Marta Sánchez: Hitting a Different Note

Marta Sánchez has established herself as one of the up-and-coming musicians in the jazz field, as evinced by her 2025 DownBeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star Pianist category win. In addition to her prowess on the piano, she is a skilled composer, whose compositions with her quintet over the past decade have shown an intricate capacity for writing for horns and interweaving her piano with the other instruments. In the past few years, she has been paring down her sound, first releasing a trio recording, Perpetual Void (Intakt Records, 2024), in 2024, her first trio recording since 2008's Lunas, Soles y Elefantes. And in 2026, Sánchez released her first solo piano recording, For the Space You Left (Out Of Your Head Records, 2026). She continues to work as a band member with ensembles such as the David Murray Quartet and the Anna Webber/Angela Morris Big Band. AAJ talked with Sánchez via Zoom about her career and her music.

Sánchez studied classical music at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música in Madrid, Spain, but also became interested in jazz. "At the Conservatory," she said, "you also study improvisation, but it's classical improvisation. I had a teacher who saw that I really liked jazz, and he started doing tapes for me of jazz musicians. I also had a close friend that was playing trumpet, and he also gave me records."

Her quintet records—Partenika (Fresh Sound Records, 2015), Danza Imposible (Fresh Sound Records, 2017), El Rayo de Luz (Fresh Sound Records, 2019) and SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum) (Whirlwind Recordings, 2022)—were all well received and showcased her compositional gifts, but she wanted more space to expand her improvisational skills on the piano. So, she returned to the trio format to give herself that space. "In the quintet, it's a lot about composition, but there is not that much space for improvising with the band. The trio is the perfect setting for that—you have a lot of space. I wanted to have more space for developing my playing and to challenge myself."

She had another challenge for herself: playing solo. She began the solo project in 2017 when she was on a residency at MacDowell, an artist residency program in Peterborough, New Hampshire. "I'm always super afraid of playing solo. I think I have a trauma from classical exams. I did it a little bit to push myself. I started writing for solo piano in 2017, but it took me a while to finish the music, because in the middle of the residency, my computer crashed and I lost all the information, everything. When you come back to normal life after the residency, you have a lot of things, writing for other projects, so the solo project can always wait. Then, during the pandemic, a friend said, 'Let's write a solo piece every week' and we did. I finished the music and recorded it. It took me a while to listen to all the tapes to choose songs for the album because I did have a lot of material."

Rather than a straight solo album, many of the songs on For the Space You Left are prepared piano, in which the artist inserts foreign objects between the strings of the instrument to create new and unusual sounds and tones. "There are a lot of jazz piano players that have been doing preparation for a while, like Sylvie Courvoisier and Kris Davis. The idea came when I was composing. My way of composing is kind of in layers: when I'm writing for a quintet, I have all these instruments and these possibilities of orchestration. With just the piano, there is just one kind of timbre. I thought that if I used preparation, I can have three different instruments inside the same instrument. I can do something that works as a drummer, and keep it during the whole song, something rhythmic. Just to have more options." The effect of the prepared piano on the songs is immense. At times, it does sound like several instruments playing at once, creating a shimmering orchestral sound for the compositions.

Getting the right combination of preparation for the piano took some time. "On the recording, I'm using metallic paper tape, Blu-Tack, sticks and magnets. I simplify a lot for playing live, because it is not possible to be changing [the preparation] so much. The preparation is great, but it limits your improvisation. I just basically use a magnet that I put on one note. And I'm using pedals, a little bit of electronics."

While writing at MacDowell, Sánchez was influenced by the African music she was listening to. "The songs that have a little bit of an African vibe were composed in 2017 while I was at MacDowell. I was listening to recordings with marimba and different instruments that a friend was sending me." Songs like "Frost Bloom" and "Pygmora" have the strongest elements of African influence, with the piano at times indeed sounding like a marimba or a thumb piano due to the preparations of the instrument.

Electronic music was also an influence, which may seem strange for a recording on an acoustic instrument, but the various preparations provide startlingly different sounds to pop up in songs like "Echolord" and "Inward Loop." Sánchez noted that she is a big fan of electronic music. "I love the surprise. I love the steadiness and the surprise at the same time. Like you have a steady [tempo] and then a different sound comes in you don't expect. I like that idea."

For a couple of the songs on the album, she did not do preparations to the piano. "These songs didn't need preparation," she said. "They are a bit more lyrical, and normally the preparation is to separate the sounds and hold something rhythmic. On 'Espejos' and 'The Regret' the voices are already separated, and it wasn't necessary to prepare something in those cases."

The album comes out on a new label for Sánchez, Out of Your Head Records, presenting a new look at both Sánchez's piano playing and her compositional abilities. "If you listen to the quintet records, they are very different to this record. The music is different. I think it fits better [with the new label] and it has been an amazing experience."

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