Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett
Keith jarrett piano.jpg
Background information
Born May 8, 1945 (1945-05-08) (age 64)
Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Genre(s) Mainstream jazz, Avant-garde jazz, Jazz fusion, Post bop, Contemporary jazz
Occupation(s) Pianist
Instrument(s) Piano
Years active 1966-present

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American pianist, composer and jazz icon.

His career started with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in both classical music and jazz, as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisation technique combines not only jazz, but also other forms of music, especially classical, gospel, blues and ethnic folk music.

In 2003 he received the Polar Music Prize, being the first (and to this day only) recipient not sharing the prize with anyone else.

In 2008 he was introduced to the 73rd annual readers poll in the Downbeat Hall of Fame.

Contents

Early years

Jarrett grew up in suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania with a significant exposure to music. He displayed prodigious talents as a young child and possessed absolute pitch. He played his first formal public concert to paying customers at the age of six and it ended with two of his own compositions.[1] In his teens, as a student at Emmaus High School, he learned jazz and quickly became proficient in it. At one point, he had an offer to study composition with the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris; this was amiably turned down by Jarrett and his mother. In his early teens, he developed a stronger interest in the contemporary jazz scene: he recalls a Dave Brubeck show as an early inspiration.

Following his graduation from Emmaus High School in 1963[2], Jarrett moved from Allentown to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the Berklee College of Music and played cocktail piano. Jarrett then moved to New York City, where he played at the renowned Village Vanguard club.

In New York, Art Blakey hired him to play with his Jazz Messengers band, and he subsequently became a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet (a group which included Jack DeJohnette, a frequent musical partner throughout Jarrett's career). The Lloyd quartet's 1966 album Forest Flower was one of the most successful jazz recordings of the late 1960s. Jarrett also started to record as a leader at this time, in a trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Jarrett's first album as a leader, Life Between The Exit Signs (1967), appeared around this time on the Vortex label, to be followed by Restoration Ruin (1968), which is easily the most bizarre entry in the Jarrett catalog. Not only does Jarrett barely touch the piano, he plays all the other instruments on what is essentially a folk-rock album, and even does all the singing. Another trio album with Haden and Motian followed later in 1968, this one recorded live for the Atlantic label and called Somewhere Before.

Miles Davis

When the Charles Lloyd quartet came to an end, Jarrett was asked to join the Miles Davis group after Miles heard Jarrett in a New York City club. During his tenure with Davis, he played both Fender Contempo electronic organ and Fender Rhodes electric piano, alternating with Chick Corea; after Corea left, he often played the two simultaneously. Despite Jarrett's dislike of amplified music and electric instruments, he stayed on out of his respect for Davis and his wish to work again with DeJohnette. Jarrett can be heard on five of Davis's albums, Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East, The Cellar Door Sessions (recorded December 16–December 19, 1970 at a club in Washington, DC) and Live-Evil, which was largely composed of heavily-edited Cellar Door recordings. The extended sessions from these recordings can be heard on The Complete Cellar Door Sessions. He also plays electric organ on Get Up with It; the song he features on, "Honky Tonk", is an edit of a track available in full on The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. In addition, part of a track called "Konda" (rec. on May 21st, 1970) was released during Davis' late-70's retirement on an album called Directions (1976). The track features an extended Fender-Rhodes piano introduction by Jarrett and was released in full on 2003's The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions[3]

Officially released Miles Davis recordings on which Jarrett appeared:

1970s quartets

From 1971 to 1976, Jarrett added saxophonist Dewey Redman to the existing trio with Haden and Motian. The "American Quartet" was often supplemented by an extra percussionist, such as Danny Johnson, Guilherme Franco, or Airto Moreira, and occasionally by guitarist Sam Brown. The members would also play a variety of instruments, with Jarrett often being heard on soprano saxophone and percussion as well as piano, Redman on musette, a Chinese double-reed instrument, and Motian and Haden on a variety of percussion. Haden also produces a variety of unusual plucked and percussive sounds with his acoustic bass, even running it through a wah-wah pedal for one track ("Mortgage On My Soul," on the album Birth). The group recorded for Atlantic Records, Columbia Records, Impulse! Records and ECM.

The group's recordings include:

The last two albums, both recorded for Impulse!, primarily feature the compositions of the other band members, as opposed to Jarrett's own which dominate the previous albums.

Jarrett's compositions and the strong musical identities of the group members gave this group a very distinctive sound. The group's music was an interesting and exciting amalgam of free jazz, straight-ahead post-bop, gospel music, and exotic Middle-Eastern-sounding improvisations.

In the mid and late 1970s Jarrett led a "European Quartet" concurrently with the above discussed "American Quartet", which was recorded by ECM. This combo consisted of saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Jon Christensen.

Albums recorded by this group include:

This ensemble played music in a similar style to that of the American Quartet, but with many of the avant-garde and "Americana" elements replaced by the European folk influences that characterized ECM artists of the time.

Following the release of the album Gaucho by the US jazz/rock band Steely Dan in 1980, Jarrett became involved in a legal wrangle over the title track. Arguably intended as a tribute to Jarrett, the song was credited only to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, despite its undeniable resemblance to the Jarrett composition "Long As You Know You're Living Yours," from the "Belonging" album. Jarrett threatened legal action, and Becker and Fagen were then forced to add his name to the credits and to include him in future royalties.[4]

Solo piano

Jarrett's first album for ECM, called Facing You (1971) was a solo piano date recorded in the studio. He has continued to record solo piano albums in the studio intermittently throughout his career, including Staircase (1976), The Moth and the Flame (1981), and The Melody At Night, With You (1999). Book of Ways (1986) is a studio recording of clavichord solos.

The studio albums are modestly successful entries in the Jarrett catalog, but in 1973, Jarrett also began playing totally improvised solo concerts, and it is the voluminous recordings of these concerts that have made him one of the best-selling jazz artists in history. Albums recorded at these concerts include:

Jarrett has commented that his best performances were during the times where he had the least amount of preconception of what he was going to play at the next moment. An apocryphal account of one such performance had Jarrett staring at the piano for several minutes without playing; as the audience grew increasingly uncomfortable, one member shouted to Jarrett, "D sharp!", to which the pianist responded, "Thank you!," and launched into an improvisation at speed.

Another of his solo concerts, Dark Intervals (1987, Tokyo), has less of a freeform improvisation feel to it due to the brevity of the pieces. Sounding more like a set of short compositions, these pieces are nonetheless entirely improvised. In addition to the shorter form, they lack the 'jazzy' feel associated with the above concerts.

In the late 1990s, Jarrett was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and was confined to his home for long periods of time. It was during this period that he recorded The Melody at Night, With You, a solo piano record consisting of jazz standards presented with very little of the reinterpretation in which he usually engages. The album had originally been a Christmas Day gift to his second wife, Rose Anne.

By 2000, he had returned to touring, both solo and with the Standards Trio. Two 2002 solo concerts in Japan, Jarrett's first solo piano concerts following his illness, were released on the 2005 CD Radiance (a complete concert in Osaka, and excerpts from one in Tokyo), and the 2006 DVD Tokyo Solo (the entire Tokyo performance). In contrast with previous concerts (which were generally a pair of 30-40 minute continuous improvisations), the 2002 concerts consist of a linked series of shorter improvisations (some as short as a minute and a half, a few of fifteen or twenty minutes).

In September 2005 at Carnegie Hall Jarrett performed his first solo concert in North America in more than ten years, released a year later as a double CD set (The Carnegie Hall Concert).

The Standards Trio

In 1983, Jarrett asked bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, with whom he had worked on Peacock's 1977 album Tales of Another, to record an album of jazz standards, simply entitled Standards, Volume 1. Standards, Volume 2 and Changes, both recorded at the same session, followed soon after. The success of these albums and the group's ensuing tour, which came as traditional acoustic post-bop was enjoying an upswing in the early 1980s, led to this new "Standards Trio" becoming one of the premier working groups in jazz, and certainly one of the most enduring, continuing to record and perform live over more than twenty years.

The trio has recorded numerous live and studio albums consisting primarily of jazz repertory material. They each list Ahmad Jamal as a major influence in their musical development for both his use of melodical and multi-tonal lines. They are:

The trio has also released videos of performances in Japan, which are available on DVD, including:

The Jarrett/Peacock/DeJohnette trio has also produced recordings that consist largely of challenging original material, most notably 1987's Changeless. (These recordings are noted above.) Several of the standards albums contain an original track or two, some attributed to Jarrett but mostly group improvisations. The live recordings Inside Out and Always Let Me Go (both released in 2001) marked a renewed interest by the trio in wholly improvised free jazz. By this point in their history, the musical communication among these three men had become all but telepathic, and their group improvisations frequently take on a complexity that sounds almost composed. The Standards Trio undertakes frequent world tours of recital halls (the only venues in which Jarrett, a notorious stickler for acoustic sound, will play these days) and is one of the few truly lucrative jazz groups to play both "straight-ahead" (as opposed to smooth) and free jazz.

A related recording, At the Deer Head Inn (1992), is a live album of standards recorded with Paul Motian replacing DeJohnette, at the venue in Jarrett's hometown where he had his first employment as a jazz pianist. It was the first time Jarrett and Motian had played together since the demise of the American quartet sixteen years earlier, and also reunited the drummer and bassist who had backed Bill Evans on his album Trio 64 (1963).

Classical music

Since the early 1970s, Jarrett's success as a jazz musician has enabled him to maintain a parallel career as a classical composer and pianist, recording almost exclusively for ECM Records.

1973's In The Light album consists of short pieces for solo piano, strings, and various chamber ensembles, including a string quartet, a brass quintet, and a piece for cellos and trombones. This collection demonstrates a young composer's affinity for a variety of classical styles, with varying degrees of success.

Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena (1975) both combine composed pieces for strings with improvising jazz musicians, including Jan Garbarek and Charlie Haden. The strings here have a moody, contemplative feel that is characteristic of the "ECM sound" of the 1970s, and is also particularly well-suited to Garbarek's keening saxophone improvisations. From an academic standpoint, these compositions are dismissed by many classical music aficionados as lightweight, but Jarrett appeared to be working more towards a synthesis between composed and improvised music at this time, rather than the production of formal classical works. From this point on, however, his classical work would adhere to more conventional disciplines.

Ritual (1977) is a composed solo piano piece recorded by Dennis Russell Davies that is somewhat reminiscent of Jarrett's own solo piano recordings.

The Celestial Hawk (1980) is a piece for orchestra, percussion, and piano that Jarrett performed and recorded with the Syracuse Symphony under Christopher Keene. This piece is the largest and longest of Jarrett's efforts as a classical composer.

Bridge of Light (1993) is the last recording of classical compositions to appear under Jarrett's name. The album contains three pieces written for a soloist with orchestra, and one for violin and piano. The pieces date from 1984 and 1990.

In 1995 the record label Music Masters Jazz released a CD on which one track featured Jarrett performing the exquisite solo piano part in Lousadzak, a 17-minute piano concerto by American composer Alan Hovhaness. The conductor was Dennis Russell Davies. Most of Jarrett's classical recordings are of older repertoire, but Jarrett may have been introduced to this modern work by his one-time manager George Avakian, who was a friend of the composer.

In addition to his classical work as a composer, Jarrett has also performed and recorded classical music for ECM's New Series since the mid-1980s, including the following:

In 2004, Jarrett was awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. The prestigious award usually associated with classical musicians and composers has only previously been given to one other jazz musician — Miles Davis. The first person to receive the award was Igor Stravinsky in 1959.

Other works

Jarrett also plays harpsichord, clavichord, organ, soprano saxophone, drums and many other instruments. He often played saxophone and various forms of percussion in the American quartet, though his recordings since the breakup of that group have rarely featured other instruments. In the last twenty years, the majority of his recordings have been on the acoustic piano only. He has spoken with some regret of his decision to give up playing the saxophone, in particular. Some of Jarrett's other albums, many of which contain examples of his instrumental diversity are:

There are several compilations and collections covering various aspects of Jarrett's career:

After leaving Miles Davis, Jarrett did not often work as a sideman, but he did appear on a few other musician's albums, including the following:

On April 15, 1978, Jarrett was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. His music also has been featured on many television shows, including The Sopranos on HBO.

Idiosyncrasies

One of Jarrett's trademarks is his frequent, highly audible vocalization (grunting, groaning, and tuneless singing), similar to that of Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk, Erroll Garner, and Oscar Peterson. Jarrett is also physically active while playing, writhing, gyrating, and almost dancing on the piano bench. These behaviors occur in his jazz and improvised solo performances, but are for the most part absent whenever he plays classical repertory. Jarrett has noted his vocalizations are based on involvement, not content, and are more of an interaction than a reaction.

Jarrett is notoriously intolerant of audience noise, including coughing and other involuntary sounds, especially during solo improvised performances. He feels that extraneous noise affects his musical inspiration. As a result, cough drops are routinely supplied to Jarrett's audiences in cold weather, and he has even been known to stop playing and lead the crowd in a "group cough." This intolerance was made clear during a concert on October 31, 2006, at the restored Salle Pleyel in Paris. After making an impassioned plea to the audience to stop coughing, Jarrett walked out of the concert during the first half, refusing at first to continue, although he did subsequently return to the stage to finish the first half, and also the second. A further solo concert three days later went undisturbed, following an official announcement beforehand urging the audience to minimize extraneous noise. In 2008, during the first half of another Paris concert, Jarrett complained to the audience about the quality of the piano which he had been given, walking off between solos and remonstrating with staff at the venue. Following an extended interval, the piano was replaced. In 2007, in concert in Perugia, angered by photographers, Jarrett implored the audience: 'I do not speak Italian, so someone who speaks English, can tell all these assholes with cameras to turn them fucking off right now. Right now! No more photographs, including that red light right there. If we see any more lights, I reserve the right (and I think the privilege is yours to hear us), but I reserve the right and Jack and Gary reserve the right to stop playing and leave the goddamn city'. This caused the organizers of Umbria Jazz Festival to declare that they will never invite him again.[5]

He is also extremely protective over the quality of recordings of his concerts. In 1992, a trio concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London was temporarily stopped as Jarrett thought he had identified someone in the audience with a recording device. It turned out to be a light on the mixing desk and the concert resumed after an apology.

Jarrett has been known for many years to be strongly opposed to electronic instruments and equipment. His liner notes for the 1973 album Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne state: "I am, and have been, carrying on an anti-electric-music crusade of which this is an exhibit for the prosecution. Electricity goes through all of us and is not to be relegated to wires." He has largely eschewed electric or electronic instruments since his time with Miles Davis.

Jarrett's public speeches and writings have been perceived as negative or obnoxious by some. He has been known to write back disdainful letters to critics who have negatively reviewed his music. This attitude and his vocalizations while playing are the reasons most commonly cited by his detractors for disliking him and dismissing his music.

Jarrett, for many years, has been a follower of the teachings of metaphysician and mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. In 1980 he recorded for ECM an album of his compositions Sacred Hymns of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Personal

Jarrett's younger brother, Chris Jarrett, is also a pianist and his other brother Scott Jarrett is a producer/songwriter.

References

  1. ↑ Keith Jarrett Information Page
  2. ↑ http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5jarrett.6572968sep14,0,4716330.story?page=2
  3. ↑ Davis, Miles. The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. Columbia/Legacy, 2003
  4. ↑ | Don't Mess With Steely Dan
  5. ↑ Keith Jarrett Officially Banned from Umbria Jazz Festival After Outburst, JazzTimes Magazine, July 16, 2007. [1]

Sources

  • Carr, Ian. Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music. 1992 ISBN 0586092196
  • Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, Brian Priestley. 'The Rough Guide To Jazz'. 2003 ISBN 1-84353-256-5

External links

Léonie Sonning Music Prize Laureates
1959–1980

Igor Stravinsky (1959) · Leonard Bernstein (1965) · Birgit Nilsson (1966) · Witold Lutosławski (1967) · Benjamin Britten (1968) · Boris Christoff (1969) · Sergiu Celibidache (1970) · Arthur Rubinstein (1971) · Yehudi Menuhin (1972) · Dmitri Shostakovich (1973) · Andrés Segovia (1974) · Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1975) · Mogens Wöldike (1976) · Olivier Messiaen (1977) · Jean-Pierre Rampal (1978) · Janet Baker (1979) · Marie-Claire Alain (1980)
1981–2000

Mstislav Rostropovich (1981) · Isaac Stern (1982) · Rafael Kubelík (1983) · Miles Davis (1984) · Pierre Boulez (1985) · Sviatoslav Richter (1986) · Heinz Holliger (1987) · Peter Schreier (1988) · Gidon Kremer (1989) · György Ligeti (1990) · Eric Ericson (1991) · Georg Solti (1992) · Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1993) · Krystian Zimerman (1994) · Yuri Bashmet (1995) · Per Nørgård (1996) · András Schiff (1997) · Hildegard Behrens (1998) · Sofia Gubaidulina (1999) · Michala Petri (2000)
2001–present

Anne-Sophie Mutter (2001) · Alfred Brendel (2002) · György Kurtág (2003) · Keith Jarrett (2004) · John Eliot Gardiner (2005) · Yo-Yo Ma (2006) · Lars Ulrik Mortensen (2007) · Arvo Pärt (2008)