“I am not an avant-gardist. Of course, I want to play new things, but I am always listening to old music. If you ask me to choose between a new record and an old record, I would buy the old record always. My house is full of old records, not contemporary records.”
Stefano Bollani was born in Milan in 1972 and grew up in Florence. He began playing piano at the age of 6 and enrolled in Florence’s Cherubini Conservatory five years later, where he received an old-fashioned classical training: “My teacher came from a very old school, the Neapolitan school of piano playing, which gave to the world people like Aldo Ciccolini, or Ricardo Muti”. He first performed professionally at 15, initially in pop contexts. He [...]
“I am not an avant-gardist. Of course, I want to play new things, but I am always listening to old music. If you ask me to choose between a new record and an old record, I would buy the old record always. My house is full of old records, not contemporary records.”
Stefano Bollani was born in Milan in 1972 and grew up in Florence. He began playing piano at the age of 6 and enrolled in Florence’s Cherubini Conservatory five years later, where he received an old-fashioned classical training: “My teacher came from a very old school, the Neapolitan school of piano playing, which gave to the world people like Aldo Ciccolini, or Ricardo Muti”. He first performed professionally at 15, initially in pop contexts. He began playing with the great Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava in 1996, confirming a deeper commitment to jazz. Since then, he has played with Pat Metheny, Martial Solal, Lee Konitz, Phil Woods, Gato Barbieri, Miroslav Vitouš, Richard Galliano, Michel Portal and Roberto Gatto, among many others.
Bollani first recorded for ECM in 2003, starting with a sequence of albums with Rava: Easy Living (with an all-Italian quintet), Tati (a trio with Paul Motian), The Third Man (duo) and New York Days (quintet with Motian, Mark Turner and Larry Grenadier). Bollani made his ECM debut under his own name with the modestly entitled Piano Solo in 2007, of which the Irish Times reviewer wrote: “His harmonic language is full of lovely surprises, his time impeccable, his touch wonderfully expressive, and his inventiveness always informed by an innate sense of structure”. Bollani then released Stone in the Water with his “Danish trio” (Jesper Bodlisen and Morten Lund) in 2009, which Michael J. West called one of Bollani’s “most beautiful albums [and] also one of his gentlest” . The pianist has also made duo albums for ECM with Chick Corea (an effervescent live album, Orvieto) and bandolim master, Hamilton de Holanda (O que será).
Stefano Bollani has also performed classical repertoire, composed for big band, theatre and cinema, published a novel (La Sindrome di Brontolo, 2006) and hosted a hugely popular show on Italian TV. Among his many awards is the European Jazz Prize as Musician of the Year for 2007.
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