Keith Jarrett in Budapest in 2016

Keith Jarrett at the keyboard (photograph by Daniela Yohannes, courtesy of ECM Records)

At the end of this past October, ECM released its latest album of a solo concert performance by pianist Keith Jarrett. Like the album that was released almost exactly a year earlier, the performance took place during a European tour in 2016. The title of that earlier album was simply Munich 2016, and the new release has been entitled with similar brevity as Budapest Concert. Jarrett visited Budapest about two weeks before his Munich performance.

Jarrett had a more personal attachment to Budapest. His ancestry could be traced back to Hungary, and the composer Béla Bartók has been a significant influence throughout both his life and his career. Indeed, the venue for the Budapest performance was the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall; and, every now and then, the attentive listener might detect of motif or two that Jarrett may have previously encountered in Bartók’s music.

That said, there are clear parallels across these two concert albums. In both cases the performance consisted of a sequence of free improvisations, each identified simply as “Part” followed by a Roman numeral. At both concerts “Part I” was the longest improvisation, lasting more than thirteen minutes in both cases. Also both concerts consisted of twelve parts, the remaining eleven of which tended to involve more modest individual reflections and styles. The most evident of those styles was that of blues, which was clearly recognizable (and identified in the track listing) in Part XII of the Budapest performance.

Finally, both concerts ended with “songbook improvisations.” Both Charles Kisco’s “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” and “Answer Me, My Love,” whose tune by Gerhard Winkler began as the German song “Mütterlein” and later received English lyrics (and title) by Carl Sigman, were played in both Budapest and Munich. The Munich album then concluded with Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” which was not performed in Budapest.

I suspect that it would be fair to say that both of these concert performances reflected similar moods. Nevertheless, given Jarrett’s prodigious capacity for invention, those moods lead him in different directions on different occasions. The author of his Wikipedia page, apparently inspired by an article from People magazine, wrote the following about Jarrett’s capacity for spontaneity:

Jarrett has commented that his best performances have been when he has had only the slightest notion of what he was going to play at the next moment. He also said that most people don't know "what he does", which relates to what Miles Davis said to him expressing bewilderment – as to how Jarrett could "play from nothing".

Every now and then there are anecdotes about composers struggling with “brain freeze” at the beginning of an undertaking. The usual argument goes that, when the page is blank, so many alternatives are possible that making a choice is almost impossible! In that context the capacity for spontaneity may be Jarrett’s greatest gift. Zen teaches us that the thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. Jarrett always seems to know how to take that first step and then see where the journey can lead. On the other hand, it may just be that each single step points him in the direction of the next one!