Jon Balke

Book of Velocities is the first solo album by Norwegian pianist Jon Balke, released by ECM in 2007. It is laid out like a book: 19 short pieces, composed and improvised, grouped into four chapters and an epilogue. Each one explores a particular idea, technique, rhythm or colour of the instrument, and the shortest lasts 56 seconds. Most of them last between two and four minutes.

On ECM, Balke was known as the leader of larger groups, the Magnetic North Orchestra and Batagraf, so a record for piano alone was a sharp change of scale. Ray Comiskey of The Irish Times saw it as a big change for a musician used to much broader canvases. He recorded it in September 2006 at Radio Studio DRS in Zurich, with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher as producer. Balke also took the cover photograph. As Audiophile Audition pointed out, nothing is overdubbed, and every sound comes from the acoustic piano.

The keyboard is only part of the vocabulary. In Stereo, Tilman Urbach described notes plucked and struck in shimmering timbres, and the opening Giada moves between plucked strings and dotted figures on the keys. Elsewhere the material is pared down to small cells. In Piano News, Tom Fuchs described details sliding almost imperceptibly into one another, slowly and quietly, until the whole suddenly makes sense. In Jazzwise, Stuart Nicholson described melodic fragments, some seemingly simple or naive, being scrutinised, developed and abstracted into textures and colours. Each piece stands on its own, yet the sequence builds into a single statement, from the brief Scintilla to the closing Nefriit.

Reviewers placed the record nearer to contemporary composition than to jazz. Fuchs found its distant relatives in the works of John Cage and György Kurtág, and noted how few examples of such aphoristic pieces exist in jazz. Comiskey gave it three stars in March 2008, hearing music "closer to contemporary classical music than jazz". Nicholson called the whole "as beckoning as it is beguiling".

This is the CD edition, ECM 2010, first released in October 2007, in a jewel case with an O-card.