Jon Balke

Norwegian pianist Jon Balke pursues an experimental path that fuses elements drawn from contemporary jazz, post-bop, rock, folk, global traditions, and classical sources. From the close of the 1970s onward he has taken part in a wide array of projects spanning Europe, Africa, India, and the United States. In the first half of the 1980s he gained recognition as a composer by creating scores for stage productions, gallery installations, and chamber ensembles while also writing extensively for jazz configurations that ranged from intimate groups to large orchestras. His eight-piece Magnetic North Orchestra, active from the 1992 album Further through the 2004 release Diverted Travels, featured an unusual lineup of three string players, two trumpets, two saxophones, and keyboards. After issuing Statements in 2005 he formed the percussion-centered ensemble Batagraf, which delivered Say and Play in 2011 and Delights of Decay in 2015. He has additionally collaborated with visual artists and dancers. Across both his performances and his writing Balke reveals an inquisitive spirit, forever exploring fresh instrumental colors. Since 2009 he has directed the international ethnic-music group Siwan, whose recordings encompass the award-winning self-titled debut from 2009, Nahnou Houm in 2017, and Hafla in 2022.

His first album, On and On, appeared in 1991. The following year he made his ECM debut with Nonsentration. As a member of Magnetic North Orchestra he also recorded several projects with the group, among them Kaynos in 2002 and Diverted Travels in 2004. In 2007 Balke joined forces with like-minded players—including trumpeter Jon Hassell, violinist Kheir Eddine M'Kachiche, and vocalist Amina Alaoui—to establish Siwan, an ensemble devoted to Andalusian culture and its attempted eradication during the Inquisition. The self-titled 2009 album received the German Record Critics’ Jahrespreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. A year later he occupied the piano chair on Lars Möller’s 2010 Imogena release Trialogue, which also featured Morten Lund. He convened his own percussion ensemble Batagraf for the 2013 album Say and Play, fronted by a vocalist and incorporating piano, electronics, and ten percussionists. After touring with the group Balke paused to reconsider his direction.

When he resurfaced it was with the 2016 solo-piano collection Warp, in which vocals, field recordings, and live electronics were layered onto the original performances to alter the listener’s sense of the material. In January of the next year he reconfigured Siwan around a new singer and oud player, Algerian-Andalusian Mona Boutchebak, and entered a Copenhagen studio. The concept, which also incorporated the bowed-stringed kemençe and goblet tombak drum alongside his keyboards, examined how global history might have unfolded had Judaism, Islam, and Christianity continued to coexist after the events in Andalusia. Drawing poetry from Persian Sufi mystic Attar, Saint John of the Cross, poet and playwright Lope de Vega, and additional sources for Boutchebak to sing, he assembled the album Nahnou Houm, issued by ECM that November. He returned to Batagraf for the 2018 Jazzland recording Delights of Decay, which featured Mathias Eick and Trygve Seim.

Balke then resumed his partnership with producer Manfred Eicher to extend the approach first explored on Warp four years earlier. Layered soundscapes of processed material, which he characterized as “distorted reflections and reverberations from the world,” intertwine with the resonant sound of his piano while reflecting on political and social language. Comprising sixteen concise pieces, the project was titled Discourses and appeared in spring 2020. He revisited Siwan for the 2022 album Hafla. On this occasion he set poems by the independent-minded eleventh-century Ummayad princess of Cordoba, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, and lover of the renowned al-Andalus poet Ibn Zaydun, delivering them fragment by fragment to Mona Boutchebak for her own Arabic translations. The recording was released in April and followed by a European tour.