Keith Jarrett A Multitude of Angels (1996)

From jazzviews.net

Keith Jarrett (piano)
Recorded October 23rd (Modena); October 25th (Ferrara); October 28th (Torino) & October 30th, 1996 

In the wonderful documentary “The Art of Improvisation” (EuroArts, 2005) Keith Jarrett remarks “There’s never been a time where improvisation was given the respect it deserves.  By virtue of the holistic quality of it, it takes everything to do it.  It takes real time, no editing possible, it takes your nervous system to be on alert for every possible thing, in a way that cannot be said for any other kind of music.”  Whether or not an individual agrees about Jarrett’s opinion, and very personal connection to improvisation, few will deny the consistency of his completely solo improvised concerts that began with “Bremen-Lausanne” (ECM, 1973). Jarrett’s solo concerts have been a remarkable melange where the pianist draws on everything from 18th century romanticism, jazz,  rock and pop like constructs, grooving gospel and ritual music inspired ostinatos.  

“A Multitude of Angels” is a simply stunning 4 CD collection of complete concerts in Italy that marked the end of an era where Jarrett performed his final long form improvisational suites lasting anywhere between thirty and forty five minutes for two sets and retired for three years due to Systematic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID—formally known as chronic fatigue syndrome).  The music represents desire to triumph heroically over uncertain circumstances.  Jarrett notes in the detailed booklet story of those evenings just how ill he felt, but the desire for in the moment creation overrode the feelings of what was then the unknown condition.  Also he notes how his studies of Gurdjieff and Sufism really brought things to a different level and he knew a higher spiritual force was aiding him in making some of the most powerful music in his career.

The box set is an interesting look back in time when compared to more recent solo offerings, such as 2010’s “Testament”, 2012’s “Rio”, and last year’s “Creation” made up of choice moments from various concerts, Jarrett was able to improvise seemingly endlessly at length, but it also points the way to the present and future.  The piano titan no longer improvises at length, like these 1996 recordings demonstrate, instead taking shorter thematic segments and expanding on them, but there are so many wonderful moments in this final series of long form solo concerts.  Part one of  “Modena” emerges from the atmosphere into a beautiful ballad, gradually morphing to signature funky, left hand ostinato, while the second half starts with spiky avant garde shapes, something that in the recent Jarrett oeuvre is a very focused point of interest, usually accompanied by intriguing left hand figures.

The opening of the final disc “Genova” mines this territory as well, sharp chordal jabs build to a peak sounding not unlike molecules in a petri dish. One of the truly most transcendent moments in the collection occurs on disc 2, “Ferrara, Part I”, an ostinato is explored, at turns funky and ritualistic, Jarrett’s loud stomping acting almost as a drummer, he tears into a ferocious swinging section, a marvelous display of horn like invention for the bulk of the track. Many of his favorite types of devices occur through the set, Middle Eastern/Spanish flavored phrygian flights, slow wheel turning vamps, and folkish laments but it is his ways of exploring each aspect, adding new facets that make it truly worthwhile. 

Jarrett mentioned in “The Art of Improvisation” that in the lengthy solo concerts, despite the music coming from a fresh place, he liked his world to have certain elements, something he tried to consciously erase in his current approach to improvising. In essence, all components of this former world  are explored to their logical conclusion across the four discs.

A further fascinating point of interest in these recordings: it’s particularly instructive to compare the music in this set with the classic “La Scala” (ECM, 1997) also taped at an Italian concert that same year.  “La Scala” takes on a more romantic 18th century tone, traces of which are found on disc 3, “Torino”, and disc 4 “Genova” the gentle ballad at the conclusion of the first part of “Genova” is contrasted with Cecil Taylor like angularity, and more swinging sections.  A boogie woogie encore and “Over the Rainbow” (also heard in a different version on “La Scala”) round out a terrific set of music.

Another thing that separates the set from others is that Jarrett produced and engineered these recordings He used a portable DAT machine and transformer less mikes, the sound on Jarrett ECM dates is terrific, but this set may be one of Jarrett’s best sounding recordings, the piano has such an incredible tonality, rich, dynamic.  There is a lot of deep, dense music to digest, but it is  a wonderful place to start for those new to Jarrett to hear what makes him one of the most powerful improvisers, and for long time Jarrett fans a potent reminder of border less creativity. In many ways, “A Multitude of Angels” is the ultimate Jarrett solo manifesto. 

Keith Jarrett The Köln Concert (1975): How Keith Jarrett Defied The Odds To Record His Masterpiece

From udiscovermusic.com

Faced with a dilapidated piano and suffering from back aches and sleep withdrawal, Keith Jarrett recorded a legendary jazz album, ‘The Köln Concert.’

January 24, 1975 proved a memorable, magical night for the 1,300 people that witnessed American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett perform a solo recital in the majestic surroundings of Cologne’s opera house. Fortunately, the concert was recorded for posterity by ECM Records, who released the recording later that year as a double-album housed in stylish black-and-white artwork adorned with a picture of an Afro-topped Jarrett hunched over the piano. Though The Köln Concert quickly went on to become regarded as a classic and amassed sales of four million (to date, it’s still the best-selling piano album of all time), remarkably, the concert almost never happened.

A young German student and part-time promoter called Vera Brandes – an avid jazz fan who was just 17 at the time – was responsible for organizing the concert and, at Jarrett’s request, had arranged for a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano to be provided for the show. Unfortunately, the opera house staff wheeled out the wrong piano – a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand. To make matters worse, it was a piano used for opera rehearsals and was in abject condition and badly out of tune.

For a renowned perfectionist such as Jarrett, who was fastidious about his pianos and possessed perfect pitch, the instrument was an abomination. When he was given the news that there was no time to get a replacement piano, Jarrett threatened to cancel the show. Making matters worse, Jarrett was not in good shape. He had been suffering from excruciating back pain for several days, a result of which was a run of sleepless nights. To cap it all, his condition was exacerbated by the exhausting five-hour, 350-mile drive he made to Cologne from a concert he’d given in Zurich. Given that situation, it was no wonder that the pianist was ready to call it a day.

Thankfully, Vera Brandes refused to give in and managed to cajole and pacify the pianist while technicians spent several hours trying to make the piano playable and sound halfway decent – at least to an untrained ear. They managed to tune it, though couldn’t do much to improve its tone and timbre, which was defined by jangly high notes and a less than resonant bass register. And if Keith Jarrett thought that was bad enough, he had to contend with malfunctioning sustain pedals.

Even so, the pianist – wearing a back brace to give him extra spinal support – eventually went out on stage at 11.30pm (the concert followed in the wake of an opera performance) and battled through pain and exhaustion to give one of his most memorable concerts ever.

The Köln Concert begins with a 26-minute improvised piece – which filled up Side One of the original vinyl album – that begins in a meditative mood characterized by lucid, singing right-hand lines that glisten with a crystalline beauty (at certain points in the performance, Jarrett can be heard singing the melodies while playing). Besides jazz, the piece draws on folk, classical, Latin, gospel hymnals, and even country music, all bound together seamlessly in what could be described as the musical equivalent of a stream-of-consciousness outpouring.

The second piece of the evening (“Part II”) is even longer: a 48-minute improvisation that is spread over Sides Two, Three, and Four of the original release. It’s more urgent than “Part I,” driven by propulsive left-hand chords. In fact, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Jarrett’s performance during this part of the record is his reliance on ostinato rhythms played by his left hand, which provided a pulsing, sometimes percussive and contrapuntal accompaniment through most of the piece. According to the record’s producer, ECM boss Manfred Eicher, Jarrett’s reason for taking this approach was to compensate for the piano’s perceived shortcomings: “Probably [Jarrett] played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with the sound of it, he found another way to get the most out of it.”

Though the piano was not – to put it mildly – to Jarrett’s satisfaction, for those of us who don’t possess perfect pitch or aren’t pianoforte connoisseurs, the state of the instrument doesn’t impact on our enjoyment of Jarrett’s virtuoso performance. He’s a mesmerizing conjuror who, by dint of his supreme skill and super-smooth musical transitions, transports us to other worlds with his improvised piano soundscapes.

The Köln Concert wasn’t Jarrett’s first – or, indeed, last – album of unaccompanied piano improvisations, but it remains his most significant and influential. It’s doubtful whether US pianist Brad Mehldau – also noted for his extemporized solo recitals – would have made the records he did without falling under Jarrett’s spell.

Forty-three years after the fact, The Köln Concert remains Keith Jarrett’s solo masterpiece and stands as the major highlight of both his and ECM’s recorded output. The magic created on that cold winter’s night in the winter of 1975 was never to be replicated, even though Jarrett came close with a few other live solo recitals down the years (such as 2016’s A Multitude Of Angels).

In the end, the less-than-perfect piano, which Jarrett initially thought was his worst nightmare, turned out to be a blessing and a boon rather than a curse. Such are life’s little ironies.

The 40th Anniversary of Keith Jarrett’s Legendary ‘Köln Concert’

From observer.com By Bill Janovitz • 03/12/15

2015 marks the 40th anniversary of The Köln Concert, a landmark album by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, who played a solo concert at Carnegie Hall last week. Few albums have touched me as deeply as this one. As a 16-year-old kid who knew very little from the jazz world, I first heard a selection from the record on the nightly “Eric in the Evening” program on WGBH FM, Boston’s public radio station. The host, Eric Jackson, a quintessential cool FM jazz DJ, was my Jazz 101 instructor, at least until I took an actual jazz history course at the University of Massachusetts with professor Archie Shepp, a legendary saxophonist, composer and playwright. In one of my favorite college memories, professor Max Roach sat in as a substitute teacher.

Prior to that, though, Mr. Jackson’s selections made up my jazz appreciation course load. He spun everything from the postwar bop period to contemporary records. After a track ended, there would be a few seconds of radio silence. In stark contrast to the increasingly wall-to-wall onslaught of FM manic rock radio, Mr. Jackson would calmly inform us of the track title, the name of the album, the year of release, and the personnel on the recording in an unhurried manner, interspersed with ultra-chill pauses. For a lonely kid whose family had just moved from Long Island to a small wooded town in the Boston suburbs, Mr. Jackson’s impeccable taste—alongside the adventurous new punk and post-punk of the early-1980s being played on the area’s many college radio stations—provided a bit of relief, if not a lifeline. “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life,” indeed.

The popularity of The Köln Concert is in large measure thanks to its spiritual resonance, the idea of one man ascending to the stage to channel improvised, often repetitive mantra-like music in a communal setting.

One night, in my bedroom, no doubt feeling quite sorry for my own forlorn teenage soul, I heard Mr. Jackson spin a stunning solo piano selection from The Köln Concert. It went on for over 15 minutes, as if it were a classical piece. Yet while it certainly had resonances with more Impressionistic classical composers such as Debussy (as I later learned), Mr. Jarrett also was striding in gospel chords and rhythms, music that sounded almost like a pop song in spots. But then while Mr. Jarrett’s left hand would start to augment the basic and familiar chords with unexpected harmonies, at the same time, the right hand would shoot out a run of notes at a blistering “Flight of the Bumblebee” tempo, each note in the flurry articulated cleanly.

The recording ended. There was the space of a breath or two, and then the sound of applause. To that point there had been no evidence that it was a live performance. As the audience sounds faded out, there was another pause, maybe five seconds, then Mr. Jackson’s mellifluous voice effortlessly described what we had just listened to.

It was unlike anything I had ever heard, even though it had familiar touch points. I immediately went out and bought the record—well, a cassette, actually. The fact that it was on a tape provided that early form of portability via the Walkman. The music became that much more intimate, direct through my headphones to my brain, as I took the bus to school, mowed the lawn and later walked the campus at college. At the time, I had been listening to everything in the rock and roll realm, and on The Köln Concert, I heard stuff that reminded me of the melancholy two-chord songs and rhythmic repetitions of New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies; the driving rock and roll and churning blues cauldron of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.; Jorma Kaukonen’s solo fingerpicked ragtime acoustic guitar, and even the Velvet Underground’s extended brutal jams. I could also recognize the more obvious influence of Gershwin’s soaring melodic rhapsodies.

Recorded as one continuous concert at the Cologne Opera House in 1975, the album is divided into four tracks, titled, “Part I” (running time: 26:01); “Part II A” (14:54); “Part II B” (18:14); and “Part II C” (6:56). In one illustrative passage beginning around the 9:30 mark of “Part I,” Mr. Jarrett locks into a hard-hammering, left-handed gospel vamp, which improbably flows out of a far-less-nailed-down, delicate two-chord dominant theme. The transition seems natural and effortless, slipping by unnoticed. Indeed, I have often rewound back, or lifted the needle on the vinyl to listen again to how Mr. Jarrett got from Point A to Point C. While one might expect the bluesy right hand soloing over the gospel left hand work on this passage, Mr. Jarrett soon rattles off stunning lyrical runs. And then the passage takes on a specifically New Orleans tone, before he steers it around to something more contemporary and cosmopolitan.

Around 14 minutes into “Part I,” Mr. Jarrett allows his improvisation to break down, as if the movement were about to end. But he teases out melodies that soon sound like they were always there, hiding around the middle of a chord, from a pivotal note that you might not have been aware of, but which he uses as a lynchpin. This subsequently transitions to something sparse and Japanese feeling, percussive like a plucked koto. Before you know it, in the 19th minute the pianist has turned all Rachmaninoff on you, pummeling you with a darker, denser and more strident attack. And he’s not done: Via a Modernist turn, with Cubist-like chord structures, the heavy curtains open up to a cascading waterfall of chords, a “Dance of the Girls with Lilies” lightness that in turn becomes an uplifting country-folk piece. This staccato left hand on the acoustic piano could also easily be imagined against a synth-pop pulse. There is something mechanized and modern about it. This resonance with electronic music is perhaps not accidental; Mr. Jarrett was already a veteran of Miles Davis’ electric band by the time he sat down in Cologne in 1975, even though he notes that he thinks of electronic instruments as “toys” and was compromising in order to work with Mr. Davis. Interestingly, the city of Cologne itself is storied for its place in electronic music.

The album is the answer to the ultimate stoner Zen koan—what is the sound of one man jamming with himself?

“Part I,” begins with Mr. Jarrett playing a five-note figure that was apparently echoing the chimes in the lobby of the Cologne Opera House alerting attendees that the performance was about to start. If you listen carefully, you can hear the knowing titters of the audience members who understood this musical quote. By the end of 26 minutes, the artist has created a whole movement that he brings down with a symphonic flourish, leaving just a few keys to finish the last few ringing notes, the middle register note somehow melting into it’s bass-octave cousin.

And somehow it all relates: The jazz, the classical, the blues, and the folk references. I can hear it all, man. In some spots, it sounds like Mr. Jarrett is playing all the best parts of a band—not only a well-oiled jazz combo; in spots, The Köln Concert sounds as if it could be the Stones or the Grateful Dead cooking on one of their peak nights. Keith Jarrett is a one-man jam band on the album. The album is the answer to the ultimate stoner Zen koan—what is the sound of one man jamming with himself? No wonder the record found a home in many a Deadhead’s dorm room. The Dead were a decades-long manifestation of the musical ideal captured in Gram Parson’s “cosmic American music,” an Americana-blend of jazz, blues, gospel, country, soul, folk, and rock and roll.

Mr. Jarrett’s music contains these and other, deeper and broader multitudes. But while such rock and roll bands hit moments of brilliance, the comparisons start to seem silly. While they might mine some of the same sources, and hit on some similar trance-like grooves, Mr. Jarrett is a true virtuoso with absolute pitch who seemingly can play anything (he is also a multi-instrumentalist with a particular talent for the soprano saxophone). The Köln Concert record is just one of his albums that stand as evidence that this artist is a genius, inasmuch as the music repeatedly flows seemingly wholly composed from his heart, soul, and/or mind, if not from some divinity or otherworldly force. And perhaps that’s its wellspring.

Like the Dead, or other jazz, and improvisational art, you never know what you were going to get when you went to go see Mr. Jarrett perform solo, but that was part of the excitement. The man’s astonishing technical ability and musical vocabulary is always subservient to the muse at his solo improvisational performances. There is that communal feeling of, “we’re all here at the same time to experience this art being created in the moment.” The audiences at a Keith Jarrett program, however, tend to be more like one found at a classical concert.

Upon arrival in Massachusetts, I had made a friend in the neighborhood, a kid named A.J., and it was with him that I went to go see Mr. Jarrett perform at Boston’s storied Symphony Hall on December 7, 1983. It was a Wednesday night during my junior year of high school. I had only been in Massachusetts for six months and this was my first time in Symphony Hall. We were seated on the floor, close to the stage. There was a grand piano up there. Behind it were two sections with about a half-dozen rows of folding chairs, with people seated there—on the stage. Mr. Jarrett, a slight man with a mustache and short, tight, curly hair, came out and acknowledged the audience’s applause. Then he sat at the piano, head bowed down, for what seemed like five minutes. This is his protocol for clearing his head and tapping into his inspiration.

A.J. remembers him getting agitated for coughing, something for which he has become infamous. What I remember is a guy on stage, a portly balding man with a white beard—his image burned in my brain—snapped a flash photo on stage. Mr. Jarrett looked at him with dagger eyes for a few seconds while the guy turned red, and gritting his teeth, said so all could hear, “Put. That. Away. Far away.”

When he performs these solo improvisations, he is clearly out there without a net. The trust has to flow both ways between the performer and audience. “There’s never been a time where improvisation has been given the respect that it deserved,” he said in the documentary, Keith Jarrett – The Art of Improvisation. “By virtue of the holistic quality of it, it takes everything to do it. It takes real time, no editing, it takes your nervous system to be on alert for every possible thing in a way that cannot be said for any other kind of music. I’m essentially an improviser. I learned that by playing classical music (laughs).”

That he has repeatedly found the muse, in front of thousands of people, with only his chops and broad musical vocabulary to guide him to some musical discovery, a form of spontaneous composition that heretofore did not exist, should—but does not always—engender that respect in his audience members which Mr. Jarrett describes. These improvisations are not mere runs up and down a scale over an established chord progression, with other musicians holding down the foundation. As opposed to much of his work with well-established Keith Jarrett Trio, his solo performances such as The Köln Concert do not begin with standards or other songs to provide a structural launching point. He comes with little or nothing prepared. However, his encores for such concerts tend to be shorter pieces that seem more song-like in structure. “Part II C” of The Köln Concert is as a catchy as any pop song, while offering an emotional depth that leaves the listener breathless.

Instead, Mr. Jarrett explores until he finds a hook or a motif, and takes off from there. And this is why the record found its way into so many non-jazz collections that it is, according to the Guardian, “the bestselling solo album in jazz, and the bestselling solo piano album in any genre.” The resulting music has as much to do with the revelations found in Krautrock and prog rock repetition. Gary Peacock, the bassist in the Keith Jarrett Trio, noted to Mr. Jarrett’s biographer, Ian Carr, “When we’re playing something in straight time, boy! When this thing locks, something else takes over and it’s like you’re not playing—it’s kind of floating!”

Keith Jarrett is a true virtuoso with absolute pitch who seemingly can play anything.

But of course, that also relates to gospel, or any devotional music aimed at ecstasy. And I don’t mean the capital “E” drug. While adventurous musicians from Charlie Parker to the Dead sought to be aided by chemicals in the search for their muse, the influences that Mr. Jarrett attributed to this singularly legendary performance are no more than sleep deprivation, a faulty piano and a long wait for a lame meal in a Cologne Italian restaurant. He told grammy.com, “I was due to go onstage soon, we’d had so many hassles, and the piano was such a terrible instrument. And I hadn’t slept anyway. So I was in almost hell. Then we went to this Italian restaurant where, for some perfectly symmetrical reason, we were served way last. Everyone else was eating, I was the one who was going to play in an hour, and I still didn’t have any food. And then when they finally brought the food, I was still hungry, because I wasn’t happy with the food they served.”

Other than speed, it would be difficult to point to a drug that would have allowed Mr. Jarrett to play with such agility. Drugs may help one find inspiration, or help one with his or her energy level, but being able to execute those ideas, ay, there’s the rub! In Ian Carr’s book, Keith Jarrett: The Man And His Music, Mr. Jarrett explains, “Once somebody … said something about getting high and I said, ‘Yeah—on the music. For me, it’s hard to understand why a musician needs more than the music.”

The Köln Concert is transcendent in the literal sense, with Mr. Jarrett transcending the all-too-typical obstacles for a musician on the road—lack of sleep, bad food and shitty equipment. “Every situation is different, the dressing room situation, the social situation, where I eat,” he told Ian Carr. “These are all big, big things, not insignificant details. If I have, say, an 8 o’clock concert and the audience is not in the hall at 8, I’m capable of losing my timing. I’m aiming an arrow at the event, and I’m divorcing myself from anything that’s the wrong thing.” Regarding the concert in Cologne specifically, Mr. Jarrett recalled, “What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was—at the time—a new way. Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had. And that was it. My sense was, ‘I have to do this. I’m doing it. I don’t care what the f*** the piano sounds like. I’m doing it.’ ”

Indeed, he has also noted that such equipment limitations can trigger those inspirations. He told Keyboard Magazine, referring to a performance in Rio De Janeiro, “So when I find a piano that has this ‘imperfect’ character, it’s actually much more to deal with—and I mean that in a good sense—than a ‘perfect’ piano. So you’re hearing me discover which notes on the keyboard will do this zingy thing with the overtones, and I’m learning what part of the keyboard is acting a certain way.”

The popularity of The Köln Concert is in large measure thanks to its spiritual resonance, the idea of one man ascending to the stage to channel improvised, often repetitive mantra-like music in a communal setting. The appeal of devotional music from various traditions was working its way into jazz starting in the mid-1960s, with Eastern drones and chants informing such records as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965) and providing the very basis of much of his widow, Alice Coltrane’s work, such as Universal Consciousness, (1971). Of course, jazz itself, like soul music, takes church music as one of its foundational stones. Mr. Jarrett is an adherent to the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and even released an album called G.I. Gurdjieff: Sacred Hymns (1980), which he describes as “a spiritual exercise,” not a musical one.

In Cologne, “It just seemed like everybody in the audience was there for a tremendous experience, and that made my job easy,” Mr. Jarrett told grammy.com. Mr. Jarrett moans and grunts at various points during the performance, as he does regularly, and as others such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus have. While these exaltations have a dramatic effect, only the most callous could doubt their organic source from uninhibited spirit of generous performance. Mr. Jarrett was 29 at the time of The Köln Concert. He was in complete trust of his capabilities, his source of inspiration, and his audience. More than 3.5 million copies of the album have been sold. Don’t blame him for any “new age” noodling that followed. His aim was true.