Songs With Words

Songs With Words is the new album by Malakoff Kowalski together with pianists Igor Levit, Johanna Summer, and Chilly Gonzales. The album features miniatures by classical composers coupled with sung poems by American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Reflecting on Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, this extraordinary quartet presents a new kind of music, and possibly a whole new genre that has never before appeared in this form either in classical music, jazz, or pop.

In his liner notes, Kowalski, the Berlin-based German-American composer and singer of Persian origin, succinctly describes the album thus: “It took about five years to birth these twelve songs. They were assembled from both famous and lesser-known miniatures by Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Aram Khachaturian, Maurice Ravel, Edvard Grieg, Amy Beach, Germaine Tailleferre, Claude Debussy, and Gabriel Fauré. I kept unearthing timeless, intimate, vulnerable poems from Ginsberg’s oeuvre, and for some reason, again and again, these poems, with little or no reworking, functioned very naturally as song lyrics. The quiet, inner-directed vocals strictly followed the piano’s motifs and themes, while the piano parts, in turn, stuck to their original versions, with only the most imperceptible of alterations here and there.”

The result is a song cycle reminiscent of Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, and David Bowie, infused with the musicality of Bill Evans, Kurt Weill, and Michel Legrand. Kowalski describes it as a great stroke of luck that three of his closest musician friends played the piano on this album in order to transform a mere concept into actual music: “Three personalities with contrasting pianistic spirits, as distinct as the material we engaged with here: Igor Levit, whom I love above all for his three great Bs: Busoni, Bach, Brahms. Johanna Summer, who improvises between jazz and classical so freely and so thoroughly that it makes me dizzy with joy. And Chilly Gonzales, who with Solo Piano and its successors, has done more for contemporary miniatures than any other living composer.” With the album Songs With Words, this remarkable group has created a fascinating interplay between the pristine European piano tradition and the American poetry of the Beat Generation.