Perhaps better known as a vibraphonist, Karl Berger is also a capable and engaging pianist. This recording consists of a kind of suite of seventeen "miniatures", solo piano pieces of between two and five minutes in length. They're ruminations, loose in structure, quite generally melodic in content. Satie inevitably springs to mind and, indeed, some of the tracks are quite akin: the theme of "miniature2", for example, is very close to Satie's "Fifth Nocturne". But if one is searching for a rough parallel, one might better refer to the earlier solo works by Keith Jarrett, notably the album, "Facing You". Berger doesn't get to the romantic/emotional extremes Jarrett did on that date, but there's something of the same feel, tenuously connected to the blues and even older show tunes, but imbued with a pastoral sense, a feeling of rural quietude.
The problem is that almost all of the pieces blend together. They're all at the approximately the same languid tempo and their melodic character doesn't vary all that much, save for the final piece which generates some more rapid rhythms and criss-crossing melodic lines. Several of these, scattered amongst other, wider-ranging pieces would have worked just fine. One after another, however, for all their relaxed attractiveness, they begin to pall. They're not rigorous enough to fall into any kind of obsessive minimalist character the way, say, Tom Johnson's pieces sometimes do. They feel as though they're striving to say something different but end up repeating the same idea.
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