Keith Jarrett
The great jazz pianist before and after Köln. By Andrew Male.
TAKE A QUICK glance at the 10 records opposite and one best-seller will be noticeable by its absence. Recorded at the Cologne Opera House on 24 January, 1975, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is the best-selling solo album in jazz history with sales now well over 4 million. It’s a record of undeniable hypnotic beauty and the story of its creation, concerning an exhausted and sleep-deprived Jarrett working with an imperfectly tuned Bösendorfer piano, yet summoning glistening meditative melodies and urgent patterns of repetition out of such adversity, only adds to the record’s myth and allure. But what this sui generis recording has arguably never been is a gateway into Jarrett’s back catalogue. You buy The Köln Concert (and statistically speaking, you have bought it) and you stop there. What this How To Buy aims to do is offer a way into the entire oeuvre of this 77-year-old Pennsylvania-born pianist, composer and multi-instrumentalist. The oldest release here is from 1973, the most recent 2013, and in those 40-plus years of releases (the majority of them on Manfred Eicher’s ECM label) are some of the most beguiling, pioneering, beautiful and subversive jazz performances ever committed to tape.
Jarrett was a child prodigy, giving his first classical recital at the age of seven and touring with Art Blakey’s New Jazz Messengers in the early
1960s while still a teenager. That precociousness
“Jarrett transforms the technically complex into the emotionally resonant.”
is a defining quality of his playing and part of the job of this
How To Buy has been to wheedle out the more ponderous and hubristic works in favour of those that simply illustrate his many strengths, including an ability to transform the technically complex into the emotionally resonant and, like Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal before him, balance different voices in a chord, emphasising the different melodic lines through the use of space and silence.
Significantly, since the early ’70s, Jarrett has been the leader of three outstanding groups, including his European Quartet (Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen), his American Quartet (saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, dr ummer Paul Motian) and, since the early ’80s, his Standards Trio with Gar y Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. All three combos are represented here, as are Jarrett’s multi-instrumental experiments and his explorations of the classical keyboard repertoire. And, finally, it’s worth adding that in live performance Jarrett has a habit of mumbling, shouting and even whining like a small animal during moments of euphoric uplift. While I’ve tried to include live recordings where that is less in evidence, perhaps another approach is to embrace it and, like the ancient Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, recognise that there is beauty in imperfection, and beauty itself is imperfect.