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“I had already made the decision to record a solo album quite a while before the pandemic,” Sebastian Sternal says, immediately dispelling a possible misunderstanding. The fact that the multi-award-winning (WDR Jazz Prize, New German Jazz Prize, etc.) pianist and composer is now presenting his first solo work after almost 20 years of professional career may come as a surprise to some. After all, on the two albums with his large Symphonic Society he successfully transcended genre boundaries (both received Jazz Echos, Vol. 2 also the annual prize of the German Record Critics) by combining a jazz octet and a string quartet. Sternal then performed brilliantly in a dynamic trio with the American star bassist Larry Grenadier and Jonas Burgwinkel - for the album Home he received his third Echo in 2018. For Sebastian Sternal a solo recording, with the piano as the singular gravitational center, was a logical development after all of the different previous projects he had worked on. These also include various duos, for example with Frederik Köster. When it came to the point of realizing the plan, the particular circumstances of 2020 were not entirely inconvenient. “After the initial excitement about Corona in March, a phase followed in which everyone quietly stayed at home,” he recalls. “That's what I was doing too, of course. Without concerts and dates outside, my life changed dramatically. So for a few weeks, I sat at the piano alone a lot and worked intensively.” Additionally spurred on by an already arranged recording date in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk, he began profound artistic research. The result is Thelonia, his most intimate work yet. “I've been playing the piano for 32 years, and you experience a lot,” the musician says, who was born in 1983 and now lives in Frankfurt. The new production reflects many facets of Sternal's creativity of the past years, and of course his overall artistic development. “A solo album like this would certainly have turned out quite differently five years ago. I have the feeling that my music has a greater level of self-evidence now. With that I don't necessarily mean the material, the ‘ingredients’ of my music, but rather how I use it in improvisation. I've become more stringent in telling what I want to say.”