Tag: piano

Poland’s EQUAL Artist of the Month Hania Rani Composes Music That Lights Up the Soul

July 20, 2021

She’s a neoclassical pianist, musician, singer, composer, and award-winning artist, but Hania Rani’s resume only tells one side of her story. To get the full picture, you have to listen to her music, which features scores of wistful piano touched by sparse vocals and subtle synths. 

Hania grew up in Gdańsk, Poland, and later split her time between Warsaw and Berlin, where she studied piano and gained exposure to jazz and electronic music. Her career includes credits on full-length feature films, performances at iconic European venues, and accolades from across the Polish music industry, including multiple Fryderyk nominations, the country’s equivalent to a Grammy or BRIT award. 

Hania’s reign continues as Poland’s EQUAL artist of the month. Spotify’s EQUAL Global Music Program aims to combat gender disparity in the music industry by amplifying the work of women creators globally through an extension of resources and opportunities and by creating a global, cohesive, branded experience. As an EQUAL artist of the month, Hania will also be featured on the program’s bespoke playlist.

For the Record asked Hania to fill in the blanks and share her inspirations, creative process, and hopes for the future of music. 

The artists who have most inspired me are ____.

At the end of the day, I have to say that many of the artists who have had a really deep impact on my music are women. I really need to mention names like Agnes Obel, Juana Molina, Martha Argerich, Maria João Pires, and Mica Levi. Watching their creative process is always a huge lesson for me. Apart from these, I also need to mention Nils Frahm, who will always have a very special place in my heart.

One piece of advice I’d give other women artists is ____.

Learn, research, create, and go for things that make the blood in your veins flow a bit faster. Be curious, look deeper, and don’t be satisfied with shallow solutions. Don’t worry about whether something is reserved for women or men. If it interests you deeply, go for it. 

One notable moment in my career so far ____.

Releasing my first solo album, Esja. Everything that has happened afterwards was just a result  of this decision.

My creative process consists of ____.

Improvisation, craft, and intuition. I consider these to be very important elements of music I would like to create, music that is a source of freedom and spontaneity but is also rooted in skills and technique. I search for things that can’t be explained, things that sound intuitive but actually are deeply processed and planned from the craft side. My songs seem effortless but are created as a result of knowledge, experience, and confidence. When composing, I spend a lot of time improvising, recording, and deciding on the motifs worth developing. 

One way I’d like to see greater gender equity in the music industry is ____.

Simply seeing girls and women working in the music business and achieving their goals. I am always happy seeing women being awarded, mentioned, seen, and admired—not as an exception or because they are women—but because they delivered to the world a high-quality work of art or their voice played an important role in a discussion. 

One up-and-coming woman artist I’m excited to watch is ____.

Sama’ Abdulhadi! She is an extremely brave and exciting artist from Palestine who is not only producing amazing music, but is also an exceptionally fearless human being. I hope her voice will change more than just the music scene.

My girl-power anthem right now is ____.

I was always more interested in fragility, empathy, and intensity of sight than the idea of bringing even more power to a world overwhelmed with noise, chaos, and violence. But if my values could have a voice, it would probably be the soft but hypnotizing sound of Melanie De Biasio singing “I’m Gonna Leave You.”

Experience Hania’s unique sound and other women artists on Spotify’s EQUAL Global playlist below:

Celebrate Piano Day with Lang Lang, George Winston, and Others

March 29, 2019

In a triumph of poetic scheduling, Piano Day is celebrated on the eighty-eighth day of every year. So today, March 29, there’ll be events all over the planet in honor of the eighty-eight-key wonder that has produced so much amazing music for more than three centuries.

“The piano should be our best friend,” says classical virtuoso Lang Lang, whose Piano Book album comes out, appropriately enough, on Piano Day. “The more you practice, the more you know about the instrument. The instrument speaks more intimately to you, and you will feel more. It’s just like friendship: When you’re always talking to each other, you will have a better connection. It’s exactly the same with piano.”

In celebration of Piano Day, we recently spoke to Lang Lang, George Winston, and other pianists about their formative experiences with the instrument.

Magic and imagination

“He played with the most incredible touch, and with the most magical pedals and the most imaginative sound,” says Lang Lang of Vladimir Horowitz’s performance of Schumann’s Träumerei (Dreaming) in Moscow in 1986, one of Lang Lang’s most cherished piano memories. “And he played in a very different way every time. If you want to hear a great concert, you need to feel the complete diversity of emotions in one piece. And also the stage presence is so important—he owned the piece.”

George Winston, the legendary pianist who pretty much invented his own genre of instrumental music, remembers how the piano first pulled him in. “I started playing the organ when I was eighteen in 1967, inspired by The Doors,” he says. “In 1971, when I heard stride pianist Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller’s recordings from the late 1920s and mid-1930s, I immediately switched to solo piano.”

Winston, whose album Restless Wind comes out May 3, recalls the way the piano’s possibilities informed the development of his own influential style. “I loved the piano sustain,” he says of the instrument’s unique timbre when drawing out notes, “which I liked better than the sustain of organ or strings or any other kind of sustain that any instrument has. This is a big part of the melodic folk piano style that I came up with in 1971.”

Grammy-winning Latin jazzman Arturo O’Farrill, whose latest project, Fandango at the Wall, examines the intersection of Mexican and American music, has his own relationship with the instrument that’s been his lifeblood for the last four decades. “Besides the obvious reason that is commonly given for loving the piano—having an orchestra at your fingertips—I also love the tactile feeling of holding a chord or a scale by the hand,” says the bandleader and composer. “I feel physically the sensation of handling music as if I were shaping the abstract with the concrete.”

Roots in rock and jazz

Veteran Memphis rocker Van Duren, whose career is currently being celebrated by the documentary Waiting: The Van Duren Story and its soundtrack, actually began on guitar before heeding the piano’s call. “I taught myself to play by transposing from guitar,” he explains, “so my ‘technique’ is puzzling to actual piano players. That said, the piano has been an amazing songwriting tool for me since my first 1950s Hohner Pianet at seventeen years old. It’s a very physical thing, almost like drums in its effort.” 

Van Duren cites The Beatles‘ “Lady Madonna,” Traffic‘s “Glad” and “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys,” and David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” as some of his favorite piano-driven songs. “But,” he says, “probably the most mind-blowing in my haphazard journey in piano land was the work of Brian Wilson and his use of juxtaposing different bass notes for a song’s chords. I know he was not the originator of that concept, but Brian was the first person I heard do that. Revelatory to this day.”

Cutting-edge Paris-born jazzman Dan Tepfer, whose new album, Natural Machines, drops on May 17, is the winner of multiple piano-oriented awards. He likes to look at the instrument as something more than merely wood and wire. “I fell in love with the piano when I realized you needed to be a bit of a magician to play it,” says Tepfer. “Most instruments have some kind of link to the human voice, which is the original musical instrument and the greatest of them all. Saxophones work on breath, and the sound they make is shaped by the player’s larynx. Violins mimic the breath with the bow. Even guitars can add vibrato to a tone after it’s been plucked. But with piano, once you’ve struck a key, there’s nothing you can do about it except release it.

“It’s really, when you look at it, not much more than a big typewriter,” Tepfer observes. “And yet, in skillful hands, it can sing almost as much as a voice. There’s something ineffable about the challenge of making that happen—something in the realm of poetry—that has always turned me on. It keeps me coming back to the keyboard again and again to see if, on a particular day, I can still make it happen.”

Whether on Piano Day or any other day, you can celebrate the instrument on Spotify. Check out Piano in the Background, Peaceful Piano, and Piano Ballads.

Watch 15-Year-Old Jazz Pianist Joey Alexander Share His Passion for Music

August 17, 2018

Each time jazz musician Joey Alexander opens Spotify, he sees something that most 15-year-olds don’t: his fourth studio album. What’s more, he sees the numbers: 400,000-plus listeners from around the world follow the Indonesian jazz pianist.

The care and delight Joey expresses with each stroke of the keyboard is apparent in his performance of his own free composition, “Eclipse,” seen in an exclusive interview and performance with Joey at Steinway Hall in New York City. Between his utter surrender to the melody and the excitement with which he shares his story, it is clear that when Joey plays, he pours his heart and soul into the music and instrument he loves.

Music has always been a part of Joey’s life. He taught himself piano when he was 6 years old by both listening to his father’s jazz albums and sitting down at the piano to practice playing the notes himself. At 9, he won the Grand Prix at the 2013 Master-Jam Fest, an international, all-ages jazz competition. And when he was 11, he became the youngest jazz artist ever to be nominated for a Grammy. But what’s most important in all of this, he says, is “to enjoy every moment.”

It’s more than talent and dedication that have pushed Joey decades ahead of his peers in his musical career. His passion for jazz, belief in music’s ability to bring people together, and love of storytelling through composition all fuel his playing—and keep him going. Joey’s musical influences and inspiration span decades of jazz expertise, as you can hear in his Inspiration Playlist:

Between his utter surrender to the melody and the excitement with which he shares his story, it is clear that when Joey plays, he pours his heart and soul into the music and instrument he loves.