WILLIAM EGGLESTON, AT 78, IN A NEW KEY

By RACHEL FELDEROCT.

When Mr. Eggleston played piano for “Nature Boy” on Big Star’s third album, back in the late 1970s, “he seemed like an old soul,” the band’s drummer, Jody Stephens, recalled. Credit Andrea Morales for The New York Times

William Eggleston is widely considered one of modern photography’s most influential artists. The prolific piano playing that’s been his other lifelong passion, however, has remained more of an insiders’ secret.

“People know my photographs because they’re published in books and shown in galleries and museums and so forth, and yet I don’t perform music in public, ever — only in front of good friends who really want to hear it and who really listen,” Mr. Eggleston, who is 78, said in a recent phone interview from his Memphis apartment.

Until now, there also haven’t been any albums of his compositions. “Musik,” to be released Oct. 20 by Secretly Canadian, will change that. The collection consists of instrumentals performed by Mr. Eggleston on an 88-key Korg synthesizer in his home over the course of several years in the 1990s, recorded using the machine’s internal memory. The keyboard can simulate many instruments, so the album includes suggestions of a majestic organ, a moody oboe, myriad string instruments and an acoustic piano. The moods of “Musik” are alternately dark, festive, pensive, regal and melancholy.

The title’s spelling is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, who Mr. Eggleston called “my great hero in music.” It’s not exactly classical music, but “Musik” does have a Bachian sense of grandeur; the album is assertive and confident, with a swagger that might well be linked to the unpressured way it was recorded, to document impromptu playing…………………..

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/arts/design/william-eggleston-at-78-in-a-new-key.html