Glauco Venier - Miniatures album review: modest but hauntingly beautiful

Italian pianist Glauco Venier is best known for his work with vocalist Norma Winstone and reeds player Klaus Gesing.

Their trio albums for Manfred Eicher’s ECM have revealed a pianist with a delicacy of touch and a melancholic frame of mind, but this solo debut for the German label places him in a lineage that includes some of the most technically gifted pianists in modern jazz.

Rather than compete, Venier takes the form in another direction, adding gongs, bells and ‘tuned metals’ as background colours, in response to which he offers simple, elegiac improvisations which owe more to texture and timbre than to linear melody.

Recorded in the natural acoustics of Lugano's Auditorio Stelio Molo, Miniatures is a creditably modest but hauntingly beautiful addition to the label's solo piano catalogue.