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KEITH JARRETT & ALL THAT JAZZ by Eric KEITH JARRETT & ALL THAT JAZZ by Eric Myers ____________________________________________________________ [This article appeared in the March, 1982 edition of the magazine of ABC Classic FM, 24 Hours, to publicise Keith Jarrett's only Adelaide Festival concert which was to be broadcast live on ABC FM on Saturday, March 13, at 9.00 pm.] Keith Jarrett: a complex man behind the masterly music… the music flows through him… n late 1978, at a press conference in Sydney, American singer Ella Fitzgerald was asked what she thought of Keith Jarrett, who was also in I Australia at that time. Ella, a delightful, bespectacled grandmother in her sixties, was genuinely bewildered. “Who's Keith Jarrett?” she replied. It was somehow ironic that Ella, one of the great names in jazz herself, had never heard of the young pianist, who, by his early thirties, had gained a following which rivalled, and possibly surpassed, the jazz audience she had built up over a lifetime. 1 Well, who is Keith Jarrett? He is an American pianist, saxophonist and composer, now 36, who became, during the 1970s, one of the handful of jazz superstars. Over the last two seasons, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York's Lincoln Center presented only two solo piano concerts, both of which sold out quickly. One was by Vladimir Horowitz; the other was by Keith Jarrett. A bewildered Ella Fitzgerald: “Who's Keith Jarrett?”… In the 1960s, Jarrett first came to notice as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, at a time when a young trumpeter, Chuck Mangione, was also with the group. Previously, he had studied at Boston's Berklee School of Music, and had played with various groups in Boston and New York. In 1966, he joined the quartet led by saxophonist Charles Lloyd. This group, which also included Cecil McBee (bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums) was unusually successful. The Charles Lloyd Quartet in 1966: one of the first of the so-called 'fusion' groups, drawing people into jazz from the rock audience… 2 The Lloyd Quartet toured Europe extensively and was, in 1967, the first American jazz group to be invited to perform in the Soviet Union. It was also one of the first of the so-called 'fusion' groups, drawing people into jazz from the rock audience. This was important for Jarrett's future career. These jazz/rock listeners, who became a huge audience in the 1970s, tended to stay with Jarrett when he later dropped electronic music and became an acoustic solo pianist. Jarrett on piano with Miles Davis… During 1970-71, he worked in the Miles Davis group, the acknowledged finishing school for aspiring contemporary jazz artists. From that time on, his rise was meteoric. With two separate quartets under his own leadership — an American one (with Dewey Redman, Paul Motian and Charlie Haden) and a European one (with Jan Garbarek, Jon Christensen and Palle Danielsson) — he released a number of outstanding LPs. 3 Jarrett’s American Quartet, with Jarrett (top left) then clockwise Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian… The European Quartet, L-R, Jarrett, Jon Christensen, Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson… 4 It was his emergence as a solo pianist, however, which made the great difference to his career. His three-record set, Solo Concerts, recorded in 1973 in Bremen and Lausanne during an 18-concert tour of Europe, stunned the critics and was showered with awards. From these records, it was apparent that Keith Jarrett was bringing something new into jazz. Instead of performing compositions, and improvising on predetermined melodic themes and harmonic structures, he extemporised totally throughout his piano recitals. He claimed to have no idea of what he might play until he was in the process of playing it, so that his whole performance was a spontaneous composition. For many people, Jarrett's art recalled the great days of the 19th century classical pianists and composers who regarded improvisation as an integral part of their performances. Beethoven and Liszt, it was remembered, were prolific improvisers on the concert stage. It was not surprising that Down Beat magazine stated: “The direction Jarrett has taken is as revolutionary as the one Beethoven introduced.” Jarrett's most controversial project has been the ten-record package of solo concerts recorded in Japan in 1976, and called the Sun Bear Concerts. No-one in the history of recorded music before Jarrett had issued ten LPs of new music at once. 5 The music on these LPs successfully divided the critics. Mikal Gilmore, in Rolling Stone, waxed lyrical: “Nowhere else in his collected works does music seem more effortless and splendid. From the opening phrase onward, it unfolds like an idyllic dream on the border of consciousness, and like the best of dreams — or narratives — you never want it to end. It is, to my mind, one of the few real self-contained epics in ‘seventies music’.” Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore: The “Sun Bear Concerts” unfolds like an idyllic dream on the border of consciousness… New York jazz critic Lee Jeske (left) pictured here with Ornette Coleman, found Jarrett’s music “almost unlistenable in its turgid verbosity”…PHOTO CREDIT DAVID GAHR 6 The New York jazz critic Lee Jeske, on the other hand, found the music “almost unlistenable in its turgid verbosity.” Whatever the critics said, Jarrett's solo piano playing attracted a huge and diverse audience. It included those who were familiar with his earlier work in orthodox jazz and, of course, many of the jazz/rock fans who admired his work with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis went with him. Also, he attracted classical music fans, who discovered quickly that, in his music, there were strong echoes of the 20th-century composers such as Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and Stockhausen. Also, Jarrett's music was infused with romanticism. Even though many people found it meandering and esoteric, it turned out to be accessible to fans who did not necessarily have a specialised knowledge of contemporary music. In other words, Jarrett's appeal extended to the middle-of-the-road. As Keith Jarrett grew in stature, people naturally started to wonder about the nature of his personality. As a performer, he was notoriously testy and moody. He became famous for stopping in the middle of a concert to lecture his audience for coughing or being inattentive. He was merciless on late arrivals and photographers. He has been known to cease playing until the piano was re- tuned to his standards. At one of his Sydney concerts in November, 1978, he reacted to a warm ovation by saying (and these were, if I remember rightly, his first words of the evening): “Go home!” Jarrett: as a performer, he was notoriously testy and moody... 7 Jarrett's demeanour as a performer has alienated many critics. Lee Jeske, for example, describes Jarrett as “one of the reigning Kings of Pretension”. In performance, he sits up from the piano stool and, as he gets further into the music, arches his body back and emits groans of (apparent) ecstasy. In Sydney in 1978, Jarrett did much of his playing while crouched beneath the keyboard. He had a habit of singing along in unison with the melody lines he played (a practice not uncommon with jazz pianists), but the emission of orgasmic cries indicated that, for him, playing the piano was an unusually deep and sensual experience. Jarrett: he sits up from the piano stool and, as he gets further into the music, arches his body back and emits groans of (apparent) ecstasy. In Sydney in 1978, Jarrett did much of his playing while crouched beneath the keyboard… Confronted by the Jarrett phenomenon, jazz writers have made brave attempts to get the pianist to give a clear explanation of his art. For many years he has been the despair of interviewers, dismissing their questions intolerantly, preaching about the uselessness of words, and the futility of trying to explain the cosmic process which produces his music. “I understand the process that you need to deal with,” he told a Rolling Stone writer recently, “but I can no more help you with it than if no-one was sitting in this chair. To me, you want to talk about subjects in which I have absolutely no concern ... 8 “What you're doing is what the Western world would love to have continue forever, which is picking apart a world that doesn't deserve to be picked apart. If there's going to be a profile of me in your magazine, it's a profile you're drawing from yourself, and you're getting answers from me because I'm not being myself enough to jump in the air, turn a cartwheel and leave this room — which is what I feel like doing.” When Jarrett deigns to talk about his music, he espouses a philosophy which seems obscure. In the program notes for his symphonic work, The Celestial Hawk, performed in New York's Carnegie Hall with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, he wrote in somewhat pompous terms: “I suppose the purpose of program notes is, many times, to ‘explain’ (after the fact) the piece to be heard in terms that might ‘help’ the listener ‘understand’ what the composer was trying to do. Or what went through his mind; or what the dream he had meant; or why (symbolically, of course) he or she used three trumpets; or what blueprint was used to create such ‘new’ sounds, etc… But this presupposes an already existing knowledge on the part of the composer that I neither have nor wish to have. To me the process itself is what it's all about.
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