Bruce Hornsby - Solo

Solo

Hornsby released his first solo album, Harbor Lights, in 1993. The record showcased him in a more jazz-oriented setting and featured an all-star lineup, including Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Jerry Garcia, Phil Collins and Bonnie Raitt. Hornsby secured his third Grammy in 1993 for Best Pop Instrumental for "Barcelona Mona" (composed with Branford Marsalis for the Barcelona Olympics).

In 1995, Hot House was released with its cover art, featuring an imagined jam session between bluegrass legend Bill Monroe and jazz legend Charlie Parker, serving as an apt metaphor for the rich fusion of musical styles Hornsby was currently developing and expanding. The album found Hornsby expanding upon the foray into jazz sound from Harbor Lights, this time reintroducing elements of bluegrass from A Night on the Town and his earlier collaborations.

During this time period, "even his concerts conveyed a looser, more playful mood, and Hornsby began taking requests from the audience." Hornsby's concerts became "departure points" for his album compositions, which would be blended with and reworked into "lengthy spontaneous medleys". Both in terms of audience requests and in terms of spontaneous on-stage decisions, Hornsby's performances became opportunities for him to challenge himself by trying to "find a way to seamlessly thread these seemingly disparate elements together."

Hornsby next worked with several Grateful Dead reformation projects, including several Furthur Festivals and the ultimate formation of The Other Ones, which resulted in the release a live album, The Strange Remain. Hornsby's piano and vocals factor heavily into the band's performance of classic Dead tunes "Jack Straw" and "Sugaree" (which features Hornsby on lead vocal, in Jerry Garcia's absence), and Hornsby-originals "White-Wheeled Limousine" and "Rainbow's Cadillac" receive reworkings in the hands of The Other Ones.

Three years after Hot House, Hornsby released a double album, Spirit Trail. Featuring a decidedly goofy picture of his uncle on the cover, the collection blended instrumental tracks with the story-telling, rock, jazz, and other musical forms Hornsby had delved into over his career. The album considered "very Southern" themes with "songs about race, religion, judgment and tolerance" and "struggles with these issues."—notably on "Sneaking Up on Boo Radley," which referenced the character from Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Throughout the sequence of Harbor Lights, Hot House, and Spirit Trail, Hornsby's piano playing steadily gained further complexity, taking on a more varied array of musical styles and incorporating more and more difficult techniques, as evidenced by his two-hand-independence on Spirit Trail's "King of the Hill." During this same span of solo album years, Hornsby made several mini-tours playing solo piano gigs for the first time in his career. The shows allowed Hornsby limitless possibilities for seguing songs into other songs, often blurring lines between classical compositions, jazz standards, traditional bluegrass, folk, and fiddle tunes, Grateful Dead songs, as well as reworkings of Hornsby originals. Hornsby reflected on these periods of intensive solo performances, stating that the solo tours helped him "recommit to the study of piano" and "take playing to a whole new level", explorations and improvisations that would not be possible in a band setting.