Howard Riley

This solo piano music has never been released before on disc. It covers a 40-year period stretching from 1976 to 2016 and contains both live concerts and studio sessions. "Paris / Debrecen are both Festival performances recorded at a period when I was concentrating on developing my own material / compositions, and before I had evolved my ‘with or without repertoire’ approach to solo playing, which explained in the ‘sleeve-note’ to Live With Repertoire on NoBusiness Records CD 58 (briefly: some performances are with repertoire, some are without and some utilise both). Fingerprints album was released in 1987 on MC cassette only (Wondrous WM 0102) and contains 13 short pieces of ‘Fingerprints’. It awakened my interest in short forms and let to the 6-CD  box The Complete Short Stories 1998-2010 on NoBusiness Records CDs 21-26. The most recent recordings are third, fourth and fifth CDs in this box set, entitled Longer Story One, Longer Story Two and Longer Story Three from 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. There is one piece or ‘single story’ on each of these CDs with duration of approximately one hour. It was perhaps inevitable that the 79 ‘Short Stories’ comprising the first box set would be followed by these ‘Longer Stories’. The main difference from my point of view as a performer / composer is that the former needed one idea per piece that was capable of being developed, whereas the longer pieces require a multiplicity of ideas and material that are capable of being interrelated either compositionally or spontaneously.

That’s the only information needed, along with a willingness to listen uninterruptedly for one hour (I know it requires effort!). Perhaps I should add that I deliberately varied my approach in each of the three ‘Longer Story’ pieces. The first has a pre-conceived form. The second starts with pre-conceived form, but ends with a long Coda, which emphasises whatever the performer wishes to emphasise. The third one is totally improvised in one take." (Howard Riley, April 2016)