John Carroll Kirby’s new album Piano Works 2016-2026 collects fourteen impromptu pieces, composed and recorded whenever he had the opportunity to sit at a piano while on the road. “Valentino” was written a long time ago, and John says, “I always liked the chords. When I played it live, people always reacted to it, so I recorded it in a cabin in rural New Zealand last year.”
Listen to “Valentino”
Listen to “Suntory”
Pre-order John Carroll Kirby – Piano Works 2016-2026
The pieces on Piano Works were recorded in Los Angeles, Rome, Tokyo, Wollongong (Australia), rural New Zealand and London, some of which were recovered from emails and unnamed folders after Kirby lost his home and hard drives in the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, LA. Kirby calls them “a record of my off-time over the years where I’m at a piano and try to compose some piano music, really as an exercise. They were almost always written in the context of ‘I will only be at this piano for a day or two, what can I put down?’ Most of the pieces have an impromptu feel. Very improvised, or meant to sound improvised, or at least written in one sitting.”
Piano Works also 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, including two tours across North America with Khruangbin. But one mode sustains the other, as he explains: the collected pieces on Piano Works are a document of his 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.”
