Pianist Mathis Picard Releases New Project “Preludes & Fugues Book 1” | LISTEN!
Jazz Pianist/Composer Mathis Picard
to release solo recording
“Preludes & Fugues Book 1”
Release Date: Out Now!
NEW YORK, NY; 2026 — French-Malagasy, NYC-based pianist, composer, and producer Mathis Picard today releases “Preludes & Fugues Book 1,” an original collection of twelve solo piano compositions and his most consequential work to date.
This is not a jazz album. It is not a classical album. It is a book of music, in the oldest, most enduring sense of the phrase. Rooted in a compositional tradition stretching back to Bach, realized through a musical imagination shaped by France, Madagascar, Manchester, and New York City, “Preludes & Fugues Book 1” is the work Mathis Picard has been building toward his entire life.
Spanning all twelve keys, six preludes and six fugues, one piece per key, the album was recorded in August 2025, though its roots stretch back to 2018, when Picard wrote the first melody of what would become the album’s lead single, Mysticism Of Money (Fugue in D Minor). That piece, a fugue built around the harmonic implications of a dollar sign mapped onto the circle of fifths, is both a compositional manifesto and a meditation on the illusion of wealth. “What’s real in this world? Love is real, but you don’t put a value to that. The mysticism of money is that there’s so much value you put to it. Which is confusing,” Picard says.
That compositional method, using symbols overlaid on the circle of fifths to determine harmonic movement and form, runs as a unifying thread throughout the album. Each of the twelve pieces grows from a different shape: a spiral, a star, an arrow. The shapes determine the structure. The music, and the story it tells, does the rest.
That invitation is one of the most distinctive qualities of “Preludes & Fugues Book 1.” Certain passages are precisely notated; others are deliberately open, calling on the performer to improvise within the framework Picard has built. The album speaks equally to a conservatory-trained classical pianist and a jazz musician encountering the format for the first time, an intentional bridge between two worlds that have long been kept unnecessarily apart. A published score will accompany the release, with distribution planned for leading music institutions and conservatories.
Among the album’s most affecting moments is its closing track, Loved One (Prelude in B Major), written in the wake of two losses: his family dog Cookie, fourteen years old, and his grandfather, who passed two months later. “This song is the feeling I feel when I miss someone and they’ve left,” Picard says. “It moves between the sadness and the good memories, and then those feelings coming together. You will see them again. They’re free now. They can be with you in a way they couldn’t be when they were struggling at the end.”
Elsewhere, World’s A Mirror (Fugue in A-Flat Major), sharing a key and meditative spirit with his earlier composition Prana, invites the listener into stillness: “However you might feel about certain things or people, consider that there’s a part of you within that. The world around you is a mirror.” And Inner Child (Fugue in G Major), built on a spiral, grows from something intimate into something vast, all the melodies arriving together at the end. “I told myself: honor the kid within you,” Picard says. “The kid who loves Earth, Wind & Fire. And invite the audience to picture themselves as a child, and see where the journey takes them.”
ASCAP Next Generation of Songwriters recipient. Member of the Montreux Jazz Foundation. Juilliard alumnus under the mentorship of Kenny Barron. Youngest-ever finalist at the Montreux Jazz Piano Competition, at age 10.
None of those credentials fully capture what makes Mathis Picard singular. He is, simply, his own sound, a voice assembled from every place he has lived, every tradition he has absorbed, and every rule he has chosen to honor or reimagine. “Preludes & Fugues Book 1” is the clearest proof yet of what that means.
“I’ve always wanted to see if I could write something that resembles what inspired me when I was learning piano music,” Picard says. “To connect with the idea that music is for everyone, students, jazz fans, classical listeners, people who just want to sit and feel something. I think this is that.”
“Preludes & Fugues Book 1” will out on La Reserve Records.
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