Jean-Michel Blais

Montréal-based pianist-composer Jean-Michel Blais exchanges contemporary minimalism for a light and generous maximalism with his fourth album ‘mirador’.

Jean-Michel Blais was ready to make an epic. mirador, the pianist-composer’s fourth album. mirador is an odyssey that spans choirs, strings and the music of the Andes, running from Spanish caves to Estonian forests and back again to the hideaway in tiny Nicolet, Québec, where Blais first imagined the adventures that might await him.

After 375 million streams and the biggest concerts of his life, the origins of mirador were remembrances from Blais’ childhood. Back then, he was a musical kid dreaming up worlds in his basement: turning pages in a Larousse encyclopedia; arranging its volumes into a castle; playing with Fisher Price instruments and his family’s cheap Hammond organ; endlessly replaying the same cassettes. Even if he wasn’t fully aware of these things yet, as a queer person, a person with Tourette’s, the basement was Blais’ refuge—an imaginary lookout, a ‘mirador’.

Four albums into his career, Jean-Michel Blais is no longer just charting the map of his grown-up heart: on mirador, he offers a path back to childhood—a chance to listen anew, gazing into the imaginary.

This event will last approximately 75 minutes with no interval.

About Jean-Michel Blais

Jean-Michel Blais is a Montreal-based pianist, composer and performer signed to Arts & Crafts and Mercury KX (Decca). In the first decade since the release of 2016’s landmark debut album Il, the classically trained Blais has defined his own music by a reverent intimacy he shares with his instrument, the piano. Appearing on TIME’s Top 10 Best Albums that year, the magazine said of his improvisationally-inspired debut release: “his music breathes, invites one to take a moment, and acknowledges that there is still much beauty in the world.”

Through this connection with the piano, the multiple Polaris Music Prize shortlisted and two-time Juno nominated artist’s music has reached masses, performing one of the largest neoclassical concerts in history to nearly 40,000 at Montreal Jazz fest, collaborating with the Orchestre de l’Agora and the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, and counting over 397 million streams across a catalogue of three studio albums – including the ambient & new age-inspired Dans ma main (2018), which draws influence from music that soothed his Tourette’s syndrome as a child, and the Félix award-winning aubades (2022), Blais’s first foray into composition for chamber orchestra – and including désert (2025), a collaboration with American harpist Lara Somogyi. His diverse resume of experimental releases include the Cannes award-winning Matthias & Maxime (2019) film soundtrack, the serenades (2023) EP of twilight music,