Tania Giannouli Solo
Henning Bolte (All About Jazz) and Martin Longley (Jazzwise) write about her solo piano concert at the Kunsthalle Mannheim - Enjoy Jazz festival 2020
“With her strong and attractive themes, she invited and captured her audience to enter her very own musical universe and follow her in her irresistible expansions. These expansions, stemming from the inner kernel of a piece, felt as natural extensions of the melodic core leading listeners into surprising wildly stirring sonorities. Her playful and highly dynamic inside-outside manoeuvres unlocked primal forces and a vivid range of flickering mood shadings. From that underlying anchoring listeners were set free to surrender to oceanic turbulences and swellings. To achieve this intense loading and dynamics in live performance an ignition of dialectics of pre- structured elements and on the spot orchestration of expansions is demanded in an overarching dramaturgy. In both concerts it turned out that Giannouli has a deep-seated capacity to achieve that. By this she turned out to be a remarkable border- crosser between a classical approach and an open improvisational approach. Here, her capacity to keep it in the bedding and enable wildly raging and spraying overflow revealed, or, to put it differently, her capacity to bring both sides inseparably together (...) With this solo Giannouli manifested herself as a very unique and forceful voice. It strengthened the ties with the growing audience she has built in recent times. She proved to be a daring female leader from the European periphery that restructured and melded old and new, known and unknown, classical and improvisational elements in vivid and captivating ways. Not a typical jazz cat but an energetic and decisive player with an open and versatile musical mind.”
Henning Bolte, All About Jazz (USA)
“Tania Giannouli might not be signed to ECM yet, but she would surely be welcomed inside their sonic universe. She played at the Kunsthalle art gallery in Mannheim, once again in a physical space that was ideal for both music and virus-avoidance spacing. The huge foyer area, with its extremely high ceiling, sounded surprisingly intimate, in the way it enfolded the piano sound. Slimline speakers added subtle amplification, as Giannouli also investigated the possibilities of her subtly prepared piano. This approach involved more extended gestures, coaxing out slow scrapes or vibrant moans, interior whalesong dotted with small mallet taps. The results were unavoidably filmic, with a locational approach that evoked landscapes and their opened emotions. Giannouli made melancholy melodic progressions, sometimes with a frisson of folkish traditionalism, spirits in view, clearly limned. Down at the left- side low end, she rode through the winds, then suddenly had both hands inside,
swiping harp-like, struck emphatics creating a full-bloom climax. The ‘movie’ was reaching its ultimate scenes, with fully flowering shapes and enlarging, dark growths."
Martin Longley, Jazzwise (UK)
