New York, NY (Top40 Charts) From his youth, internationally acclaimed pianist Paul Cardall has been fascinated by his European heritage and the immigration stories of his forbearers who came to the United States from a variety of nations.
Their experiences were at the heart and mind of the pianist as he improvised on a Steinway & Sons concert grand piano that became the music for his upcoming album Return Home.
In 2019, John Jennings, Vice-President of Royer Labs Microphones brought the two together. Jennings heard Paul improvise music at a dinner party in Nashville and suggested he record an album of improvisations with multi-grammy winning audio engineer Michael Bishop. Paul's prolific catalogue already had resulted in topping numerous Billboard charts and had tallied more than 3 billion lifetime streams. The idea of improvising a record was foreign to Cardall, who carefully prepared compositions before entering a studio. But the chance to work with Michael was a risk the pianist was willing to take.
The venue for their landmark session was Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory of
Music in Oberlin, Ohio, where they recorded for two days in the Clonick Hall studio. As an acclaimed Steinway artist, Paul had his choice of three magnificent Steinway and Sons grand pianos.
The resulting album, Peaceful Piano (Anthem Entertainment), featured 18 songs from the session. The album, which was released
September 2019, was featured in Mix Magazine and Forbes Magazine. Afterwards, Michael and Paul discussed recording a series of improvisational pieces inspired by Paul's European heritage and the legacy and generations the proceed. Unfortunately, Michael passed away before their new collaboration could be realized. It was during the Covid-19 Michael Bishop passed away.
In time, Paul reached out to Bishop's surviving business partner and fellow Grammy winning engineer Robert Friedrich. They discussed doing something like Peaceful Piano to honor Bishop and the legacy he'd left behind for his children and grandchildren. The idea tied into Paul's desire to compose songs about the legacy of his own forefathers.
Friedrich booked time at Ohio's Baldwin College University's Gamble Auditorium in the Kulas Musical Arts Building. To capture the experimental recording session on video, Paul hired Think Media Studios.
Music performance videos were produced and edited for Paul's YouTube channel so fans can watch the recording as it was happening live for the album.
Sitting at a Steinway & Sons model D concert grand, surrounded by cameras, in an empty theatre with Friedrich behind the stage recording every sound in the venue, Paul began improvising. The pianist utilized his familiar left- hand arpeggio style that is more commonly used on instruments which serve the role of melodic lead or ornamentation. Beethoven used arpeggios in Moonlight Sonata. Today, pop artists like The
Eagles (Hotel California) and
Coldplay (Clocks) incorporate this style. Paul has been using this method since his first album Sign of Affection was released on cassette in 1995.
After improvising several pieces Cardall shifted towards minimalistic chords allowing the listener to be aware of gradual changes. In addition, many pieces incorporated Germanic and Polish styles of counterpoint, with harmonic and motivic organization familiar in Bach and Chopin's simple piano pieces. Patterns were repeated to create an atmosphere - and introspective - causing the pianist to go deep into a personal reflection of exploring lands of his heritage.
A month later, Friedrich mixed a rough draft of 23 pieces and delivered them to Paul to do the final mix. Though the album was intended to be a solo piano record, he felt the music needed additional cinematic depth. He hired Nashville string arrangers Josée Weigand and her husband Gideon Klein to create arrangements. They had previously worked on Cardall's December album (All
Heart Publishing, 2021). Their string ensemble brought more depth to his piano pieces.
The resulting album titled Return Home is an introspective album featuring 13 pieces for piano that take listeners on a cinematic journey through the lands of his ancestors. The uniqueness of this album is that Cardall entered the studio without any material. All of the songs were improvised.
Cardall's has previously released 18 studio albums, 2 live recordings, 5 collection albums, and 2 EPs, and a dozen singles.
