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.

 

Keith Jarrett: A Tribute

by Karl Nehring

Earlier this month, American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett celebrated his 80^th birthday. Although best known as a jazz pianist, his body of work extends far beyond jazz – and beyond the piano. We have reviewed a few of his recordings in the past; you can find those reviews here (Budapest Concert), here, (Bourdeaux Concert), and here (C.P.E. Bach Sonatas). Like many people, my first encounter with his playing was from listening to Forest Flower, on which Jarrett played piano as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet in a live set at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival that was released on Atlantic Records in 1967. In 1971, Jarrett, who was then touring with Miles Davis, had a fateful meeting with producer Manfred Eicher that resulted in Jarrett recording a solo piano album, Facing You, which was released in 1972 on Eicher’s ECM label. In 1973, had released Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne, the first of what would become a series of concert recordings during which Jarrett played improvised music. Popular music critic Rick Beato has posted a YouTube video (which you can see here) describing a segment of this recording as “two of the most beautiful minutes in music.” 

While in the Army in 1974, I picked up both of his “American” quartet albums – Fort Yawuh and Treasure Island – on the Impulse! label, the latter of which featured Jarrett picking up the soprano saxophone on one of the cuts. As a side note, his “American” quartet included the late Dewey Redman, father of Joshua Redman (whose recent performance we mentioned here), on tenor saxophone, along with Charlie Haden on bass and Paul Motian on drums). 1974 also saw the release of the album Belonging on the ECM label, this by Jarrett’s “European” quartet, with Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone, Palle Danielsson on bass, and Jon Christensen on drums. It’s a beautiful recording, highlighting Jarrett’s skill as a composer as well as a pianist. Then in 1975, ECM released what would become the best-selling piano recording in history, Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. It’s a spellbinding album that still sounds fresh and new 50 years after its initial release.

In 1976, Jarrett received a commission from the Deutsche Grammophon to compose a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was to be conducted by Seiji Ozawa and feature Jarrett on piano. Jarrett completed his 200-page, 40-minute score for The Celestial Hawk in 1978. The BSO had been expecting a jazzy piece with Jarrett doing a lot of improvising, apparently thinking that would guarantee box-office success; when they saw it was a serious classical composition, they lost interest, and the project was dropped. Instead, Eicher decided to record the work for his ECM label, with Jarrett on piano accompanied by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Keene. It was released in 1980.

 

In 1984, Eicher decided to expand ECM into the classical realm and brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. This recording also marked the intersection of some of the most longstanding, significant musical collaborators in the label’s history: Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer, and Keith Jarrett. I was quite familiar with Jarrett, somewhat familiar with Kremer, but my familiarity with Pärt extended only as far as having heard his name but not his music when, late at night in 1984 while sitting in my car having just finished a shift as a security guard while I was still in grad school, over the radio came music that immediately held me under its spell. The late-night host on WOSU-FM announced that he was playing some tracks from a new album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and that we had just heard his composition Fratres, performed by violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Keith Jarrett. Keith Jarrett?! Although the music sold itself, Jarrett’s endorsement made me even more eager to run out and purchase the CD just as soon as I could find it; I have been an enthusiastic Arvo Pärt fan ever since.

Jarrett went on to release many, many recordings over the ensuing decades, both as a soloist and as part of an ensemble. Many of these were jazz, of course, but there were also many classical efforts, in music of Bach Handel, Mozart, Shostakovich, Bartók, Barber, Harrison, and Hovhaness. (If I may be permitted another personal aside, it was Jarrett who introduced me to the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano by Shostakovich – I had many recordings of DSCH’s symphonies and was somewhat familiar with his concertos and chamber music but had no idea this marvelous piano music even existed until ECM released Jarrett’s recording in 1992. I now own several versions and continue to delight in this music that Jarrett first revealed to me.) 

 

In 1994, Jarrett’s Bridge of Light album appeared on the ECM New Series label, containing four classical compositions by Jarrett: Elegy for Violin and String Orchestra, Adagio for Oboe and String Orchestra, Sonata for Violin and Piano, and Bridge of Light for Viola and Orchestra. Jarrett said of these works, “Actually, all of these pieces are born of a desire to praise and contemplate rather than a desire to "make" or "show" or "demonstrate" something unique. They are, in a certain way, prayers that beauty may remain perceptible despite fashions, intellect, analysis, progress, technology, distractions, "burning issues" of the day, the un-hipness of belief or faith, concert programming, and the unnatural "scene" of "art", the market, lifestyles, etc., etc., etc. I am not attempting to be "clever" in these pieces (or in these notes), I am not attempting to be a composer. I am trying to reveal a state I think is missing in today's world (except, perhaps, in private): a certain state of surrender: surrender to an ongoing harmony in the universe that exists with or without us. Let us let it in.” It is a charming album, pastoral and serene. If you were to listen to it today without being told who the composer is, your guess might well be a British composer such as, say. Butterworth. 

Tragically enough, in 2018 Jarrett suffered the first of several strokes that robbed him of the use of his left hand, thus leaving him unable to continue his career at the piano. However, ECM has since released several albums of past concert performances; in fact, there is a release of a recording he made in Vienna that we will be reviewing in a forthcoming post. For more insight into this fascinating musician, whose music blurred the boundaries between classical and jazz, between composed and improvised, there is a an in-depth interview that the notoriously press-shy Jarrett granted to Rick Beato; that fascinating video can be seen here.

Recent Releases No. 44 (CD Reviews)

by Karl Nehring

American Stories. Richard Danielpour: Four Angels; James Lee III: Quintet; Ben Shirley: High Sierra Sonata; Valerie Coleman: Shotgun Houses. Anthony McGill, clarinet; Pacifica Quartet (Simin Ganatra, violin; Austin Hartman, violin; Mark Holloway, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello). Cedille CDR 90000 216

Anthony McGill is the principal clarinet for the New York Philharmonic and he plays with a strong, confident tone that is a wonder to behold. He is joined on this release by the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet to play music by contemporary American composers.  McGill describes it as a project driven by the desire to “expand the capacity for art and music to change the world,” further observing that “as an artist you don’t often get to put together a collection of living composers that you love. I am in awe of every piece on this album and how each piece communicates with the other.” Each of the four composers contributes a liner note essay explaining the motivation behind their composition, with a common theme being the struggle for human dignity. Danielpour’s Four Angels pays tribute to the four young African-American girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and civil rights advocates who refused to be intimidated by racial violence. Lee’s Quintet reflects on the Native American experience and contains elements of Native music. Ben Shirley’s High Sierra Sonata, which inspired the album’s cover art, evokes California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and the region’s annual high-altitude marathon. Coleman’s Shotgun Houses celebrates the life of Muhammad Ali and the West Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood where she and the legendary boxer grew up. Throughout, McGill’s command of his instrument is nothing short of miraculous, and the Pacifica Quartet plays with both precision and passion. As usual, the Cedille sonics are beyond reproach.

Symphony: Jean-Michel Pilc. Leaving; Discovery; The Encounter; First Dance; Just Get Up; Way to Go; Understanding; Waltz for Xose; Not Falling This Time; I’ll Be Back. Jean-Michel Pilc, piano. Justin Time Records JTR 8632-2

 

Some readers may be familiar with the music of the legendary pianist Keith Jarrett, who throughout his long career has released numerous live concert performance recordings of improvised solo piano music for the ECM label; a review of one of those releases, The Bordeaux Concert, can be read here. Moreover, Jarrett fans – and even those who are not necessarily Jarrett fans but who have an interest in beholding musical genius, not to mention a moving human interest story – should find this extended in-depth interview with Jarrett by the delightful YouTube musical personality and fount of information Rick Beato to be both illuminating and heartwarming. 

But now we have another recording of improvised solo piano music to audition and enjoy. In November, 2021, the French jazz pianist Jean-Michel Pilc (b. 1960), who now resides in Canada, had just finished a recording session in a Portuguese studio for an album by a Spanish saxophonist. He really liked the studio, the acoustics, the Steinway, and the overall vibe, so he asked whether he could take some extra studio time to improvise at the keyboard. The saxophonist gave the go-ahead and the sound engineer agreed to record while Pilc played. Pilc says of the session, “Without any intention other than making music, I started playing. When inspiration sets in, you leave the 'real world' and music leads you through a new universe of its own. That’s what happened, and when I stopped, everyone was so enthusiastic about the result that they generously offered to mix and master it carefully for a future release which they said was inevitable. After listening to it myself, I agreed with their assessment. So here it is, and I hope the listener will go on the same journey I did that day.” That journey is one of discovery, exploring harmonies on the keyboard, going down different melodic trails to see where they might lead, but along the way, never losing sight of the idea of melody. Although the header above reads like a list of songs, the album does not sound like that; rather, ideas shift, tempos change, but in general, the album has an overall flow to it that does not sound entirely like a collection of discrete songs. There are, of course, some abrupt shifts of mood from time to time, as between the nervous tension of Time to Go and the reflective serenity of Understanding. All in all, Pilc has produced a fascinating album of compelling improvisatory music that blurs the boundaries between classical and jazz.

 

 

Piano Potpourri No. 9 (CD Mini-reviews)

by Karl Nehring

The Future Is Female: Vol. 2, The Dance. Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729): Suite No. 1 in D minor: 1, IV, V, VIII, VI (from Les Pièces de Clavecin) [1687]; Clara Schumann (1819-1896): Variations, Op. 20 [1853]; Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983): Partita [1957]; Zenobia Powell Perry (1908-2004): Rhapsody [1960]; Madeleine Dring (1923-1977): Colour Suite [1963]; Betsy Jolas (b. 1926): Tango Si [1984]; Elena Kats-Chernin (b. 1957): Peggy’s Rag [1996]; Meredith Monk (b. 1942): St. Petersburg Waltz [1997]; Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964) Preludio y Estudio 3 [2011]; Theresa Wong (b. 1976): She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees [2019]. Sarah Cahill, piano. First Hand Records FHR 132

This is not just another piano recital recording, for Sarah Cahill is not just another pianist. Among other things, she is also a musical explorer, communicator, and advocate. Her radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm in San Francisco. The program focuses on the relationships between classical music and new music, encompassing interviews with musicians and composers, historical performances, and recordings outside the mainstream. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2018, she started working on her project, The Future is Female, which now encompasses more than 70 compositions. 

 “For decades I had been working with many living American composers,” Cahill explains, “including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe. Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard. At some point I would love to record Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s complete Suite in D minor and Madeleine Dring’s complete Colour Suite, but my main objective in this project is to be inclusive rather than exhaustive.”

 

What we have here is the second volume in the series (Vol. 1: In Nature was released in March, 2022), and as you can see from the track listing above, Cahill presents the works of 10 composers in chronological order of their composition, spanning the years from 1687 all the way up to 2019. Somehow it seems that you can sense that the earliest selections, five movements from Jacquet de la Guerre’s Suite No. 1 in D from her Les Pièces de Clavecin was indeed written for an instrument different from our modern piano; it just has that feeling of music meant to be played on the clavichord or harpsichord – not that it sounds wrong on the piano, just that the style of the music gives away that it was written for such an instrument – which of course it originally was. In any event, it’s a danceable delight. As we come next upon the music of Clara Schumann, the more stately, formal style of dance is served well by the full, rich sound of the modern piano (Steinway Model D) captured so well by engineer Matt Carr. 

 

And so the program continues with diverse forms of dance such as the “deconstructed” tango of Tango Si by Betsy Jolas or the gently swinging Peggy’s Rag by Elena Kats-Chernin. The stylistic range of the program that Cahill has assembled makes for an interesting program, and the dance theme, even though not all of the pieces sound like the kind of music that is going to make you just want to just get right up and dance, is enough to keep things lively and interesting. The most recent compositions, those by Gabriela Ortiz (Preludio y Estudio) and Theresa Wong (She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees) give Cahill particular opportunity to fly her fingers nimbly over the keyboard and emphasize some expressive dynamic contrasts. In addition to her playing, Cahill also supplies the liner notes, which give biographical information about all of the composers. The Future is Female, Vol. 3 is scheduled for release later in 2023. 

 

Federico Mompou: Música callada (“Silent Music”): Book One [1959]; Book Two [1962]; Book Three [1962]; Book Four [1967]. Stephen Hough, piano. Hyperion CDA68362

 

In his fascinating collection of essays titled Rough Ideas (reviewed here), the British pianist Sir Stephen Hough wrote of the Spanish composer Federico Mompou (1893-1967): “The music of Federico Mompou is the music of evaporation. The printed page seems to have faded, as if the bar lines, time signatures, key signatures, and even the notes themselves have disappeared over a timeless number of years. There is no development of material, little counterpoint, no drama nor climaxes to speak of; and this simplicity of expression – elusive, evasive and shy – is strangely disarming. There is nowhere for the sophisticate to hide with Mompou. We are in a glasshouse, and the resulting transparency is unnerving, for it creates a reflection in which our face and soul can be seen.” Hough also observed that of his musical education, “I knew Mompou before I knew Mozart,” which perhaps give him something of a different perspective on the composer’s output.

Mompou declared that Música callada was meant as a spiritual piece with an aim “to reach the profound depths of our soul and the hidden domains of the vital force of our spirits. This music is silent as if heard from within.” The music seems to exist somewhere behind the notes, drifting in and out of focus, or as Hough puts it, it “evaporates.” That does not mean that there are actual silences; no, it is not there are no notes, but rather there are times when the notes linger but the music seems to disappear. There are wisps of melody, but they seem to come and go as though they were scattered about hither and yon by the breeze. Hough has a tender touch at the keyboard, at times lingering, but then at other times snapping things back into focus with some sharply struck notes – those too, though, destined soon to evaporate.

Another way that I might try to explain this music would be to ask you to imagine keyboard music something like that of Debussy – dreamy, impressionistic, soft-edged; however, in this keyboard music by Mompou, there is much less of the lushness of Debussy’s music. Many of the notes have been subtracted, so that the music that remains is more subtle, more spiritual, more transparent. My guess is that some listeners will find the lack of hummable melodies a minus, while, others will find themselves entranced by the unique musical atmosphere evoked by Mompou’s writing and Hough’s performance, which has been captured in full, rich sound by the Hyperion engineering team. The customary top-quality liner notes and cover art that we have come to expect from Hyperion are the frosting on the cake.

 

Bordeaux Concert. Keith Jarrett, piano. ECM 2740 B0036120-02 

 

The American pianist Keith Jarrett (b. 1945) is most widely known as a jazz pianist, but that is not the extent of his recorded legacy. On the jazz side, some of his notable recordings include Forest Flower wlth Charles Lloyd; his American Quartet albums with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian; his European Quartet albums with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson, and Jon Christensen; his Standards Trio albums with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette; and his numerous solo piano albums, including one of the most famous solo piano albums of all time, his Köln Concert. On the classical side, he has recorded music by Bach, Bartok, Mozart, Harrison, Hovhaness, Pärt, Shostakovich, and others. it is an incredible recorded legacy. Surprisingly enough, however, although he was nominated a dozen times, he has never received a Grammy (although Köln Concert was named a Grammy Hall of Fame recording in 2011). Tragically enough, in 2018 he suffered the first of several strokes that have left him unable to play the piano. As a longtime Keith Jarrett fan, that leaves me heartbroken. Thank goodness we have so many recordings to enjoy the beauty he has created throughout his remarkable career.

Bordeaux Concert documents a solo performance, the last that Keith Jarrett would give in France, at the Auditorium de l'Opéra National de Bordeaux on July 6, 2016. For this concert, the entire program was improvised – no segue into any familiar melodies, even at the end as an encore, as Jarrett would sometimes do at his concerts. Given the worldwide popularity of Köln Concert for well more than four decades, there may be readers whose familiarity with that recording might lead them to expect a similar style of music from Jarrett this time around. However, it would not take long for them to realize that this concert is not going to be the same gospel= and blues-tinged mix. From the almost random-sounding bunch of notes that opens his performance, Jarrett’s improvisatory inspirations in Bordeaux lead him down largely atonal paths. That is not to say that the resulting music is harshly dissonant or otherwise harshly voiced; there are, even within some of the more abstract sounding movements (the performance is divided into 13 Parts, of which Part I is the longest at 12:45, while Part X is the shortest at 2:54), there are often passages in which Jarrett’s lyrical impulses can be discerned. Part IV is simply tender and gorgeous throughout. Longtime Jarrett fans will know that he must have been particularly inspired during this part of the concert because of the groans picked up by the microphones – a Jarrett trademark. Some listeners hate it, some don’t mind, much as is the case with recordings by another keyboard legend, the late Glenn Gould.

 

The sound of Jarrett’s piano is captured quite closely by the microphones, so you hear plenty of detail, a few little warts and all (Jarrett’s occasional moans, some occasional creaks and bumps, some strings in the piano that occasionally just don’t sound quite right when struck hard). You can put recording on, close your eyes, and imagine you are hovering right above the keyboard as Keith Jarrett somehow manages to find all of these notes in his mind and fingers and use the piano to send wave after wave of energy into the auditorium on that night in France as once again you find yourself taking a moment to pause and reflect upon the miracle of high-fidelity sound reproduction and the magic of musical imagination.