Stefano Bollani, born in Milan on December 5, 1972, first approached the piano as a youngster to support his own singing before turning his full attention to the instrument alone. At age eleven he entered a Florence conservatory, where his studies encompassed both jazz and pop, culminating in his 1993 graduation. Shortly afterward he contributed keyboards to recordings by leading Italian pop figures including Laura Pausini, Irene Grandi, and Jovanotti; the 1996 association with the last of these introduced him to trumpeter Enrico Rava, who promptly invited the young pianist to perform with him in Paris.
Bollani accepted and soon began issuing jazz recordings in multiple formats: his longstanding Italian trio with bassist Ares Tavolazzi and drummer Walter Paoli produced the well-received Black and Tan Fantasy in 2002 and Ma L’Amore No in 2004, while early solo work surfaced on 2003’s Småt Småt and 2006’s Piano Solo. Additional trio projects included 2002’s Fleurs Bleues, featuring bassist Scott Colley and drummer Clarence Penn, and 2005’s Gleda: Songs from Scandinavia, which employed bassist Jesper Bodilsen and drummer Morten Lund; the quintet I Visionari appeared in 2006. A 2000 duo album with Tavolazzi, Mambo Italiano, had already appeared on an Italian imprint, followed in 2001 by Les Fleurs Bleues on Label Bleu. After several ECM sessions alongside Rava, Bollani signed with the label and released the widely praised Piano Solo in 2007.
The pianist also functions as a sought-after soloist in orchestral classical contexts and maintains an active broadcasting and writing career. He has appeared at festivals such as Umbria and Montreal and has shared stages with Gato Barbieri, Lee Konitz, Pat Metheny, Paolo Fresu, and Phil Woods. In 2007 he joined Rava’s trio with drummer Paul Motian on Tati and recorded the duo album The Third Man with the trumpeter. Two large-ensemble projects for Verve followed in 2008: Carioca and Big Band!. The Danish trio album Trio, featuring Bodilsen, arrived the same year, while Stone in the Water appeared on ECM in 2009.
Bollani’s 2009 duet tour with Chick Corea yielded the ECM release Orvieto. In 2010 he performed an all-Gershwin program with conductor Ricardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchester; the resulting Decca recording, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Catfish Row; Concerto in F, reached European audiences that year and the wider world in 2011. That same year Decca issued the globally lauded Sheik Yer Zappa, featuring his American quintet of vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, trombonist Josh Roseman, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jim Black. Between 2012 and 2013 he issued further duet projects—a self-titled album with Irene Grandi and O Que Será with Hamilton de Holanda—before reconvening his trio for 2014’s ECM album Joy in Spite of Everything, which added guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Mark Turner. Subsequent releases included 2015’s Arrivano Gli Alieni on Universal and 2016’s Napoli Trip.
In 2018 Bollani inaugurated his own Alobar S.R.L. imprint with Que Bom, an encounter between Italian and Brazilian idioms that reunited the Carioca rhythm section of bassist Jorge Helder, drummer Jurim Moreira, and percussionists Armando Marçal and Thiago da Serrinha and featured guests Hamilton de Holanda, Caetano Veloso, and João Bosco. The following year Alobar issued the live tribute The Music of Sasha Argov, which two Italian newspapers distributed gratis in their Sunday editions. Three decades after discovering the film of Jesus Christ Superstar at age fourteen and mastering its 1970 score, Bollani marked the musical’s fiftieth anniversary with the 2020 solo album Piano Variations on Jesus Christ Superstar on his own label.
