The relationship between Iaies and his instrument is, above all, an emotional and spiritual one. He expresses this in the first person on his website: “My love for music is, above all, my love for the piano. Love and gratitude. The piano gave my life meaning. To place my hands on the keyboard is to be safe, to come home.”

For Adrián Iaies, playing tango has been a very particular passion since his earliest recordings. His love for these beautiful songs, and his gratitude towards their perfect melodies, have given him the opportunity to tell his story and speak in the first person without this repertoire – an unusual choice for a jazz musician – compromising his identity as a jazz artist.

Iaies’s relationship with this repertoire is as natural as that found in the way Bill Evans, Tommy Flanagan or Hank Jones – to name a few of his greatest idols – approached the American popular songbook. And while it is true that, throughout his extensive career and prolific discography, both under his own name and in trio and duo settings, Iaies has devoted himself to his own compositions and to the repertoire traditionally associated with jazz musicians – jazz songs and standards – his connection with the tangos he explored on his early albums, Nostalgias y otros vicios and, especially, the highly acclaimed Las Tardecitas de Minton’s, has always remained strong and beyond question. It was with the latter that he received the first of the four Grammy Award nominations with which he has been honoured.

Less than a year ago, Iaies released another solo piano album, this time recorded live at one of Buenos Aires’ most intimate and welcoming jazz clubs: Live at Prez: We’ll Be Together Again. The album features a repertoire of jazz standards by composers such as Burt Bacharach and Johnny Mandel, as well as compositions by the person he describes as “his favourite tango composer: Thelonious Monk”.

ADRIÁN IAIES was born in Buenos Aires in 1960. He is a pianist, composer, arranger and producer. His artistic career spans more than four decades. Through his extensive body of work, he has established himself as one of the defining figures of Argentine jazz. Held in high regard by colleagues and young musicians alike, Adrián is a passionate pianist, a tireless worker in the field of music and an indispensable bridge between the forms of expression found in international jazz and his beloved Buenos Aires.

He was artistic director of the Festival Internacional Buenos Aires Jazz as well as of the Usina del Arte, one of the city’s most significant cultural venues. He has been nominated for a Latin Grammy four times – for the albums “Las tardecitas de Minton’s” (2000), “Tango Reflections” (2002), “Las cosas tienen movimiento” (2003) and “La casa de un pianista de jazz” (2018). Iaies has also composed music for several films and has released nearly thirty albums.

He has performed on stages all over the world with various ensembles and a diverse repertoire, including at Lincoln Center (New York), the Performing Arts Center (Miami), at the San Sebastián Festival, the Oslo World Music Festival, the Semana del Jazz Latino (Madrid), the Ibirapuera Auditorium (São Paulo), the Metropolitan Opera (Tel Aviv) and the Vancouver Festival, amongst many other venues.

He has shared the stage with artists including Brad Mehldau, Ron Carter, Stanley Jordan, Bebo Valdés, the Yellowjackets, Lee Konitz, Richard Bona, Dino Saluzzi, Kenny Werner, Toots Thielemans and Pedro Aznar.