The Importance of Being Jarrett
Over the past thirty years, Keith Jarrett has been called petulant and pretentious, inspired and transcendent, Dionysian and oceanic, the “Jazz Martyr” and “maddeningly indulgent and selflessly brilliant by turns.” He’s prone to prickly public statements — from stern edicts on music to dissing other musicians (such as Wynton Marsalis, his main jazz rival for name recognition among the general public, whom he called “a talented high school trumpeter”). Yet his art often gushes generosity of emotion: Just ask the three million souls who’ve bought The Koln Concert since 1975, making it the best selling solo piano album in history.
His output as soloist and leader includes a staggering 76 albums, ascribed to his “brass neck in releasing product on a scale usually only accorded the great and the dead” (according to British critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton). Over the past 17 years he’s led a trio devoted to pop and jazz “standards” that’s quite simply the best in jazz. He’s also recorded acclaimed interpretations of Bach and Shostakovich. He is the most influential pianist of his generation, yet at age 55 he’s still regarded as a bit of an enfant terrible.
His reputation is such that last month a leading cultural radio station in France programmed 24 hours of Jarrett, to celebrate Whisper Not, his new trio release recorded in Paris last year. The double-CD is his first concert album since he contracted chronic fatigue syndrome in August, 1996, forcing him to stay away from the piano for two years. For an artist so prolific, the physical debilitation was a profound psychological shock. Jarrett was typically hyperbolic about it: “If I were to invent the most mind-boggling disease imaginable, I couldn’t do better than this.” (This will come as news to terminal cancer and AIDS sufferers.)
Thus the buzz surrounding Whisper Not: Would he play any differently, try to reign in his legendary energy and intensity, not to mention his notoriously irritating accompanying vocalese? Jarrett claims he clears his mind of preconceived notions before he plays — a modus operandi that’s made him both deity and caricature. “I don’t believe that I can create, but that I can be a channel for the Creative,” he wrote in his notes for the three-LP Solo Concerts in 1974. “I do believe in the Creator, and so in reality this is His album through me to you.” Over 20 years later, he toned down his musical world view — only slightly. “I have to be in no mood,” he told the New York Times. “I’ve learned over time how to go deeper than mood. I put my hand somewhere and play something. Fast, before my brain starts telling me what it’s going to do.” He calls the process “my scouring the let’s-see-what-we-can-get-from-nothing cave.”
His solo pieces often last 45 minutes or more, ebbing and flowing in gushes, awash in strains of classical, jazz, folk and boogie. His “emotional content” was compared by the veteran New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett to that of Judy Garland and Cecil B. De Mille. “The playing is bravura and self-indulgent, like a dandy constantly changing clothes. It moons and shouts and daydreams.”
Last year, he surprised fans and foes with The Melody at Night, With You, a startlingly meditative album recorded at home and clearly reflective of what he termed “forever dead syndrome.” Simple melodies held sway instead of improvisational cascades. Ranging from I Loves You Porgy to My Wild Irish Rose, he played slow, subdued and melancholy, notes struck deliberately yet seeming as natural as ripples in a pond. If this was marking time, it had never sounded so soul-satisfying or cleansing.
“Nobody was ever as wild as I was for as long,” he announced three years ago, while keeping his chronic disease syndrome a secret. “You know, the stress of playing has to come out of somewhere, and my body just does it. I really have no choice. The piano is such a bull: it will not dance with you unless you force it … “I make myself the victim of my music. I truly feel that my [1996] tour — it was heroism, you know? If someone’s in the trenches, and they’ve just been shot, and they go and save somebody — where does that energy come from?”
Like many listeners, I became tired of Jarrett’s “self-indulgent” image, and his mind-boggling recorded output. I tuned out, moved on to less narcissistic jazzmen. (When he lamented that Scarlatti “steals the solo stage” from Purcell and Telemann “partly by sheer quantity of material,” I couldn’t help but think this was also Jarrett’s self-inflicted problem. He seemed to clone himself with his solo work, and his own classical-spiritual compositions — with titles like Invocations: The Moth and the Flame, In the Light and Luminescence — tended to lack backbone.)
A couple of years ago, I began listening to his “standards” trio in earnest, and catching up to his solo excursions of the past decade — which has clearly been Jarrett at his best. I’d missed a lot of great music.
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Keith Jarrett is the eldest of five sons, who all became musicians and scored no less than 140 on IQ tests and became musicians. He learned to talk at six months, started playing piano at age two, showed perfect pitch, and began taking lessons the following year. He hated them so much that he placed a Corgi toy car on the music stand to help him concentrate. He appeared on television show at the age of five, and performed a two-hour recital of Beethoven, Mozart, Saint-Saens and two of his own works at seven. He played at his senior high school prom, and declined an opportunity to study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger to instead “dig into the mystery.”
Living in a bug-infested pad in Spanish Harlem in 1965, he dropped by a Monday night jam at the Village Vanguard; as the bass player was missing, Jarrett played those parts with his left hand. He was hired on the spot by drummer Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers was one of the great musical laboratories.
Then, playing three years with saxophonist-flutist Charles Lloyd and a year with Miles Davis (in the midst of his groundbreaking jazz-rock-funk fusion), he grabbed a youthful counter-cultural audience weaned on rock, opening bills for the likes of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Playing with Miles’ group was a compromise for Jarrett, who hated electronic instruments. “Electricity goes through all of us,” he said, “and is not to be relegated to wires.” But Miles was a great musical spirit and Jarrett “wasn’t going to be able to change his music to suit me. I [joined the band] with that knowledge so I was not upset about it.” At least he would “have that camaraderie with him, that I could trust his playing and maybe he could trust mine.” By this time, Jarrett wore the requisite tight bell-bottoms and a big-time Afro which, combined with his dark complexion, had many believing he was black (he’s of Hungarian and Scots-Irish descent).
Davis tells an amusing story in his autobiography: After he rescinded a rule prohibiting sidemen from bringing girlfriends on tour, Jarrett would play something “that he thought was hip, and him and his old lady would look at each other like it was the greatest thing in the world. I had to tell him that it wasn’t knocking me out.”
In 1972 he hooked up with German producer Manfred Eicher, who founded ECM Records with a commitment to acoustic, ascetically intellectualized jazz that stretched boundaries. Jarrett’s three-LP set of Solo Concerts: Bremen & Lausanne was chosen best jazz album of 1974 by Down Beat’s critics and best “pop” album by Time magazine.
[His cascading style one could hear hints of Bartok, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Gershwin, country ivory tickler Floyd Cramer, Ferrante & Teicher. MORE]
He followed up with the rhapsodic Koln Concert, in tune with the zeitgeist of the Me Decade and its “healing” spiritualism; he embraced mystics like Kahlil Gibran and G.I. Gurdjieff (recording an album inspired by the latter’s works). As jazz historian Ted Gioia noted, it’s “only a slight exaggeration to claim that the burgeoning market for New Age music grew out of [its] influence.” This led to a glut of navel-gazing noodlers, and the spectre of Jarrett trying to top himself (including the 1979 ten-record Sun Bear Concerts, of which a Rolling Stone reader wrote, “I hope a sun bear knocks his ego three blocks down the street”).
Ah, the notorious Jarrett ego. He’s acknowledged being considered a “typically touchy artist … fussy and grumpy.” He famously stopped a Montreal concert after a spate of audience coughing and demanded: “O.K., everybody cough!” Yet he complained that silent audiences “can be the most annoying, because you know they’re being silent because they’re not sure whether they should relax.”
His physical gyrations are legend, likened to the sexual act itself (“Disgusting,” snorted one music teacher). “I don’t understand why other improvisers sit still,” he countered. “And how can they not make a sound?” Jarrett’s vocal tics are notorious. He grunts, groans, moans, cries, whines in high-pitched childlike “dee-dee-dee” sing-song, and ecstatic “ohhhhs.” These mannerisms can be not only irritating but also intimidating, as if he’s saying: “This is Deep, so listen up.” “There isn’t enough time to be the creator of the actual music and the interpreter, to get my hands to accomplish the performance in the same microsecond I make up the music, but I do it anyway. So that explains the grunting.” Ultimately, you learn to accept them, as we did with Pablo Casals and Glenn Gould, among many others; they’ve been less pronounced in recent years.
His pious pronouncements on music-making can be off-putting. Setting up The Vienna Concert (of 1991), he wrote, “I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself.” For a 1995 concert at La Scala — the first solo piano recital at the world’s most famous opera house — he quoted a conductors’ assistant who had heard all the music there for 25 years and “said it was the strongest, most moving (again putting his hand to his heart and with tears in his eyes) musical experience he ever had …” Then again, these two albums are indeed major advances on The Koln Concert.
While Jarrett agonizes over words, he can be eloquent: “A master jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He/she knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but on openness. It must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of which is the musician him/herself. This recognition is the most misunderstood part of the process (even by musicians). It is a discrimination against mechanical pattern, for content, against habit, for surprise, against easy virtuosity, for saying more with less, against facile precision, for a certain quality of energy, against stasis, for flow, against military precision, for tactile pulse. It is like an attempt, over and over again, to reveal the heart of things.”
If Jarrett’s statements rub the wrong way, perhaps we’re not accustomed to jazz musicians, stereotyped as instinctual, making utterances that are taken for granted coming from classical musicians (from Wagner’s ravings to Stravinsky’s voluminous musings to Glenn Gould’s outpourings on Bach, Schoenberg et al). Jazz literature has been dominated by critics invariably bent on defining and categorizing the relatively new art form.
Thus some jazz critics feel his solo sorties disqualify Jarrett from greatness, while classical critics’ antipathy towards his jazz background makes them poo-poo him as merely “adequate” (a stance shattered by Jarrett’s definitive brilliance on Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues).
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Which brings us to Jarrett’s nonpareil “standards” trio, reflecting his relationship with jazz improvisation, classical interpretation and the nature of music itself.
In the mid-1980s, he suffered a well-publicized “crisis” in which he questioned his place as both improviser and classical interpreter. According to his fawning biographer Ian Carr, he went into “shock,” stopped played “for several days,” then “slowly healed himself” with fundamental music forms and “in a permanent state of inspiration which lasted for several weeks” recorded 30 pieces of improvised “ethnic” music. Spirits, the double-CD he foisted on the world, is at best a biographical curio.
During his most recent illness, Jarrett became drained just listening to music, and wondered out loud, “What the hell is music?” While improvisation is most often associated with jazz, it has roots in classical music where, musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky points out, it was “regarded as integral to the craft of composition.” Bach was a master of fugal organ improvisation. The child Mozart improvised at the European courts. Beethoven and Liszt dazzled musical friends.
Improvisation is the heartbeat of jazz. [BEBOP] But stimulating, thrilling spur-of-the-moment inspiration can’t be turned on and off like a faucet in nightly gigs, resulting in much hackneyed “improv” cliches. Mere “style” can become a prison, and Jarrett is one of the few jazzmen to address this issue head-on.
The improvisational antecedents for Jarrett’s trio lie in the great bebop pioneer Bud Powell and the supremely lyrical Bill Evans. Powell was a prodigy raised on Bach, whose forte was thrilling invention at a blazing 200 beats per minute. Evans — most widely heard on Miles Davis’s classically cool Kind of Blue, the most famous album in jazz — slowed things down to excavate the prototypical trio dynamic with innovative bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. He replaced Powell’s dazzle with a near “cosmic” use of space to create an intense lyrical interplay between his band mates.
Jarrett’s trio ups the ante, with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette (the latter played with Jarrett in the Lloyd and Davis groups). The trio’s agenda, he told Down Beat, was to “dispossess ourselves of the music, to be giving, not to be taking it and saying ‘This is ours.’ To just be ourselves and play.” He sets the tunes free (“If you own anything, you’re not free”). Last year he put it this way: “All three of us love melody and don’t like playing clever.” For a threesome with telekinetic powers of communication, they don’t sound “tight.” They swing in an elegant yet loose-limbed way, “trying to hear the history of jazz as well as play into the future while playing the stupidest standard tunes.”
Among the chestnuts are Mona Lisa, Autumn Leaves, My Funny Valentine, Days of Wine and Roses, You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To, All of You, Just in Time, Bye Bye Blackbird, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Too Young To Go Steady, and — on the new album — What Is This Thing Called Love and Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams. He’s also recorded bebop classics by Powell, Monk, Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Many improvisers impose a personal style on old tunes, becoming locked into the limitations of style (for better or worse). Jarrett’s trio abandons themselves to those songs, elucidating elementals, replacing archivalism with sublime adventure. There’s a profound lightness of being. That is Jarrett’s particular genius.
I rolled my eyes when he released the 6-CD Complete Blue Note Recordings, an unedited documentary of the trio’s 1994 weekend stint at the famous New York club. Yet it’s an incredible work. “It might be considered warts-and-all but for the fact there are no warts. Nor is there any repetition or aimless noodling,” noted critics Cook and Morton. To listen to all seven hours of it in a day is to get drunk on pure alchemy. Only a musician of Jarrett’s calibre — and spirit — can succeed in making us hang on to the whole creative process unfolding.
“What we investigate is the music-making process and our own feelings towards this process as well as our commitment to the ‘something’ about jazz that makes it unique, vital and touching …”
Jarrett quotes Bach telling a student: “It’s a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment.” Jarrett does not strike the piano keys as tenderly as Evans. He’s not as rhythmically explosive as Powell. He’s not as abstract as Paul Bley, or as cacophonous as Cecil Taylor. His improvisations aren’t as densely maze-like as Brad Mehldau’s (the “Gen X Jarrett”). Others are more elegant, warm and romantic. With age Jarrett has become rather formal, his impeccable technique producing crystalline clarity (without sounding self-consciously definitive).
During his illness, he discovered a lot of things he hated about his playing, and “undid” them when he returned. “I’m not playing as hard. I’d like to find a lightness — more of the sparkly bebop style. Instead of digging in, I’d like to be digging up.” Whisper Not begins its journey with Bouncin’ With Bud — the sprite Powell signature — and ends with When I Fall In Love … it will be completely.