In Black & White: Music for Piano Solo

In Black and White: Steven Beck performs nearly all of Soldier's solo piano music on a double CD. Letter to Skip James and Letter to Gil Evans are a form inspired by Baroque pieces such as "Tombaeu di Lully", in this case musical letters to another musician that elaborate on common interests. Fractals on the Names of Bach and Haydn use fractal patterns, named by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, in which a complex pattern is formed from a simple phrase overlaid at multiple time scales: in this case the phrases are the letter names of the two composers. Variations on a Minute Waltz takes the Baroque math variations like inversion and retrograde further, using calculus (an integral and first derivative), a version in with no rhythm, another with no pitch, another that plays all the pitches that Chopin' didn't write, and in the final movement, the inspiration for the piece, a musician's joke that "it takes him half an hour to play the Minute Waltz" in which Soldier performs the Minute Waltz in 23 minutes at a live concert at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. Other pieces range from Hockets and Inventions which develops from Medieval chorale music; Girl in Car With Hat, an immensely difficult apotheosis of boogie woogie piano, punk classical music in Five Little Monsters (compare the version for string quartet); and Phong's Solo, a transcription of an elephant's improvisation from Soldier's Thai Elephant Orchestra.