Among the group of musicians who came out of Miles Davis’ stable, it is Keith Jarrett who has achieved the greatest fame and is considered a true megastar: Videos, Photos

Keith Jarrett is one of those artists who is recognized by almost every music lover who admits to being interested in jazz and almost every owner of even the most modest collection of jazz records.

It is completely unusual, but among the group of musicians who came out of Miles Davis’ stable, it is he who has achieved the greatest fame and is considered a true megastar.

It is even more unusual that in this elite group there are such personalities as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, to name only the most titled. However, it is Jarrett and all events related to him that naturally become the subject of salon conversations, and the vision of attending a concert – the subject of desire and envy.

It is not easy to hear Jarrett live if you do not live in Japan or the European capitals of Mediterranean countries. Here, where it snows and winters can be harsh, we had the chance to remember what it’s like when this great pianist and no less eccentric sits behind the piano twice.

The first time was in the 80s during the Jazz Jamboree, when his famous trio began its musical journey, and then after almost 20 years again in the same line-up, but already enveloped in the splendor of the most magnificent and probably the longest-running jazz band in the world.

I remember both of these concerts perfectly, especially the first one, although my adventure with jazz was just beginning then. I remember them, of course, not as a musical feast or a festival of refined tastes, but more as a previously unheard-of mystery composed of slightly alien sounds and a completely magical silence ringing in my ears just before the first chords of the next standards.

Today, we will probably not be able to enjoy Jarrett’s music with our own ears, neither solo nor in trio, but there is probably still a lot of his music in the archives that will see the light of day. However, today, on the day of his 77th birthday, it is worth recalling the fate of the most famous jazz pianist in the world.

Jarrett was haunted by the spirit of not only great improvisation, but also impressive eccentricity. It is still so today, when rumors about what the temperature must be on and off stage for the master to play, what kind of car must take him to the airport and at what time the plane must take off so that the celebrity, without losing any of his own brilliance, can rest in his Parisian privacy after the concert.

However, one can, to some extent in Jarrett’s defense, guess that he was probably like this much earlier than his position in the world of jazz authorized him to be. This scenario is likely. An above-average gifted child, who knows, maybe even a genius, judging by his high, though unknown, IQ. In addition, equally ambitious parents, who found it just as easy to favor their oldest and most promising son as they did to ignore their younger one.

A specially programmed curriculum, individual lessons and recitals at the age of 6. It looked like breeding a champion. In retrospect, you can see – it ended successfully.

It is therefore not too surprising that Jarrett, immersed in classical music, did not bother with jazz in his youth, but once he started, it was for good, and today, as the years go by, one can even risk saying that he devoted himself entirely to it, abandoning his – otherwise intriguing – struggles with classical music, at least in the form we can recall from albums (“The Celestial Hawk” – with the outstanding Japanese conductor Seji Ozawa, solo with Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues) or concerts that were never released by any record company (Christopher Hogwood and Vladimir Ashkenazy).

While the vast majority of jazz musicians respect and admire classical music, but reach for it after hours, in Jarrett’s case, interest in it took the form of a great passion, and with time also a great love. He himself has admitted this many times, even when – discouraged by the lack of creativity of classical musicians – he stopped performing classical repertoire in public.

So what really made Jarrett start treating his studies of the scores of great composers more as personal explorations than as a pulpit of artistic expression? I am probably not the only one who would like to ask him about this.

Nevertheless, Jarrett, whatever one thinks of his classical records and concerts, belongs entirely to jazz. He chose this path when he studied for a year at the famous Berkley School of Music, he decided so when he accepted invitations from Stan Kenton’s bands, then Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and then still from Charles Lloyd and finally the greatest – or perhaps it would be better to say the most famous of them – Miles Davis.

It is commonly said that it was Davis who created Jarrett – a great jazz improviser. But was that really the case? Certainly, by joining the electric jazz-rock ensembles of the Black Prince, Jarrett entered the most elite circles of jazz popularity, becoming a recognizable, appreciated and respected person almost overnight.

But so did all those anointed by Davis, whether they were to sound with their own original voice in the future or join the ranks of moderately recognizable, yet talented artists. Let it be so. However, the further stage career of the brilliant pianist seems to deny that strong aesthetic bonds could have been formed between that Miles and the soon-to-be Jarrett and that a clear line of descent could have been drawn.

By leaving Davis, with whom he unfortunately held a less prominent position than Red Garland, Bill Evans, and later Herbie Hancock, Jarrett almost completely distanced himself from the aesthetics of electric jazz as a way of formulating musical ideas. Yes, he occasionally played electric keyboards, but these ideas practically disappeared into complete oblivion with the dissolution of his American quartet.

It is enough to reach for the recordings of that band collected on two extensive Impulse! releases to make it clear that Jarrett is closer to the aesthetics of Ornette Coleman than to Davis, who was blurred in drug electrifications. If it were not so, why would he invite two leading followers of Coleman’s aesthetics to his band: tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and double bassist Charlie Haden? It was not because of natural eccentricity.

Many critics and listeners saw this American formation of the pianist as a continuation of the ideas built by Ornette. Many today also miss that band, considering it the pinnacle of Jarrett’s career, forgetting a bit about the European quartet with Jan Garbarek, Pall Danielson and Jon Christiansen, which as a band seemed more integrated, and stylistically much more uniform, organized and convincing.

Whatever it was, the Jarrett we admire today was yet to appear. Who knows, maybe it didn’t happen with his first solo recording, not a concert one at that time, but a studio one, made for the not-so-significant-in-the-world-of-jazz label ECM.

Maybe it was “Facing You”, a practically completely unprepared album, created from just a few sketches and played out almost on the spur of the moment, that became the proper prelude to the endless self-praising song, the echoes of which still resonate today. Could one have guessed that it would initiate a whole series of solo recordings, then mainly concert recordings, which, it must be admitted, took Jarrett straight to the musical Olympus?

The concerts from Bremen, Paris, Munich, Lausanne, Rome, and the slightly lesser known but extraordinary ones from Japan, published by ECM, of course, and collected in the extensive box set “Sun Bear Concerts”, have become not only important items in record collections, but also recordings to which listeners return again and again. Oh, and I forgot about the most important one, probably not only for Jarrett himself and for Manfred Eicher (from that moment on, no one spoke of ECM as a small, independent publishing house), but for the entire jazz audience – the Cologne Concert.

This completely improvised performance became something more than just an excellent recording. There are people all over the world who treat it as the bible of jazz, which is all the more surprising because in this purely jazz aesthetic, which grew out of the blues, is based on the blues, swings, rhythmically vibrates, it hardly fits into any bar. To tell the truth, it is not easy to decide what we are dealing with here.

That it is improvisation is obvious, but is it not sometimes the case that Jarrett, although he rises to the heights of expression, as if pouring out wonderful themes from his sleeve, instead of extracting a wonderful, noble stone from them, crumbles them and arranges them into a necklace that is, in all its dazzling splendor, only a shadow of a real gem? Doesn’t his attitude resemble more a butterfly landing on a different flower than an awe-inspiring creator, a builder of truly significant works?

Perhaps that was the case once. Now, the case of Jarrett sitting alone at the great concert Steinway, illuminated by a single beam of light, is a different story. All you need to do is reach for the four Tokyo performances released six years ago on DVD or the recordings from the Paris and London concerts to see that today’s Jarrett – a soloist, is no longer a peacock proudly puffing out his chest and nonchalantly showing off his tail, but a focused, attentive master soaring far into musical spaces, above contemporary music, jazz and anything else that comes to mind.

The face of the famous eccentric also appeared, and I mean not only the apology for his arrogant behavior, which he recently addressed to the audience before a performance at Carnegie Hall, but above all the album “Rio” – a lively, sunny album, full of energy, but not of an artistic kind, but simply human, and in this respect truly impressive. All those who had doubts about Jarrett’s creative path years ago were soon able to verify their views.

In 1983, a new formation appeared on the jazz scene: the Keith Jarrett Trio with Jack DeJohnette – drums and Garry Peacock – double bass. This disrupted the image that had been created in the minds of the recipients of Jarrett’s previous work – his solo recordings, abandoned concepts from American quartets and undeveloped ideas in European quartets. Although the formation of the Keith Jarrett Trio seemed a natural step, especially for someone who had long since felt like a strong musical personality and had often clashed with listeners in an unequal, victorious battle, it seems to me that it should also be viewed as an almost provocative action, and perhaps even a bit arrogant.

Let us remember that at that time the jazz world had not yet fully come to terms with the loss of Bill Evans – a legendary virtuoso and piano stylist, whom Joahim Berendt used to compare to Vladimir Horovitz, and who was deeply and permanently remembered by music lovers both for his unparalleled trio with Scott LaFarro and Paul Motian, active in the early 1960s, and for his last – no less magnificent, although different in aesthetics – three-person band, with the then very young double bassist Mark Johnson and drummer Joe Labarbera.

Only three years separated Evans’ death and the release of the first volume of Jarrett standards. However, both this and subsequent albums were met with applause from critics and audiences, but let us not be surprised, because in the field of piano trio aesthetics, Jarrett’s formation represented a new voice and a new quality. Quality built on old, strong and durable foundations, but also opening the door to new experiences, new discoveries and new perspectives. Even those who did not entirely like the idea of ​​playing old themes usually succumbed to the way in which the Keith Jarrett trio managed to sell them.

It was no longer possible to talk with impunity about the exaltation and inspired, but not deepened, artistic attitude of the pianist. It was no longer possible to maintain the opinion about his narcissistic nature without exposing oneself to a sharp retort. The counterargument could be any track from the long list of trio albums and then it turned out how non-standard the standards could become.

That is probably why no one expected that the time would come when Jarrett – one of the most famous jazzmen in the world and a true master of reviving harmonious themes – would throw away the warm, royal armchair and risk a stylistic metamorphosis. We will no longer find “Someday My Prince Will Come” on the artist’s latest albums. We will not find sounds that will lead us to a friendly, endless meadow of standard abundance.

Today we have a new Jarrett, stretched in an inexorable precision between Monk and Webern, rejecting established formulas and leading music on waves of free improvisation, taking great stylistic risks, but fully aware of the great means of expression at his disposal, both he and his band. As he himself claims, however, risk has been inscribed in the idea of ​​jazz from the beginning of its existence. It is difficult to figure out the reasons for such a stylistic volte-face. All that remains is to bow to an artist who could have cashed in on his previous achievements until the end of his life, but revealed himself as an extremely creative creator. Even if it was just a momentary whim – because he soon returned to the formula tested over the years.

However, he did it in a non-obvious way. There were Parker reminiscences, glances towards be-bop on one hand, and on the other towards the earlier history of the mentioned “Honeysuckle Rose” by W.C. Handy. However, these are still standards – fabulously played, wonderfully, non-standardly sounding and dazzlingly performed, but standards nonetheless.

Remembering all this, completely without hope that it will ever visit us again.