Tania Giannouli interview: “What I do is maybe not mainstream jazz but it is jazz”

Of all the ‘live’ performance groupings in jazz and improvised music, the duo surely presents the biggest challenge. Much like playing solo, once you’re up on stage there’s really nowhere to hide. Yet of all the various instrumental matchups, the piano duo may also be the hardest to love.

Let me make a case. When pianists go face-to-face across Steinway grands, too often it can turn into something resembling a duel rather than a duo, a cat-and-mouse game of who can outsmart who, or a kind of jokey exchange in which the pianists seem to be having much more fun than the audience. Doubling up on the piano’s already rich orchestral-like palette as well can make for dense, cluttered textures; trying to figure out who’s playing what exactly tends to distract from the listening experience.

Thankfully there are a few notable exceptions. One of them is arriving at the London Jazz Festival (LJF) this month when the renowned ECM artist and Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch and the rising star Greek pianist-composer Tania Giannouli join grands on the Wigmore Hall recital stage. In their work to date, both are in the business of letting the music breathe. Sharing a common purpose is also key to a duo’s success.

“It’s not a problem what you say because we try to make the whole thing sound better and Nik’s language is minimalist and mine is very melodic so it’s more or less we have two roles but of course this doesn’t mean that the roles don’t change during the concert,” Giannouli tells me on a video call from her home in Athens. “Certainly it’s not about virtuosity or playing too much to impress. Both of us are adding elements to the other person’s music so it’s very interesting because then it becomes something new. It’s really, really exciting what we do because there’s no egos. There’s not the idea of who will play more or who the best pianist is. It’s what can I do so that the other pianist can sound better and make the music as a whole sound better. This is the main idea behind it. Yes there is some improvisation too of course. As well it’s one set as we do it like a journey.”

Giannouli maps out her studio albums in much the same way, especially her most recent widely-acclaimed Solo album from 2023 that she’s described as, "a very personal journey; a story narrated without filters".

The concert at LJF will be just the fourth time she and Bärtsch have played together and she says they’ll be adding in new compositions for the first time. The pair originally met at Germany’s Enjoy Festival in 2022, where they were both artists-in-residence.

“During this time I had the idea it would be nice to play something together with Nik because I realised that although our music languages are not similar we have a similar approach to the idea of a solo piano concert”, she says. “For example Nik and I both play one set that doesn’t stop anywhere and we don’t talk. So I asked him if we could try playing together some time and he immediately said yes. Some months later we met in Zurich where Nik lives and we had a concert at Moods Jazz club so it was our first try at playing together and it was very good. It’s music of mine and music of Nik’s and we have some improvisation inside and around these pieces and some are very recognisable because they’re pieces Nik is playing for many years with Ronin and the same with me as these are tracks I play either with my trio or solo. So the next year Enjoy Jazz invited us again for a proper concert this time and it was amazing, and then we played in Athens for the third time last January.”

In fact the instrumental duo has been a format regularly visited by Giannouli both ‘live’ and in the studio since releasing her eerily avant-minimalist debut in 2012 with Portuguese saxophonist Paulo Chagas; through to her most abstract release Rewa in 2018 with traditional Maori instrumentalist Rob Thorne (taonga puoro), a connection initially prompted by her genre-defying New Zealand indie record label Rattle.

“Playing with other musicians is always rewarding,” she says. “It’s another kind of interaction and you discover a lot of things in your music, in your performance too. It’s completely different from playing solo. But when it’s only two persons I think this dialogue and this interaction is more intense because you have to be alert all the time. It’s not about a band where you can add something here or there. Rema for me is my most special project and was totally improvisational. So we never met before, we just got into the studio. I had prepared some ideas in advance but when we were there I realised it doesn’t work because this guy plays stones and shells. So we said, 'okay, let’s just play free and see what comes out'. It was very, very, very interesting. I’ve played with Sun-Mi Hong, a Korean drummer, in concert and I have actually recorded an album which is not released yet with trumpeter Arve Henriksen. So the duo format is extremely interesting for me.”

Although it’s clear that cross-cultural collaborations are vital to Giannouli’s music that in itself is a big generalisation. Other projects include her work in mixed-media contexts (visual arts, cinema and with text) while there has to be very few musicians that can say they’ve improvised for 10 hours inside of an active volcano (as she did in 2016). Above all else then, Giannouli is an artist with a passion for new adventure and sonic experimentation.

“I consider myself firstly a composer and secondly a pianist,” she says. “I have studied both academically: a Classical Composition Diploma which in the Greek system means you have to go through advanced harmony, contrapuntal fugue and then you are allowed to study composition. Since I was a child, composition was what was interesting for me and I still think that composition is first and the performance or the piano is the medium for that. Probably my background and studies play also a very big role in that because music is not only the melody, the harmony and the rhythm but it’s also about sounds, about noises, about their soundscape, about what you can create there even when you don’t play the keys. That’s my approach in general. I think in mostly a compositional way than like a pianist. Maybe this is why I have a tendency to explore things, new sounds, new ways. ‘What can I do next with the piano’?”

Giannouli also leads a couple of trios – Hemera with Michele Rabbia (drums, electronics) and Daniele Roccato (double bass); and on In Fading Light, an album released in 2020 with Andreas Polyzogopoulos on trumpet and Kyriakos Tapakis on oud - which come from a contemporary jazz lineage deriving inspiration from global folk music (including her native Greece), avant-electronica and Baroque to Romantic through to more ambient/minimalist European concert music idioms, from JS Bach through to Arvo Pärt.

“I have been listening to jazz since I was a teenager when I discovered Keith Jarrett,” she says. “We were studying in the conservatory at the time and I was always showing the class my compositions and someone made the comment, 'this sounds so much like ECM' and at the time I had no idea what that meant. But then I discovered what ECM was. I play mostly in jazz festivals because of the improvisation but in a wider way as well what I do is maybe not mainstream jazz but it is jazz.”

Speaking about her visit to London for the Festival this month she’s sorry that, “unfortunately it will be a very short visit. The previous day I have a concert with my trio in Rome and the next day I play with Nik in Poland so it will be really an express trip. But I’m looking forward to this concert that’s the highlight of the whole tour… if not the year!”

It’s not at all unlikely we could soon be adding the London Jazz Festival to that highlights list.

Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch play Wigmore Hall on 22 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today