Alfred's Group Piano

Group Listening’s brilliant first album, Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol.1, was a haunting, meditative and lovingly considered selection box of musical reworkings. It featured rearranged tracks by the likes of Arthur Russell, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. Fast forward a couple of years, a remix album of Vol.1, 12” What’s A Girl To Do? - featuring a re-work of the Fatima Yamaha club staple - an EP of re-arrangements with Cate Le Bon from her LP Reward, a remix of Lambchop’s This Is What I Wanted To Tell You and the pair started Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol.2 from an altogether different vantage point.

Stuttgarter Wolfgang Dauner approaches legendary status as one of Germany’s most inventive pianist-composers. Here the quartet jumps onto a bouncy Take The A Train, riding on to Dauner’s own Waltz for a Young Girl with luscious soprano and piano solos. On Ellington’s Take The Coltrane the band rides out on a modern blues. Swiss pianist Elsie Bianchi was popular throughout the 50’s and 60’s as pianist/pianist. Her Baron Lazor features a relaxed, swinging blues, while she interprets What Is This Thing Called Love with a bluesy flair and some hip quotes. Dieter Reith co-wrote the music for 1972 Munich Olympics and worked with the likes of Stan Getz and Art Farmer.

Ingrid Haebler became one of the 20th Century's leading interpreters of the Viennese classic piano composers. She came to the piano as a little girl, making her public debut in Salzburg at the age of eleven. She studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Vienna Academy, and the Geneva Conservatory. She also was a pupil of the French pianist Marguerite Long., She won two prizes in 1954, one in Geneva and one in a Schubert competition at Geneva.

The Gloriosa Piano Trio is one of the finest piano trios based in the U.S. today. This program includes the wonderful Saint-Saens Trio No. 2 with a work by Piazzolla, and two contemporary American works, both from 2016. “Driven by lush violin-and-cello unison melodies” and a timbre that is “fuller than the brain imagines three musicians can sound” (Jon Sobel, BlogCritics), the Gloriosa Piano Trio burst onto the music scene in January 2014 as brightly as the flame lily for which the group is named.

First Circle is a Grammy Award winning album by Pat Metheny Group released in 1984. On the album Pat Metheny is joined by Lyle Mays on piano and keyboards, Steve Rodby on bass, drummer Paul Wertico and vocalist and percussionist Pedro Aznar. The album won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance in 1985. Pat Metheny has remarked that this is an important album in the Group's history for a number of reasons, among them being that the Group's core lineup on the album remained unchanged for over 15 years and it was the final Group album released on the ECM record label.