Piano Works 2016-2026 collects fourteen impromptu pieces by composer and producer John Carroll Kirby, written whenever he had the opportunity to sit at a piano while on the road.
These mostly solo works for piano were recorded in Los Angeles, Rome, Tokyo, Wollongong (Australia), rural New Zealand and London. Piano Works marks a departure from the full-band sound of recent albums Blowout and Septet, which Kirby has spent the past years performing live around
the world. The album is a study in piano repertoire: Baroque, Romantic, Impressionist, jazz, minimalist, atonal, and more. Most of the pieces have an impromptu feel – improvised, or meant to sound improvised, or at least written in one sitting.
The collected pieces on Piano Works are a document of Kirby’s life as a piano player and touring musician, and “serve as the melodic / harmonic lexicon for what would inform all my other compositions of the past ten years.”