Pianist Ignasi Terraza releases live album from his Palau de la Musica tribute concert

Ignasi Terraza, the Catalan jazz pianist born in 1962 and blind since about the age of ten, has released a live album called Long Play 45 at Palau de la Musica, and the applause has deliberately been left in. The recording documents a June 2025 concert held in his honor at Barcelona's Palau de la Musica Catalana, a 1908 modernista concert hall, with the title referring to both the venue and four and a half decades of Terraza's career, a run the press materials describe as more than just a concert recording, but a portrait of that whole career.

The album opens and closes with solo piano pieces: John Lewis's "Django" to start, where Terraza works through echoes of stride piano, Errol Garner and Art Tatum, and Michel Legrand's "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" as a closing, encore-like performance. After the opener he is joined by his regular trio, bassist Jasen Weaver, originally from New Orleans, and drummer Esteve Pi, a rhythm section reviewer Sebastian Scotney described as communicating with obvious ease.

From there, three guests gradually raise the energy: Greek-born, New York-based vibraphonist Christos Rafalides on a Terraza original called "Good Vibes for Milt," in a nod to Milt Jackson's style, and Australian-born tenor saxophonist Adrian Cunningham on "5am Blues," which opens into solos around the whole band. The final guest, singer Sara Dowling, joins for "I Hadn't Anyone Till You," a song she and Terraza had already recorded in a different arrangement, in the spirit of Count Basie's "Cute," on last year's studio trio album Stargazers.

UK Jazz News reviewer Sebastian Scotney singled out how the crowd's reaction builds across the record, moving from respectful applause after the earlier pieces to a full wall of whistling and yelling by the climactic group performance of Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing." He pointed to the album as evidence of Dowling's rising profile on the Spanish and Catalan scenes, writing that UK audiences who have heard her sing live will recognize how fully she commits to a performance, and voicing hope that she returns to sing in the UK again.

The album is a digital-only release on Switrecords, and lands on the release calendar as a document of both a specific night and a career that has quietly shaped Barcelona's jazz scene for more than 40 years.