My First Piano Malakoff Kowalski

• 1 Shorou 03:28
• 2 My First Piano 03:04
• 3 Is It Spring? 02:37
• 4 Dimanche Soir 03:09
• 5 Serge Chez Juliette - Encore Une Fois 03:20
• 6 65 East India Row 03:14
• 7 Euphoria, Lobster & Champagne 03:22
• 8 Olmo Rosenthal 05:09
• 9 Tehran Lullaby 03:16
• 10 Anin Goldkind 07:55
• Total Runtime 38:34

Info for My First Piano

Malakoff Kowalski was born to Persian parents in Boston, grew up in Hamburg, and lives in Berlin today. His first solo album Neue Deutsche Reiselieder was released in 2009. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung described his 2012 album, Kill Your Babies—Filmscore for an Unknown Picture, as “an album full of melancholic song sketches. As if he had cut out the pieces of a scratched copy of a Nouvelle Vague film.” In 2015, the album I Love You was released, a mix of jazz, folk and film music.

Of the many instruments that can be heard in Kowalski’s recordings, the piano has always played a significant role. And so it is on his new album, My First Piano, that is being released on April 6, 2018 on the label MPS. These ten piano pieces are described by the critic Max Dax in the liner notes as “little hybrids of finger exercises, doodling, aphorisms and the laconic. A bold, well-tempered piano player blurring the lines between classical and jazz.”

The cover image of the baby photo on the piano was discovered by accident in an old family album. Kowalski went in search of the forgotten piano from his childhood and brought it back to Berlin some thirty years later.

“My earliest childhood memories are of lying curled up under the piano stool, listening to my mother playing Bach, Brahms, Schubert and Scriabin. There are not many places or things that feel like home to me. Our family is scattered all over the world and that’s the only way I’ve ever known it. But having my old baby piano with me again, with its ivory-white rounded keys, the decorated sound holes and the unpadded stool, just like back then—this all feels a bit like home.”

Malakoff Kowalski has worked also as a film and theater composer. Over the past years, he has collaborated closely together with the filmmaker Klaus Lemke and the stage director Angela Richter. His stage music for Parzival and Faust were last to be heard at the Schauspielhaus in Cologne and the Staatstheater in Stuttgart. In the cinemas, Kowalski’s piano music can be heard now in Lisa Langseth’s film Euphoria, a drama featuring Alicia Vikander, Eva Green and Charlotte Rampling in the starring roles.

In his solo concerts on the piano, Kowalski will be presenting his newly released My First Piano, parts of the last two albums, as well as extracts from his stage and film music.

"Heartfelt music that searches, finds and gets lost again. Beautiful and addictive." (Chilly Gonzales)

Malakoff Kowalski, piano

Malakoff Kowalski
(born June 21, 1979 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA as Aram Pirmoradi) is a German-American-Persian singer, musician, composer and producer. His parents are from Tehran and he was raised in Hamburg, Germany.

In 2005, Kowalski released his debut record Action with his band Jansen & Kowalski, which he later referred to as “a memorial for a monumental failure.” In 2009, after the band had broken up, Kowalski released his first solo-album Neue Deutsche Reiselieder, a progressive and vintage Krautrock record, which included a remix of the single Andere Leute produced by German electronic music legends Deichkind. The video for Andere Leute was made by acclaimed film director Klaus Lemke. To date, Kowalski has composed the original scores for five of Lemke’s feature films.

In 2012, Kowalski released the album Kill Your Babies — Filmscore For An Unknown Picture, which was a collaboration with painter Daniel Richter, novelist Maxim Biller and Klaus Lemke. The instrumental record received excellent reviews and was praised as CD Of The Year by Arts & Culture Editor-in-Chief Claudius Seidl of Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

Kowalski simultaneously began working with theater director Angela Richter. Supernerds, their third and latest play to date, was based on interviews with whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange and premiered in 2015 in Cologne.

Malakoff Kowalski currently lives in Berlin, Germany and has resided there since 2007.

This album contains no booklet.