06.06.2025 | Artist
Jon Balke, Norwegian keyboardist, composer, improviser, arranger, ensemble leader and conceptualist, turns 70 on June 7. He’s covered a lot of ground, artistically, since making his ECM debut as a teenage pianist with Arild Andersen’s band on Clouds In My Head back in 1975. The broad range has lately included a series of exploratory albums recontextualizing the nature of solo piano performance, subtly incorporating environmental sounds on Warp and Discourses and diving deeply, via processing, into the interior life of the tone on this year’s Skrifum. The almost scientific, inner-directed nature of the solo work is strongly contrasted by the emotionally powerful and outgoing Siwan group project led by Balke, which has provided one of music’s very best arguments for multicultural collaboration.
Inspired by the poetry and the legends of Al-Andalus, its tales of artists and scholars of different faiths exchanging ideas, Siwan brings together strongly individual musicians from different backgrounds, all committed to an ideal of creative cooperation. The albums, so far, are Siwan, Nahnou Houm and Hafla. The group will be back on the road in 2026, with concerts planned in Algeria, Norway and Italy.
Other Balke projects on ECM include the improvising trio Jøkleba, with trumpeter/vocalist Per Jørgensen and drummer Audun Kleive, and the dynamic percussion forum Batagraf. The Magnetic North Orchestra and Oslo 13 gave early evidence of Balke’s feeling for distinctive sound-colour combinations in his writing and arrangements, and he was also a founding member of Masqualero, with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, Nils Petter Molvær and Tore Brunborg – a group revived at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2024 (with Gard Nilssen substituting for the late Christensen). As a sideman, Balke has appeared on ECM recordings with Sidsel Endresen and Mathias Eick, and also contributed – as player, composer and co-producer – to Miki N’Doye’s Tuki. N’Doye, the Gambian-born drummer, mbira-player and vocalist, worked with Jon Balke in the Afro-jazz band E’Olen in the 1970s, their between-the-idioms endeavours setting the stage for projects to come. Balke has since created much music in many different contexts over the decades, all of it distinguished by a rare spirit of cultural open-mindedness.
For more news of Jon Balke’s current and upcoming activities, visit his web page www.jonbalke.info
Photo © Kerstin Siemonsen
