New York-based Finnish pianist and composer Frank Carlberg blends aspects of Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus with contemporary classical and avant-garde influences. Many of his smaller ensemble recordings feature poetry by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley, and Ken Mikolowski, often sung by close collaborator Christine Correa, but Carlberg has also recorded in instrumental settings and big-band contexts. He released his first album, Blind Drive, in 1992. Numerous albums with Correa followed, including The Crazy Woman (1996), Variations on a Summer Day (2000), The American Dream (2007), Uncivilized Ruminations (2011), and Word Circus (2015); furthermore, Carlberg recorded with his Tivoli Trio (2010) and released duo albums with musicians like Noah Preminger and Ran Blake. With his group Frank Carlberg Large Ensemble, he also explored the music of Thelonious Monk, producing the records Monk Dreams, Hallucinations and Nightmares (2017), and Elegy for Thelonious (2024). Helsinki-born Frank Carlberg first pursued classical studies but became interested in jazz through his father's record collection, listening to classic recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Peterson. He moved to Boston in 1984 to enroll at the Berklee College of Music, and upon his graduation in 1990, he continued to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Geri Allen, and Jimmy Giuffre. Graduating in 1992, Carlberg released his debut trio album, Blind Drive, the same year. His first collaboration with indigeneous American-Indian jazz singer Christine Correa followed in 1993 under the moniker The Correa Carlberg Duo, entitled Ugly Beauty (1994). Carlberg soon recorded more albums with Correa and a small jazz group, starting with Crazy Woman (1996), which used poetry by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Anselm Hollo, and Anna Akhmatova, followed by the ambitious Variations on a Summer Day (2000, based on a poem by Wallace Stevens), In the Land of Art (2003, withpoetry by Hollo, Robert Creeley, and Kenneth Rexroth), State of the Union (2005, featuring poems by Kerouac, Hollo, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein), and The American Dream (2007, with poems by Creeley). Carlberg also recorded music in different settings. He released a trio album (Prelude, 2002) and two duet albums with drummer Klaus Suonsaari, Offering (2003) and Fallingwater (2006). Not content with just recording and performing, the pianist served as one of the founders of the Douglass Street Music Collective, a jazz venue in Brooklyn that offers workshops, and started his own Red Piano label, on which he not only released his own albums, but recordings by musicians such as Nicholas Urie, Ro Sham Beaux, David Berkman, Wild Man Conspiracy, Andrew Schiller, and the Saxophone Quartet Dicke Luft. Additionally, he served as a faculty member of the New England Conservatory. Carlberg continued to release new albums in his jazz-meets-poetry style, including Uncivilized Ruminations (2011), Big Enigmas (2013), Word Circus (2015), and No Money in Art (2020), while also working with his new group Tivoli Trio, composing material for an album by the Clazz Ensemble (Federico on Broadway, 2011), and recording a quartet album titled Cosmopolitan Greetings (2015). In 2017, he presented the first album by his big-band project Frank Carlberg Large Ensemble, Monk Dreams, +Hallucinations and Nightmares. Several duet albums followed, including Whispers and Cries (2018, with saxophonist Noah Preminger), Gray Moon (2020, with pianist Ran Blake, who was one of Carlberg's mentors at the conservatory), and Charity and Love (2020, with electronic musician Gabriel Bolaños). Apart from recording another vocal jazz project entitled Los Trabajos y las Noches (2023) with Argentine singer Roxana Amed, Carlberg also further explored the music of Thelonious Monk by recording the tribute album Reflections 1952 (2022) with a trio and conducting another record by his Large Ensemble, Elegy for Thelonious (2024). ~ Christian Genzel, Rovi