Michael Snow is a multi-talented artist who has been involved in filmmaking, sound installations and musical improvisation in his native Canada for many years. Snow Solo Piano Solo Snow is a three-disc spotlight of his skills as a piano improvisor. CD 1 (Piano antique) is comprised of Snow improvisations in the jazz idiom, and even includes a couple of tracks recorded by him on homemade 78 RPM records in the late 1940s. This CD is meant to provide background, and we are to understand that Mr. Snow came to improvisation mainly through jazz. The epic "Around Blues" serves as a musical autobiography. It starts out in classic stride piano mode and develops over the course of 40 minutes into a very sophisticated, free, modern form.

CD 2 (Piano biologique) is Mr. Snow as he exists today. It consists of somewhat lengthy, intense, free-form piano improvisations. As would be expected, jazz references are plentiful, though nothing as overt as you'll find in "Around Blues". The chef d'œuvre of Piano biologique is the 30-minute opus "Roverto". Like a kind of musical psychoanalysis, it climbs to heady heights and sinks into low, boggy valleys as it slowly reveals its intricate emotional topology. This is Snow at his best.

CD 3 (Piano mécanique is made up of works Snow composed for a computer controlling a Disklavier via MIDI (the Disklavier is a genuine concert grand piano that can be controlled by computers). Snow's purpose in writing these works seems to be the creation of music that capitalizes on both his skills as a (human) improviser and the flexibility of the Disklavier, which can perform melodic and harmonic contortions that would be impossible for humans. As is too often the case with MIDI-programmed music, however, some of these tracks come across as too rhythmically perfect, lacking the slight temporal imperfections that add luster to a human's performance. This is simply to be expected, though, as computers obviously aren't humans (yet!). The track that surprises me here is "Headline: Bird Mécanique Arabian Entendu." Borrowing riffs from Charlie Parker, it lives in the extreme high and low ranges of the piano, its odd little melodic threads slowly developing into a fascinating combination of predictability and randomness. This is computer music that doesn't sound computerized, and I find it refreshing indeed!

For my taste, three CDs is overkill for this project (I would have preferred the strongest pieces from the three CDs placed on one), but there are certainly gems to be mined here if you have several hours to kill!