One Take, Eight Greens: Simon Sieger's played through
An hour-long solo piano improvisation, captured in a single uninterrupted take.
Most solo piano records are assembled. Pieces are written, takes are stacked, the best moments are stitched together until the seams disappear. played through, the new album from Simon Sieger, does the opposite and tells you so in its title. This is one improvisation, played start to finish, captured in a single uninterrupted take. What you hear is what happened in the room, in the order it happened. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is fixed in post.
That nerve pays off. It’s one of the most alive piano records I’ve heard this year.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the company he keeps will. Born in France in 1986, Sieger is a multi-instrumentalist in the old, unfashionable sense — pianist, trombonist, tubist, arranger, composer — who learned the trade at the elbow of his father, a saxophonist steeped in the creative-music scene of the eighties. He’s worked with the drummer Famoudou Don Moye since 2015, joined the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 2019, and has been part of Moor Mother’s orbit since 2023. His playing here sits squarely in that lineage of Great Black Music, free jazz, and collective improvisation — you can feel Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Hassan Ibn Ali, Elmo Hope, and the Art Ensemble moving under the surface — and yet the architecture is entirely his own, built in real time and never repeated.
Green, in eight tongues
The conceit is simple and quietly brilliant. The album divides its single performance into eight indexed sections, and every one of them is the word green in a different language: “green,” “vert,” “yeşil,” “grün,” “verde,” “lùsè,” “akhdar,” and a final eighth that closes the cycle. One color, said eight ways; one improvisation, walked through eight rooms that all open onto the same courtyard. The cover image makes the theme literal — moss spilling green over a weathered red wall, water shimmering above it — but the music never illustrates. It just keeps finding new dialects for the same idea.
Because it’s a continuous take, the “tracks” behave less like songs than like movements or weather systems. Sieger moves between groove and rupture, density and silence, lyricism and abstraction, and the transitions are the point. A passage will lock into an insistent, motoric figure and then dissolve, mid-thought, into something searching and harmonically unmoored. Lines turn modal and refuse to resolve where a Western ear expects them to — a friction that rewards close listening rather than smoothing itself away. You are hearing a musician decide, second by second, where to go next, with no safety net and no rhythm section to catch him.
The center of gravity: “yeşil”
If there’s a peak, it arrives at the third section. “Yeşil” — Turkish for green — is the longest stretch here at nearly ten minutes, and it’s where the whole performance seems to gather its weight. It opens with a small repeated figure that behaves less like a theme than a question asked over and over with slightly different inflection each time, then builds the way a long conversation builds: not by getting louder but by getting deeper, accumulating implication until it has nowhere to go but release. When it finally lets go, the quiet that follows feels earned rather than incidental.
It’s also the section chosen to carry the record’s visual identity. The accompanying video — abstract green filaments of light, an oscilloscope rendering of the sound itself glowing against near-total black — is one of the rare cases where a “music visualizer” actually serves the music. There’s no footage of hands on keys, no soft-focus mood lighting. The sound is turned literally into light: every transient and sustained tone becomes a living green thread that breathes and frays in time with the playing.
The room itself
A one-take record lives or dies on how it’s captured, and played through is captured beautifully. Recorded at the CRR in Strasbourg, France, and mixed and mastered by Eda Er — who also made the “yeşil” video — the album keeps the piano close and honest. You hear the instrument as a physical object: the felt, the wood, the resonant bloom after a chord, the small mechanical sounds a piano makes when no one is trying to scrub them out. The 24-bit master has the air and depth to make that intimacy count. It’s the sound of a real room on a real day, which is exactly what a performance like this needs.
What keeps the record from becoming a private exercise is how much shape Sieger finds without a script. An improviser’s instincts are doing the work of a composer’s pen — phrases land where they should, ideas return transformed, and sections end a beat earlier than you’d expect, which is its own kind of generosity. By the time the eighth and final pass fades, you have the sense of having followed a single sustained train of thought from one end to the other, rather than flipping through a folder of unrelated cuts.
For listeners who know Sieger from the Art Ensemble’s maximalism or Moor Mother’s confrontational collages, played through is a chance to hear that same intelligence alone and unguarded. And for anyone who’s never heard a note of his work, it’s an unusually direct front door: no overdubs, no edits, no homework — just one musician, one piano, and an hour of thinking out loud that trusts you to follow.
Put it on without skipping. The album was played through in one take; it’s best heard the same way.
played through by Simon Sieger is out now (digital, 24-bit/48kHz).
Piano: Simon Sieger. Recorded at the CRR, Strasbourg, France; mixed and mastered by Eda Er. The “yeşil” video was created by Eda Er.
Also available at nyxpherelabel.com.
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