It’s not really a sense of memories flooding back just that same old feeling I never got anywhere else.
That was seeing Keith Jarrett live. Three times as it happened – twice solo, once with the “Standards” Trio. All the gigs were in London’s Royal Festival Hall. And the best of these were certainly the solo concerts – the 2008 concert in particular that became the best chunk of Paris /London (Testament) – one of the most stirring concerts I have ever been to in going to hear jazz over some 40 years.
By the time I first heard him I had listened to many of his records notably The Köln Concert many times and Facing You which are enough by themselves. Almost. But Bremen/Lausanne is just as great. Actually, the list goes on. There have been many recordings since his 70s heyday that again take the breath away and this is the latest from the vintage year of 2016.
1970s Jarrett has been in the spotlight during this year of Jarrett’s 80th thanks to Branford Marsalis’ version of the quartet album Belonging. Here on a deeply serious, very dark Goldener Saal, Musikverein 2016 recording out for the first time that compares contemporaneously with other live recordings that year during his last European tour already released Bordeaux Concert, Budapest Concert and Munich 2016, it’s a very intense series of 9 spontaneously created in real time improvisations of his own original creation plus an interpretation of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. You don’t come to a Jarrett solo recording for cocktail music or daft neoclassical “under conversation” minimalism however well crafted.
The mood lifts on the tender fifth part – not that it needs to – but this is a challenging listen – part of the reason why you come to Jarrett. Challenge your laziness, your desire to be sedated. There is a stillness too.
In his book The Man and his Music on Jarrett published in the 1990s trumpeter-composer Ian Carr perceptively explained Jarrett’s solo concerts in general terms: “These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him.”
A favourite of Jarrett’s you will find other instrumental versions of the Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg Wizard of Oz song sans lyrics of course on multiple albums of Jarrett’s including 1990s album La Scala, the aforementioned Munich 2016 and A Multitude of Angels. There’s an ever lasting freshness to everything here. I can’t not but think of the words of the great playwright Eugene O’Neill from Long Day’s Journey into Night, stripped of context but resonant nevertheless in the aftermath of listening when there is just silence and you have time to think about the power of art and how it can help explain the mysteries of life ransacking such triteness and often insufferable cant as, for a listener anyway, of “being in the moment”: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”
A recording that is a present companion but whose wisdom seems already future proofed enough to extrapolate from in whatever sense you most desire.
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