements with strong symbolic resonance. Jon Balke (born June 7, 1955) is about to turn seventy—and, true to form, he marks the milestone in his signature style: austere, rigorous, and deeply reflective. Skrifum is a distilled, essential solo work that encapsulates his lifelong conversation with the piano.

A man of few words, Balke prefers to let his music speak, whether in concert, on record, or through his many ensembles—including Batagraf, the Magnetic North Orchestra, and the multicultural Siwan project. But the piano remains his primary means of expression. This is his fourth solo album for ECM, following the trilogy that began with Book of Velocities (2007), continued with Warp (2016), and concluded with Discourses (2020). In Skrifum, Balke builds a 21st-century counterpart to Bill Evans’s 1963 classic Conversations with Myself, in which Evans overdubbed three layers of piano, each performed by himself.

Technology has evolved considerably since then. With Skrifum, Balke engages in dialogue not just with himself but with the Spektrafon, a custom electronic instrument he helped develop. The Spektrafon enables him to manipulate the piano’s sound in real time by isolating and transforming specific frequencies—resulting in a kind of spectral reverberation that expands the instrument’s expressive range. While Balke had previously explored soundspace in Warp and Discourses—through prepared piano, field recordings, and electronic processing (“reverberations and reflections of the world, distorted,” as he put it)—here he achieves those effects organically and in the moment.

This brings the focus to the signifier of the piano itself: the spatial diffusion of each note, its decay, resonance, silence—and, above all, the architectural dimension of the music. His relationship with the piano becomes at once abstract and physical.

One hears the influence of Paul Bley throughout—a key touchstone for Balke. “He is my hero,” the pianist has said. And it shows.

—Ivo Franchi