ECM Releases Jarrett’s Latest Solo Concert Album

courtesy of Universal Music Group

At the beginning of this month, ECM released its latest album of a solo concert performance by pianist Keith Jarrett. The title of the album is simply Munich 2016, and it was recorded on the last night of a 2016 European tour at the Philharmonie in Gasteig. I have now listened to enough of these concert recordings to have some sense of a pattern.

Jarrett tends to present a sequence of free improvisations, each of which is called simply “Part” followed by a Roman numeral. “Part I” is almost always lengthy but is not necessarily the longest offering of the evening. However, he uses many of the shorter Parts to reflect on genres that reflect on past jazz traditions, while the longer ones take bold steps in unexpected directions and then “survey the ground” while trying to figure out how to eventually (sooner or later) tie things up with a sense of an ending. Towards the end of the evening, Jarrett is likely to extend his improvisations into familiar tunes; but those improvisations tend to be shorter than any of their predecessors.

I should note, as an aside, that I have attended a recital of only one other pianist that tends to work from a similar framework; that pianist was Cecil Taylor.

Because I have never followed Jarrett on one of his tours, I have no idea how many commonalities there are from one night’s program to the next. However, it would not surprise me if all of Jarrett’s performances get recorded. Jarrett himself then probably decides which are the full-evening accounts he would like to see “preserved” on released albums.

Nevertheless, I have to wonder if, in my hypothesized role as a “camp follower,” I would recognize any of those commonalities. Presumably, Jarrett spends a lot of his time on his own, proposing certain paths down which improvisation would be feasible and then deciding which to accept as points of departure during one of his concerts. However, I doubt if I could say anything meaningful about his decision process on the basis of what is available to me through recordings.

Thus, as a listener, I tend to “take it as it comes” when approaching any of these recordings, which would be the same attitude I would bring to attending an actual concert performance. However, there is so much diversity across any given recording that I doubt that, even after listening to an album multiple times in short succession, I would be able to hypothesize anything resembling a “method” behind Jarrett’s capacities for improvisation. Put another way in terms of past history, I suspect that it is easier for me to get my head around Elliot Carter’s second string quartet while following the score as part of my listening activity than it is for me to claim “familiarity” with any of Jarrett’s improvisations.

In my book that speaks well of Jarrett’s concert recordings, and I look forward to fresh discoveries any time I return to any of them!