Belonging on ECM and Blue Note (CD Reviews)

 by Karl Nehring

Keith Jarrett: Belonging. Spiral Dance (4:11); Blossom (12:15); ‘Long as You Know You’re Living Yours (6:14); Belonging (2:15); The Windup (8:27); Solstice (13:13). Keith Jarrett, piano; Jan Garbarek, saxophones; Palle Danielsson, bass; Jon Christensen, drums. ECM 1050

 

Branford Marsalis Quartet: Belonging. Keith Jarrett: Spiral Dance (6:21); Blossom (11:02); ‘Long as You Know You’re Living Yours (8:56); Belonging (7:36); The Windup (12:41); Solstice (14:20). Branford Marsalis, saxophones; Joey Calderazzo, piano; Eric Revis, bass; Justin Faulkner, drums. Blue Note 00602475486596

 

In the world of classical music we think nothing of there being numerous recordings of the same repertoire. Whether we want to listen to a recording of a Beethoven symphony, Schubert song, Mozart string quartet, or Stravinsky ballet score, we have an almost overwhelming number of versions from which to choose. In the heyday of record stores, a shopper looking for a version of, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony could flip through a dozen or so competing versions on LP, then later, on CD. Today, the choices are even wider on streaming services, where entering “Beethoven Symphony No. 5” as a search term will yield an overwhelming number of choices (I just tried it on Amazon Music and got way more than 100). In the jazz world, however, things are different. Although there are certainly many recordings to be found of many jazz tunes – ‘Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk and Take the A Train by Duke Ellington, for example – to have a jazz album be recorded by two different ensembles is a rare occurrence indeed.

The original Belonging album was recorded in Oslo in two days in April, 1974. All the tunes were written by Jarrett. This was the debut of what came to be known as his “European Quartet,” as opposed to his “American Quartet,” which featured Dewey Redman (saxophone), Charlie Haden (double bass), and Paul Motian (drums). Because Jarrett was under contract to ABC/Impulse for that group, he was unable to attach his name to his European ensemble for either recording or touring, so the album cover simply lists the names of the musicians. Of the six tunes, three are ballads (Blossom, Belonging, Solstice), while the other three are more hard driving (Spiral Dance, ‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours, The Windup). “It was the fastest album I’ve ever done,” Jan Garbarek would later say, referring to Jarrett’s emphasis on first takes in the studio to capture the spirit of the pieces. The music flows spontaneously and organically, drawing the listener in. “The album Belonging ranks with the greatest quartet recordings in jazz,” wrote Keith Jarett biographer Ian Carr, “because everything about it is superlative: the compositions, the free-flowing interplay, the level of inspiration and the brilliantly focused improvising of all four musicians.” It is one of those albums that although by no means “easy listening jazz” (e.g., Kenny G), can appeal to a wide variety of listeners, even those not familiar with the idiom. Not long after Belonging was released, I gave a copy of the LP to a couple who did not listen to much jazz at all. They loved it. 

As a side note, it turned out that there were some people who may have loved the album a bit too much. The tune 'Long as You Know You're Living Yours wound up being the subject of a lawsuit between Jarrett and the rock group Steely Dan. Jarrett alleged that the title track from their 1980 album Gaucho had stolen from the song (I must say that the first time I heard the Steely Dan song, the music immediately struck me as an homage to Keith Jarrett). Co-writer Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, a huge jazz buff, later admitted he'd loved the track from Belonging and was strongly influenced by it. Jarrett sued for copyright infringement and was then added as a co-author of the song.

 

Half a century later, Belonging has been named Downbeat magazine’s 2025 Recording of the Year – but for a recording by the Branford Marsalis Quartet on the venerable Blue Note label rather than Keith Jarrett and his European ensemble on ECM. Marsalis admits that he was into other music when Belonging was released in 1974. “I was a freshman in high school, listening to R&B,” he recalls. “I didn’t know Belonging existed.” That changed once he shifted his focus to jazz, although he was only familiar with Jarrett’s solo piano music until pianist Kenny Kirkland introduced him to the Jarrett’s European Quartet. “We were sitting on a plane sometime in the 80s and Kenny put his headphones on my ears and played [Jarrett’s 1979 album] My Song. When he tried to take the headphones back after five minutes I slapped his hand away; and when we got to the next city, I went out and bought every recording by that band.” 

A similar discovery occurred when Marsalis decided to include the tune The Windup from Belonging on his band’s most recent album, 2019’s The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul. “We were all listening to The Windup for the last record, and Revis said that we should just record Belonging, the whole album is so great and we could do things with it. We all liked the idea, and then the pandemic came. When the pandemic ended, we all still felt that yeah, we should do this.” The quartet applied Marsalis’s previous approach to classics by Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, and others – neither slavish devotion to the originals nor extreme deconstructions. “On the composition Belonging, I clearly played things that Jan played on the record,” Marsalis points out. “I didn’t try to reject the idea when it occurred, but at no point did we plan to consciously pay tribute. I’m always listening to the whole record, not just the saxophone solos, and the most impressive thing about Belonging for me is how it all fits together.”

If you go back and look at the headers for the two albums above, you’ll note that I have taken the unusual step of including the timings for each tune. If you compare the two albums, you’ll see that Marsalis’s band stretched out the tunes longer in every instance except for one, the ballad Blossom. The title track, Belonging, is the most notable example of this more expansive approach, coming it at more than three times as long as interpreted by Branford and his crew. In general, the newer album has a more propulsive feel, both in performance and sound. Marsalis’s saxophone sound is warmer and fuller than that of Garbarek, and Faulkner takes a more aggressive approach to his drumkit than did Christensen. It is fascinating to play these two albums back-to-back and compare the two approaches: the more lyrical original versus the more expansive, energetic tribute. Both the Jarrett 1974 ECM original and Marsalis 2025 Blue Note tribute version are recordings that deserve a place in the collection of jazz fans, and both are well worth a listen by those unfamiliar with jazz but willing to give it a try.

 

Live Concert Report: Immanuel Wilkins 

 

On a bitterly cold night in central Ohio, we ventured once again to the Performance Space inside the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of The Ohio State University campus to enjoy an evening of music, this time featuring a jazz ensemble led by alto saxophone player Immanuel Wilkins. The rest of his band included a keyboardist who played both piano and organ, a double bass player, a drummer, plus one male and two female vocalists (When he first took the stage, Wilkins introduced his bandmates, but I really couldn’t catch their names, and there was no printed program identifying them, alas). The vocalists often used their voices as instruments, weaving them together and playing off each other rather than just “singing songs.” There were some lyrics from time to time; however, the PA system made it hard to follow just what was being sung. Musically, however, the sound of the vocals blended in with the sound of the instruments in a natural-sounding way. Wilkins rarely stepped front and center but rather blew his lines as a part of the whole rather than being the solo focus. The musical mood was warmly communicative.

A Concert Report from Ethan Iverson:

 

Pianist and composer Ethan Iverson recently attended an exciting concert at Zankel Hall in New York. Below is a brief excerpt from his report on the concert followed by a link to his full Substack post. And once again I would advise music fans to subscribe to Ethan’s Substack, Transitional Technology, which offers a world of insight into music and culture.

 

“Last night American music leveled up! Pianistic virtuosity, groove rhythm, and long-term structural control aligned in a way that had never quite been previously achieved. 

 

A century ago jazz happened, and for a moment it looked like the American classical composers (Gershwin, Copland, Barber) were going to make blues and ragtime part of the sonata and symphony idiom. But that blend was elbowed out first by disjunct high modernism (Babbitt and Carter) and then straight up and down minimalism (Glass and Reich). A lot was left on the table, and in the current free-for-all of postmodernism, bright lights such as Derek Bermel and Tania León have been working on bringing back soulful syncopation to formal composition. 

 

But there are two sides to this fusion: Writing the music is one thing, playing it is another. That’s the unprecedented part: Aaron Diehl and Timo Andres can play the beat for real. The concert concluded with my lips from speaking by Julia Wolfe, a long process piece based on a fragment of Aretha Franklin. It’s an intellectual gambit, an atomizing of a riff, a deconstruction of an emotion: part noise, part space. But as the piece evolves, the beat starts coming out. By midpoint, the audience at Zankel was helplessly grooving to the syncopated rhythm. I have never heard this hall turned into a club before.” 

 You can find Ethan's complete concert report here.