Discography

__._,All parts improvisation

John Shand

October 29, 2011

.___

KEITH Jarrett had performed hundreds of solo concerts but not like this. From backstage he could hear the buzz in the auditorium, the voices carrying just enough to catch the mellifluous Portuguese lilt that surrounded him. Even the name of the city, Rio de Janeiro, was like music. Now he was about to embark on another night of entirely improvised solo piano but this was different.

He had eschewed a proper sound-check to avoid filling his head with musical thoughts. What would be would be. It reflected new confidence from a new love in his life. He rang her in Japan from backstage, as he now found himself ringing her so often. Each time she buoyed and calmed him and strengthened him. It was just what he needed.

He had wandered on stage earlier and found he was playing an American rather than a German Steinway for the first time. That would be interesting. Thankfully, a noise in one of the pedals was resolved without it becoming a source of angst.

Then it was time and he went out and the man some people consider jazz's greatest pianist played as he had never played before. He was playing about Rio and its sounds and shapes, about the musically hip audience with its pin-drop attentiveness and explosive applause, and about this piano with its uneven tonal quality that he transformed into a breadth-of-colour asset. He was also playing about his new love.

Afterwards he called the concert an affirmation of his entire career. It was what he had been building towards since he began playing at the age of three; since his first recital, aged seven, which included not only Mozart, Bach and Beethoven but his own work and, crucially, improvisation.

For his eighth birthday he had asked his parents for a walkie-talkie, an elephant or a piano. The latter duly arrived, paid for out of his own concert earnings. He loved it so much he took to sleeping under it.

The prospect of interviewing Jarrett was clouded with accounts of monosyllables and disdain. He sounds suspicious when he picks up the telephone in his large New Jersey country house, which has a barn converted into a studio, but swiftly warms and talks for an hour.

''When I was a little kid and I was studying piano,'' he recounts, ''I would get music that would look too difficult, so occasionally I remember saying to my mother, 'I don't think I can play this piece.' And she would say, 'Can you play the first note?' I said, 'Yes.' 'Can you play the second note?' 'Yes.' 'Well, then you can probably play the piece.

Now he has crowned his evolution as a musician with Rio, the double album of that concert last April.

Born in 1945, Jarrett passed through the bands of Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis and in 1971 made an album of solo piano improvisations for Manfred Eicher's fledgling ECM label. This proved a signal event. A stream of concerts in this format followed, including 1975's Koln Concert, which sold more than 3.5 million copies, alongside stellar bands and occasional classical performances.

It all came crashing down in 1996 when he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. ''This disease stopped me dead. I could only look at my piano. I couldn't touch it,'' Jarrett says. Not knowing whether he would play again, many things became clear.

''One of those things was I really hated my previous recordings,'' he says, then gives a short laugh. ''Not hated but I thought, 'If this is all of my work, it's not enough.'''

He found his playing too busy, for example, and wanted to improvise without resorting to a pre-existing vocabulary of ideas; to always reach for the new; reach for what happened in Rio.

''It's proof that what I spend my time doing can work like that,'' Jarrett says. ''The only thing is that it can't work just because you want it to work. It takes a certain amount of crazy convergences of reality.

''I remember feeling strangely at ease when I went out on stage and all the way there was a lack of a certain kind of stress. My wife had left three years ago. I have someone who's been giving me more hope than I thought I would get from any person. This, of course, can help me stay relaxed and if an improviser's stressed out on stage, the music isn't going to come.''

That ''someone'' is his Japanese fiancee, Akiko. ''If I talked to her on the way out to the stage, or backstage between sets, I would get this complete feeling of support,'' he says.

They met when Jarrett walked into a shop where she was working in Japan. He kept returning during his stay and found she knew his name but nothing of his work. On the last day his tour assistant told him to go down to the shop while she packed. ''I said, 'Wait, no, no, no, I don't do dates! Don't leave me!' I suddenly am at the elevator going down alone to meet her.'' Jarrett disabused Akiko of her notion that his tour assistant was, in fact, his partner and then they said goodbye with a hug that was ''full of stuff that meant more than I could figure out and we parted, and I couldn't let that go.

''So I just started calling her all the time. In the beginning she said, 'Oh, Keith, what's wrong? Why are you calling me?'

'' 'Nothing's wrong. I don't know why I'm calling you. Really, I don't want to lose you and I don't think I have you at the moment.' '' He laughs. ''You could write a book about this.''

When Jarrett received a finished copy of Rio, Akiko asked him how it felt. ''I think she thought I'd say 'exciting','' he says. ''But I think she suspected it was a complicated feeling. And I said, 'nervous'. The natural thing is to be sitting there with this in your hands going, 'Will they get it?' I did my job. But now it's out there.''

And he can't control that part.

Keith Jarrett: Rio (2011)

By

JOHN KELMAN,



John Kelman

Managing Editor - Since 2003

With the realization that there will always be more music coming at him than he can keep up with, John wonders why anyone would think that jazz is dead or dying.

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Published: November 15, 2011
If music is a reflection of where we live, it must also be a reflection of where we are at any given moment. As much as the undercurrent redolent of an artist's home can often be heard, a live performance can equally draw inspiration from where it is, especially if it's a place with its own musical tradition. There's little doubting the intrinsic Americanism of pianist Keith Jarrett on Rio—his first solo piano recording since Testament (ECM, 200where two largely dark performances drew on a difficult time in the pianist's personal life—but equally, there's no mistaking the Brazilian joie de vivre that informs this 90-minute concert from April, 2011, turned around with uncharacteristic speed by ECM in just six short months.

That's not to say Jarrett has left the dark side entirely behind. Opening this concert of fifteen improvised miniatures with "Part I," the pianist doesn't make it an easy entry point for his audience, contrapuntal angularities ebbing and flowing with quirky stops and starts and temporal swings and sways, but largely pushing relentlessly forward during its entire 8:40 duration. "Part II" provides welcome relief, though its brooding ambiance remains more closely aligned to contemporary classicism than a specific jazz vernacular.

Things shift with "Part III," however, as Jarrett begins to pull a more definitive song form from the ether, the sound of his stomping foot creating its own rhythmic energy as the pianist builds changes that begin to reflect his South American surroundings, while a passing reference to "As Time Goes By" acts as a foundational motif for the rubato "Part IV." Even as hints of dissonance abound throughout, the mood continues to brighten, as Jarrett demonstrates the encyclopedic knowledge that's always at the core of his muse, though with his stream-of-consciousness approach it's never possible to predict just where that knowledge will take him.

In the case of "Part VIII," it's a buoyancy that could easily be heard in Egberto Gismonti's repertoire, though Jarrett's unfailing melodism is born more of the city than the rougher Amazonian jungles that often inform the Brazilian pianist/guitarist's music. The cascading notes of "Part IX" are closer to the rainforest, however, while "

9), "Part XI" returns the pianist to his home, as funky and straightforward a blues as he's ever played.

Since his bout with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the 1990s scuttled his well-known continuous improvisational marathons, Jarrett has opted, instead, for a more individual and self-contained approach to solo piano performance. With so many landmark recordings on ECM—ranging from 1972's Facing You to 2006's The Carnegie Hall Concert, with its controversial applause—it's become pointless to assess each subsequent recording in terms of "good, better, best"; instead, each set, carefully chosen from the half-dozen or so shows he does each year, occupies its own space, with its own points of recommendation. Rio, despite some hints of darkness, is a most joyous and lyrical set, and one that finds the perfect nexus of where Jarrett lives and where Jarrett is.