Gisela Horat is a Swiss, Zürich-based classically trained pianist and composer who gravitated into improvised music more than twenty years ago. Her music draws on personal experiences, memories and observations of a musician who grew up in a small mountain village in the Swiss canton of Uri, and has developed her highly personal compositional and improvisational language. Her music stresses her austere, minimalist language that values patience, silence and the expressive weight of individual notes. She often incorporates experimental prepared piano techniques – including felt, cymbals and seashells placed directly on the strings – to introduce unexpected textures and elements of chance. She names Erik Satie and Bill Evans as her main influences.
The double album Trio Solo was recorded over four days at Gabriel Recording in Stalden in November 2024 and October 2025. It is her seventh trio record – with double bass player Simon Iten and drummer Samuel Büttiker, who have accompanied Horat in the last decade – and fourth solo album. The album explores insightful meeting points between modern jazz, minimalism and free improvisation through eight trio pieces and eleven solo pieces, often repeating the trio pieces. These pieces were shaped by introspective stillness, deep listening, and emotional restraint, elements that are often missing in our hectic world.
Horat Trio is by no means a typical modern jazz trio. Her compositions lack a clear structure or familiar, defined rhythmic mode and intentionally avoid expressions of virtuosity, asking the listener to imagine how these less-is-more compositions can unfold. These mostly lyrical compositions are comprised of a few skeletal lines that imagine bold strokes on an empty canvas, using silence as an essential element. Horat demands profound trust, sharp instincts, egalitarian-collective dynamics, and complete freedom from her trio to transform into organic yet completely unpredictable statements through free improvisation, where every note and gesture carries great significance. The 16-minute «Einfach müde» («Simply tired» best captures Horat’s approach, exploring abstract, reductive gestures with endless patience to finally find their crystalline melodic essence.
The solo piano pieces distill Horat’s approach even further. The dramatic melodic threads are as important as the emptiness and space that embrace them, and even the sparse musical gestures can carry the greatest emotional resonance. As with her trio, Horat addresses inner turmoil, melancholy, and the daily struggle with oneself and the world, radiating her need to find calmness and surrender in the fleeting moments. Horat often experiments with the prepared piano’s resonant and percussive timbral qualities and lets the sounds linger on. She revisits a few of her previous pieces and reflects on her own changed perspectives of the thin line between the composed and the spontaneously improvised.
Eyal Hareuveni
Gisela Horat (piano, prepared piano), Simon Iten (double bass), Samuel Büttiker (drums)
