| Contemporary music |
Inside Out: A Brilliant, Long-Overdue Portrait of a Singular American Composer
For more than half a century Alvin Singleton has been writing music that swings without being jazz and is rigorous without being academic, music of silences and surprises, of sparkling patterns and sudden turns, and yet his name remains little known to the public. Inside Out, the new album by Canadian pianist Jackie Leung, is the best possible way to meet him. It is the first album devoted to his solo piano works, played with extraordinary precision, imagination and love, and it is a revelation from the first bar to the last.
Born in 1940 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Alvin Singleton grew up with a church choir, a trumpet in a marching band and neighbours who played jazz, and sometimes he sat in with a jazz combo at the piano. After a brief spell in an accounting firm, a practical career his parents had hoped for, he chose music instead, studied at New York University and at Yale (with Yehudi Wyner and Mel Powell), then went to Rome on a Fulbright scholarship to work with Goffredo Petrassi. He stayed in Europe from 1971 to 1985, mostly in Austria, an experience he has described as “life-changing” and which gave him a distance, both musical and personal, from the America he had left.
Back in the United States, he became composer-in-residence of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Robert Shaw (1985–88) and later of the Detroit Symphony, taught as a visiting professor at Yale, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014. His works have been played by orchestras and chamber ensembles around the world, and his string quartets, recorded by the Momenta Quartet, were praised in The New York Times.
What defines his music is a rare synthesis. As a young man he was struck by Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot and by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but just as deeply by Beethoven and Mahler (hearing Leonard Bernstein conduct the Resurrection Symphony was “a revelation”). Rather than separate these worlds, Singleton let them flow together. “The jazz elements, they are just natural to me”, he says. He does not consciously use a jazz language, it is simply the music he grew up with. In his scores you find a sparse economy of means, generous silences that give each idea time to develop and resonate, structural surprises, bold contrasts, and a rhythmic precision that is a real challenge for any performer. Critics have summed up his influences as running “from Mahler to Monk, from Bird to Bernstein, from James Baldwin to Bach, from Santana to Prince”, and that is not far from the truth.
The story of this fantastic album is a lovely one. Jackie Leung, who was born in Toronto, studied at McGill University and Stony Brook University and has played the piano since the age of six, is a performer and teacher with a taste for repertoire off the beaten path. During the pandemic, as part of a mentorship with Toronto’s Continuum Contemporary Music, she went looking for piano music by composers outside the standard canon, and, browsing the catalogue of the publisher Schott, was immediately struck by Singleton’s scores. She could only see previews, but something spoke to her: the writing looked rhythmic, challenging and interesting.
She began to play his pieces, recorded some of them for Continuum’s digital series (in some cases the first recordings ever made), and the composer himself listened and encouraged her. As she kept exploring, including “Mutations”, which had hardly been played since its premiere decades ago, Singleton suggested she should record his published piano music. For several years they worked together by telephone, email and recordings, without even having met. She sent him home recordings before going to the studio, to be sure her interpretations were true to his intentions. He gave the album its title, Inside Out, and helped choose the cover photo, a younger Singleton at the piano, which Leung felt was ideal for a programme that begins when he was a young composer. For her, the title has a deeper meaning: to improvise on something you must know it inside out, and improvisation is present in most of Singleton’s notated music, either explicitly or in the very character of the writing.
Leung also did something that deserves a special mention: when Singleton asked her to edit a new engraved edition of “Mutations”, which until then existed only as a handwritten manuscript, she clarified the doubtful notes and accidentals with him and checked the engraver’s work, so this album is also a contribution to the music’s survival on the page. She wrote the liner notes herself, a 24-page booklet (!) in which each piece is explained.
And she plays magnificently. Her touch is precise and clear, her sense of rhythm is razor-sharp, she negotiates the repeated passages that Singleton wants played exactly alike with an almost mechanical rigour, and yet she leaves room for the freedom, the humour and the poetry that run through the music. The album was recorded in July 2025 at Noble Street Studios in Toronto, on a Fazioli S212 grand piano that Herbie Hancock and Paolo Fazioli selected for the studio, with a bright, clear sound that suits this music perfectly.
“Changing Faces” (1986, 1:55) opens the album like a microcosm of the whole: a pattern that sparkles as it repeats, then splinters into different versions of itself, with a mercurial mix of repetition and change. In less than two minutes you understand the language. “Cinque” (1969, five movements, about six minutes in all) is a set of five short essays, each exploratory and using extended techniques, between jazz-like syncopation and Webern-like chromaticism. Leung goes inside the piano in the third movement, plucking and dampening the strings, then rushes into a scurrying fourth, and the fifth contrasts hammered chords with whispered single notes. The space the score leaves to the interpreter is used wonderfully, creating atmospheres that sometimes recall a jazz session.
“Greed Machine” (6:13), for vibraphone and piano with Ryan Scott, was inspired by the Modern Jazz Quartet and by Milt Jackson and John Lewis in particular. The two instruments could hardly be more different, and yet their dialogue is meditative, robust and beautifully balanced. For many, this is the high point of the disc, and it is easy to hear why. “Baked in the Cake” (2012, 2:38), written as a birthday present for Peter Hanser-Strecker of Schott, alternates between jittery and pensive moments, with Leung scampering over the keyboard and then resting gently upon it. Its disjointed character hides a lot of humour. “Argoru I” (1970, 5:22) is the first of a series of ten pieces spread over more than half a century, whose title, in Ghana’s Twi language, simply means “to play” (the latest, Argoru X for trumpet, was premiered in 2025). It is prickly and rhythmic, full of chordal splashes and jagged rhythms, but with a groove that you can feel underneath.
“Mutations” (1966, 8:52), Singleton’s first published piano work, is a theme and variations that marries counterpoint with frenzied patterns and jazzy grooves. It is a spidery, energetic piece, and the fact that we can hear it here at all, played from a score that Leung herself helped to establish, makes this recording premiere particularly precious. “In My Own Skin” (10:34) shows a more recent Singleton with a more substantial discourse. It opens with bold, powerful chords that almost recall the fiery gestures of the Romantic repertoire, then fragments into the composer’s more familiar language, with echoes of jazz skilfully built into the structure. It is impressive, and it is a showcase for Leung’s technique and imagination.
“Inside-Out” (about 18 minutes), for piano four hands, with Erica Murase, is the epic that closes the album and gives it its name. Written in 1983–84 for Anthony Davis and Ursula Oppens and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1985, it has been compared by the composer to the chaos of a train station, where passengers get off and scatter in different directions. It rises out of silence, with notes placed one by one and a repeated C sharp, before the two pianists begin to entwine, mirroring each other and improvising for about half of the piece. The sound grows denser, driven by a motorik pulse, until it becomes a powerful percussive tangle. Leung and Murase play it with a conviction and perfect coordination that take the breath away, and the effect is that of a masterpiece we should hear far more often in the concert hall.
This is not background music, and I have to say that it’s not an album for everyone, but for those who like to be surprised, it is a treat. Jackie Leung’s commitment is extraordinary: she is not only an interpreter but a researcher, an editor, an ambassador. She hopes her album will become a place where listeners and performers can begin to explore Singleton’s piano music, and she has already started learning his newest piano sonata, so we can hope that this is only the beginning of a longer journey.
Inside Out is a model of what a portrait album should be: rigorous, generous, intelligent and moving, and a tribute to a living composer, played by a fantastic pianist who understands him inside out.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 22nd, 2026
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Order the album on the Bandcamp
Comes in a 4-panel digipack with a 24-page booklet with liner notes written by Jackie Leung
Tracklisting:
- Changing Faces 01:55
- Cinque: I. 01:22
- Cinque: II. 01:22
- Cinque: III. 01:11
- Cinque: IV. 00:57
- Cinque: V. 01:17
- Greed Machine (For Vibraphone and Piano) 06:13 (with Ryan Scott, Vibraphone)
- Baked In The Cake 02:38
- Argoru I 05:22
- Mutations 08:52
- In My Own Skin 10:34
- Inside-Out (for Piano Four-Hands, with Erica Murase)
Credits:
Recorded on July 9-11, 2025 at Noble Street Studios in Toronto, Canada, on a Fazioli S212 grand piano selected for the studio by Herbie Hancock and Paolo Fazioli.
Recording Session Producer Denise Ball
Recording Engineer Pouya Hamidi
Mixing, Editing & Mastering Pouya Hamidi
Jackie Leung acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Jackie Leung would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.
Executive Producer Bob Lord
Artistic Director, Albany Records Susan Bush
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