Nik Bärtsch

Nik Bärtsch’s music is made to be malleable. Though the Swiss pianist is a diligent composer with a distinct sense of groove and structure, as limned for a quarter-century by his bands Mobile and Ronin, he likes to hear his musical “modules” evolve. In those groups, after all, he moves pieces in and out of rotation, revisiting work based on the players and chemistry around him. “The idea of the perfect masterpiece is an idea of musicologists,” he once explained. “Composers, improvisers, even classical interpreters know that the process of transformation through creative listening is never finished.” Though he has made only two solo albums in his long career, they are both showcases of this ethic, of how considering a work complete is to sentence it to death.

Bärtsch’s second solo album, 2021’s Entendre, was a compelling study in such flexibility. He resurrected, for instance, “Modul 5,” from his debut 20 years prior, hammering at its intro with an insistence that recalled his youth as drummer. He slowly swept upward into flurries of notes that recalled Keith Jarrett and Arvo Pärt, a melody peeking through sheets of sustain. Bärtsch opened the album by combining two more modules, his love of American funk sharing space with a Debussy sense of delicateness. And on “Modul 26,” cut long before with Mobile, he used interlocking rhythmic cells to suggest the pulsing works of Steve Reich reduced to one piano, expertly played in real time. A confident bandleader, Bärtsch is also an inquisitive soloist, allowing his enthusiasm for his instrument to reshape his work.