Shai Maestro on Solo: Miniatures & Tales

Shai Maestro, a visionary Israeli pianist and composer, has emerged as a defining voice in contemporary jazz. Since launching his own trio in 2011 after early acclaim with Avishai Cohen, Shai has developed a signature lyrical and cinematic style that blends improvisation and musical influences from around the globe. His recent work with ECM focused on ensemble playing, but in his debut with Naïve he now explores solo piano recording for the first time. Told through tracks of completely contrasting styles of composition, the album looks to explore spontaneous improvisation as well as more developed pieces for solo piano.

I was fortunate enough to discuss this significant step in his career with Shai himself, uncovering the details surrounding the album’s inspiration, as well as his thoughts on his musical evolution so far…

Solo: Miniatures & Tales is your debut solo piano album! How are you feeling prior to its release?

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but it wasn't ready or ripe back then. I was very excited to record a solo piano album around ten years ago, and then a good friend of mine advised me that I wasn’t quite there yet, so I put it on the back burner and focused on a lot of trio and quartet music. But now, I think, is the right time to explore it. I think solo piano is one of the most demanding formats, but also a beautiful one, with a really long history of people who have done it. So I’m trying to be very respectful of the tradition.

The album is a collection of minimalist compositions and improvisations. What inspired you to create an album with this structure and this particular style?

Well, I kind of stumbled across the idea of miniatures when I was doing a different recording session. I live in Spain now and there's a culture of eating tapas (which is very small doses of food and lots of it!) and it's a pretty beautiful thing to be able to create a mini-universe in a really small amount of time, so I started messing with this idea a while ago. This project sessions took place both in Utrecht in the Netherlands and also in Berlin, but I wasn’t aware at the time that I was going to record an album. So in that way, the concept of the miniatures just kind of came out naturally without me thinking about it. All the pieces were very condensed, with the exception of two or three pieces that were longer explorations, which led me to think that it's a beautiful idea to deal with contrast against contrast. It's a concept that I'm fascinated with in general, so the contrast here is between length and time – short pieces and long pieces.

How did you approach playing and improvising in a solo setting? How did it compare to your experiences within an ensemble?

Playing solo could be the most daunting format because it's just a blank canvas - there's nobody for you to interact with. But, a blank canvas is also a beautiful thing to have because the levels of freedom that you can find are pretty high. You can really mold it, make it become whatever you want, without needing to consider form, structure, other people's wills –  it's a very liberating feeling. But then with my trio or my quartet, we do that to an extent as well. It's kind of like both of them complement each other, or one is an extension of the other.

The lovely track ‘Gloria’ is dedicated to your partner. Are there particular personal experiences that inspired the compositions on this album?​

I think that's one of the most direct ones that's dedicated. There's also one that's called ‘Aba’, which means father, so that's dedicated to my dad. The rest are more abstract. There's a track called ‘Chaos is an intimate thing’ (Monkey Mind), which is about learning to embrace chaos a little bit. It’s completely improvised and, in a way, it doesn't make sense. But it's more like intuitive playing with the material, just moving it from one place to the other. That's a reflection of a longer process that I'm going through, like learning to accept that sometimes as humans we are not as organised, it's not always a well-structured song. Sometimes it's very chaotic and that's beautiful as well, so that's an indirect influence. But for sure, the tracks ‘Gloria’ and ‘Aba’ are for two people that I love deeply.

What would you like listeners to take away from the album? 

A concrete message? No. It's definitely a presentation of something that’s much more raw than I've ever done before, which I guess is a good message to convey: that it's okay to present yourself in a way that is sometimes fragile or vulnerable. It's a great thing to be exposed like this. I’ve also learned that once you put music out in the world, you have no idea how it's going to be accepted or in what conditions people will hear it; so I think there is this sort of letting go or acceptance that takes place once you release it. It will no longer be mine, so whatever it does to the listener, I'll be happy with it.

Who are your greatest influences?

Definitely the usual suspects: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel – these are amazing pillars. Thinking of later influences, I like the usual suspects of jazz history: Herbie Hancock, Art Tatum, and the modern guys: Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett, and Nina Simone too. I've been in love with Cuban music for many, many years; there's a guy called Alain Pérez that I really love. I live in Spain, so I'm very connected to flamenco, but I also like Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía and The Beatles. I'm an avid music listener, so there’s a bit of everything!

Am I right in thinking that there’s more to come, that hopefully this is the first of many solo volumes? 

Yes, for sure. I think a solo record, whether it's solo piano or any other album, is the most faithful snapshot of where a person is in relation to music. I decided to start this journey now, and I'll continue to release solo albums which will act like a little bit of a snapshot until I can't play anymore. It’s a chance to follow my relationship with the piano without anything else –  without other musicians, without production, without electronics – just in its most naked form. I think it could be a very, very beautiful thing, one that would be really nice to look back on throughout the years. To listen to this record and then see what has happened when I release a solo record in 50 years. It’s a lovely thing to do.

How would you describe your musical evolution so far? 

The early days are ones of studying and learning, building the language and your toolkit. Dealing with technique, harmony, chords and learning how to follow a form or shape a melody. That exploration never ends, I will always have more challenges and will need to improve my technique. I’ll always have to look for ways to strengthen my ears and dissect the music I listen to, or how quickly I can understand what's happening around me and do something with it. 

Honing your craft, I feel, is a little bit like language. When you get to a certain point you’re able to have a fluent conversation, form sentences, or follow an idea through. Getting to that place though includes having a lot of tools that you need to have built up already: to know how to conjugate, connect words, or how to syntax correctly. But when you get to a point where it's more fluent, then the challenges of transcending beyond that comes down to things like courage. Musically, that could be like dealing with your ego, daring to go on stage to play weird stuff, learning how to deal with mistakes and learning how to embrace silence. I think those things are more abstract, but to me they belong to a later stage of musical development. To me, that's where the interesting stuff starts happening. It's like, “okay, you know the piano, you’ve learned it. But what are you going to do with it? What poems are you going to write with the words that you know how to say?” That goes hand in hand with continuous development and never stopping as a practitioner to learn the craft, but also having the courage to play some weird stuff. Because, why not? Let's see what happens!

Solo: Miniatures & Tales is available for Streaming & Download and Vinyl from Friday 2nd May 2025 with Naïve Records.