Craig Taborn

Shadow Plays is a fully improvised solo piano concert by Craig Taborn, recorded in Vienna in March 2020, a few weeks before concert life stopped. It is his second solo album for ECM, a decade after Avenging Angel, and Taborn himself calls it part of the same continuum. Where the first was made in a studio, this one captures the same process of spontaneous composition in front of an audience.

The recital took place on 2 March 2020 in the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Stefano Amerio was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced the album. Taborn, born in Detroit, had by then recorded for ECM in several settings, from electric groups to piano duets. Over those years his approach had grown sharper and more distinct. Here he plays for well over an hour in seven sections, two of them longer than seventeen minutes. Nothing was prepared, yet each section has a clear sense of form.

Bird Templars opens the set quietly, with a high, fluttering ostinato set against deep chords, and grows toward a dark climax before returning to its tremolo figure. The paired Discordia Concors and Concordia Discors show a lighter, more playful side, the second moving between pastoral calm and dense, atonal bursts. The title piece, at more than eighteen minutes the most dramatic of the set, places brusque chords and skittering interjections beside flowing melody. The closing Now in Hope is sweetly melodic, close to a blues and a jazz waltz without settling on either.

BBC Music Magazine gave the album five stars, and Garry Booth called it "an ethereal tour de force" and "sonic poetry in its purest form". In the Financial Times, Mike Hobart heard "spontaneous masterworks with a majestic sense of form", and noted that the first piece is so artfully built that it seems previously composed. Hobart added that the style overlaps with contemporary classical music. Its pulse, though, stays with jazz, and the rolling left hand of A Code With Spells has clear jazz roots.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2693, released on 8 October 2021, with all music by Taborn.