Jon Balke (NO)

About

Jon Balke is a Norwegian jazz pianist with a restless creative streak that has taken him well beyond the boundaries of straight ahead jazz. Leading the Oslo 13 and Masqualero groups in the early 1980s helped establish him as one of Norway's foremost jazz composers, and from there he kept pushing into new territory. The percussion ensemble Batagraf, which he formed in 2002, shows his interest in rhythm as a compositional force, while Siwan, the project he created with singer Amina Alaoui in 2007, weaves together jazz, classical Arabic music and medieval poetry into something genuinely hard to categorise. He also dreamed up Ekstremjazz, a series of multimedia concerts at the Vossajazz festival that pair live music with parachuting, paragliding and BMX biking. His 2016 solo piano concept Warp adds live electronics to the grand piano, keeping his sound perpetually in motion.