Dominik Wania

CD version. Lonely Shadows is a solo piano album by the Polish pianist Dominik Wania, his first as leader for ECM: eleven pieces improvised in the studio with nothing prepared beforehand. Wania had come to the label as a member of the Maciej Obara Quartet, on Unloved (2017) and Three Crowns (2019). His playing brings a classically trained sense of touch, tone and texture to the instincts of an improviser who works in the moment.

Born in 1981 in Sanok, in the Podkarpacie region of southern Poland, Wania started piano at the age of three. He graduated from the Academy of Music in Kraków in 2005 and in 2006 won a scholarship to study jazz at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Since then he has played with Tomasz Stańko, Lee Konitz and Dave Liebman, among others. His first album as leader, Ravel (2013), took Maurice Ravel's Miroirs as its starting point. Lonely Shadows was recorded in November 2019 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, engineered by Stefano Amerio and produced by Manfred Eicher. "I didn't want to prepare anything in advance. No forms or melodic sketches or harmonic layers," Wania writes.

The titles were given after the session. The opening title piece is slow and reflective, its notes left to ring in the wood-panelled hall. New Life Experience is lighter, with busy chord shifts that never settle for long, and Relativity is the most dissonant piece of the set. AG76 is named after a painting by Zdzisław Beksiński that hangs in the Historical Museum of Sanok, and here Wania alters the piano's sound by working its escapement. Among the composers behind his language he names Ravel and Olivier Messiaen above all.

In London Jazz News in September 2020, Mary James heard "a glittery surface to the music much like Maurice Ravel's works". Fred Grand compared the pieces to pages in an artist's sketchbook in Jazz Journal, and wrote that the album "can sit proudly in Eicher's growing and justly venerated catalogue of solo piano works." The German magazine Stereoplay made it its album of the month.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2686, first released on 18 September 2020.