Pandemicity

Fire is what Josu de Solaun shed with his improvisations to the audience of the City of León Auditorium on 13th March 2021. It was an exceptional concert in which improvisations full of warmth and light now have a second life thanks to this album. panDEMi-City is the musical document - the still photo - of a unique event, an unprecedented hic et nunc in the artistic career of the great pianist born in Valencia and raised in New York. Undoubtedly, this is a milestone which makes Josu de Solaun an essential demiurge of the current world improvisation scene. de Solaun's exuberant idiomaticism, his vast musical background, provokes vertigo in the listener. de Solaun not only pays a moving tribute to Keith Jarrett, but also visits and inhabits the music of numerous composers who have been nesting in his prodigious fingers for decades, such as his favorite composers: Schumann, Janácek, Bartók, Chopin, Brahms, Enescu, Carter, Liszt or Debussy, 20th century and interwar music, music close to Russian composers such as Shostakovich, but, above all, jazz, always jazz, because for Josu de Solaun this music is his "link with popular music, folklore... Jazz has very strong vernacular roots and this music keeps me with my feet on the ground, in the atavistic, in the ancestral."