Keith Jarrett in Bordeaux in 2016

This Friday Wikipedia will have to update its Keith Jarrett discography Web page. That will be the date when ECM will release his latest album, entitled simply Bordeaux Concert. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

This will be the third album to document a performance that took place during the European tour he made in 2016. (Google has not been very helpful in accounting for the full schedule of that tour.) The venue for the performance was the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, which hosted the performance on July 6, 2016.

That date is situated between those of the two other recordings currently available that document the tour. The earlier of these was July 3, the date of the Budapest Concert album. The successor took place on July 16 in Munich, the source for the Munich 2016 album.

All three of these concerts followed roughly the same pattern, which amounted to a sequence of free improvisations. Each improvisation was entitled simply “Part” followed by a Roman numeral. In Budapest there were twelve of them, the last of which included the addition of the qualifier “Blues.” In Munich there were also twelve. Both of the albums required two CDs and both concluded with a few brief accounts of tunes by others. The one tune performed at both venues was Charles Kisco’s “It’s A Lonesome Old Town.” In Bordeaux, on the other hand, there were thirteen Parts and no “traditional” tunes. The duration is 75 minutes, meaning that the entire content fits on a single CD.

I have now listened to enough Jarrett tracks to know that the last thing I want to do is try to analyze any of them to death. Put another way, the best approach to Jarrett’s approaches to spontaneous invention is with “spontaneous listening.” Think of it as riding in a car with a driver that has given you no indication of where (s)he is going. There is no shortage of features that mind can easily grasp and then follow through an unfolding of transformations; and there is no need to worry about whether or not there is any “grand design.” As I have previously observed, my capacity for listening in this matter began to emerge through solo piano performances by Cecil Taylor and were subsequently cultivated through encounters with Ahmad Jamal. (I have also applied my listening strategy to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, but I suspect that the very idea of listening that way would make him turn over in his grave!)

Nobody seems to show much interest in T. S. Eliot these days; but the listening style that I have tried to cultivate can be captured in the once-familiar couplet from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as follows:

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.