Keith Jarrett's subtle and solitary art
Sunday, October 01, 2006
BY ZAN STEWART
Star-Ledger Staff
For Keith Jarrett, the gifted pianist and composer who is a remarkable interpreter of both jazz and classical music, improvising is his artistic raison d'etre, a very serious undertaking.
"Improvisation is a delicate thing," he says. "It's made up of so many billions of things happening at the same exact moment. (While improvising), I am willing myself into a situation I still know nothing about. It's like going to battle ... this thing is so demanding."
At 61, Jarrett's been improvising for more than 50 years. His first solo piano recital, at around age eight in his hometown of Allentown, Pa., included an improvisation he called "Mountain Scene."
Later, as a budding major league jazz artist, Jarrett's improvisational prowess was demonstrated via performances with drummer Art Blakey, saxophonist Charles Lloyd and trumpeter Miles Davis between 1965 and 1971.
Then, from 1972, Jarrett built a new audience, many coming from the world of pop and classical, with his solo concerts: two-part 30-45 minute improvisations often based on a few themes or motifs that were known for their song-like quality and their upbeat, vibrant rhythms.
The 1975 "Köln Concert," recorded in Germany and released by producer Manfred Eicher's Munich-based ECM Records -- for whom Jarrett has recorded almost exclusively since 1971 -- remains the most famous of these events.
Perhaps that will change with the release last Tuesday of the two-CD "The Carnegie Hall Concert" (ECM), a documentation of Jarrett's exceptional solo performance on Sept. 26, 2005.
The concert was Jarrett's first solo affair in the U.S. since a 1995 performance at New York's Avery Fischer Hall. This break was caused initially by his debilitating 1996-1998 bout with a bacterial parasite that led to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then scheduling details, on a reduced touring routine, found him playing solo concerts in Japan and Europe before a U.S. date could be set.
Post CFS, Jarrett, who lives in rural Northwestern New Jersey with his wife, Rose Anne, had played dates with his Standards Trio, with bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. The first was in November 1998, at the then brand-new New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
It was after a trio tour in Japan in 2001 that his Japanese promoter asked him what would be his next event there.
"I was noticing in the trio performances there was something that I wanted to do with my hands and I couldn't put my finger on it, and I thought maybe I'd find out if I did something solo," says Jarrett. "So I told him, 'Maybe solo, but don't call it a solo concert like before'.
Jarrett knew he wanted these next solo concerts to be different, not predictable, maybe call them "classical improvisations," though he eventually decided against using that phrase.
Back at his home studio, he discovered how his approach was changing. "I would play and hear things, and I'd say, 'No, this is what I used to like, I don't like it anymore'," he recalls. "I wanted to hear something I didn't understand completely and find out if it's viable or usable or serves a function."
"Radiance" (ECM), a two-CD solo set recorded in Osaka and Tokyo in October 2002, finds Jarrett playing pieces of varying lengths in what might generally be called a free-form classical-meets-jazz mode. The performance is markedly unlike the more lyrical, song-like Köln concert.
Jarrett brought his various new conceits to the Carnegie performance, but in a much larger way. New York was one of his homes: he'd lived there in the early 1960s, then, after moving to New Jersey, he was close enough to regularly visit and perform.
"I started thinking about New York City, what had happened musically in New York, what things am I hearing in my head when I'm contemplating what NYC is," he says. "I started thinking about the American avant-garde: Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Samuel Barber, and people not only in the avant-garde like Aaron Copland, and the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson. Those guys affected me.
"I knew the concert had to include these elements, that I would have to make broad brushstrokes of a wide array of feelings that I have in music."
While preparing his Carnegie concert, Jarrett, a voracious reader, also wanted a book that dealt with the city. He chanced upon "King of the Jews" (Ecco), a biography of 1920s- era gangster Arnold Rothstein, by Newark native and now New Yorker Nick Tosches.
"I'm very good at intuiting what to do to get to the next place, and this book was exactly what I needed," says Jarrett. "In music, you want to confront the listeners at the same time as you're informing them, and also entertaining them, by some miracle (and this book did that). Maybe the way we deal with confrontation and engagement together is, in some strange way, New York. Not that it's not available anywhere else, but here there's a magnification, with everybody living together.
"What I wanted was to be aware of this (duality) all the time, and what better way than to read someone who is disappointed (about) where things had gone in the world, but whose real germination as a writer was the city."
Jarrett has said that in his pre-2002 solo concerts, he would usually start gradually and build, but that now he wanted to start with an "explosion." The Carnegie concert does just that, with a nine-minute number than runs from two-handed tumult and whispers to muffled-sounding lines, as if he'd covered the strings with a blanket, to singing chords and spots that evoke Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."
"The opening piece includes a contrapuntal multiplicity of rhythms with different parts of the keyboard all kind of kaleidoscopically enmeshed with each other," is Jarrett's interpretation. "The interesting thing is that they clear the air, prepare the audience to hear anything after that. And if you can make a substantive statement while also clearing the air, that's a big, big plus. The idea is to get involved to the point of losing yourself, then maybe if you're good at this kind of thing, you'll know what to play next."
Well, Jarrett does. The subsequent piece ("II" -- all are numbered in Roman numerals) is one of the pianist's patentable funk-groove-pop ditties, followed by a lovely ballad ("III") a mix of beauty and sadness. "IV" is marked by sweeps of notes all around the keyboard, with "V" eventually a tender-at-the-bone opus. Streams of bebop-based ideas inhabit "IX," while "X" is another sturdy groover.
There are five encores, including his winning "My Song" and a sumptuous ballad, "Time on My Hands." But Jarrett says the first encore -- a rhapsodic number called "The Good America" -- is part of the concert proper. Its warm chords and gentle melodies seems to represent hope and possibility.
"I feel the first encore has much less to do with an encore vibe, and has much more to do with putting the final touch on the entire affair," he says. "It's as if the concert is focused through the lens of that last piece. And I knew that at the time I played it, that it was supposed to be an encore, but it's not. It was part of keeping the tension and integrity of that concert at a certain emotional peak. Once you start playing encores, they can be more fun than anything, but they're encores. A certain weight of responsibility is off your shoulders."
It's performances such as Köln and Carnegie that have made Jarrett a force in modern music, and an inspiration to others.
"Anyone who knows Keith's stuff at all can tell it's him within the first couple of bars," says Peter Zak, an on-the-rise pianist in the New York jazz scene. "In terms of his influence on jazz pianists of today, I'd say he's pretty close to the level of McCoy (Tyner), Herbie (Hancock), and Bill Evans."
Bruce Barth, a Brooklyn-based pianist and composer who leads a powerhouse trio, talks about how hearing Jarrett play solo has moved him.
"When Keith's on, he's incredible," says Barth. "He has a deep connection to the sound of the instrument, and he's really in the moment, a true improviser capable of stunning melodic invention and lyricism."
Jarrett has not listened to as much jazz in his lifetime as one would imagine, given his fluency with improvisation. He cites Ahmad Jamal's "Portfolio of Ahmad Jamal" (Argo) and the work of Bud Powell as important, but says most of his listening has been in the classical arena.
"What I play comes from everything I've heard," he says. "And when I want a reality check, I listen to Charlie Parker or Bud Powell. But, really, playing well is basically about what you are conscious of. It's not really a musical thing."
Jarrett has solo concerts in Paris on Oct. 31 and Nov. 3, but no U.S. dates are planned. In the meantime, he can be seen in the new DVD "Tokyo Solo" (ECM), a 2002 performance that included selections from "Radiance," as well as in Mike Dibbs' documentary, "Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation" (EuroArts).
Looking back at the Carnegie performance, Jarrett says he could sense when he first walked on stage that it would be a special night. "The feeling told me right then, that we were all there for the same reason.
"If the atmosphere is genuine and open, the acoustics (in the hall and of the instrument) are competent to work together, and the people in the room have dropped their expectations and are just ready for whatever happens, there's no way I can't be aware of that," he says. "When I can tell that 3,000 people are hearing exactly what I'm hearing, that is the greatest possible gift. I lost myself in that awareness, and it was not a room full of 3000 people, it was a room full of one person. I've only had that similar experience one other time, for the Köln concert. Sometimes you have to wait 30 years."
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With 20% of the representitives reporting from Northern California, the San Jose delegate accepts this assignment, and will report to the designated polling place!!
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