21/8/2017 50 great moments in jazz: Keith Jarrett's The Kln Concert | Music | The Guardian

50 great moments in jazz: Keith Jarrett's The

Kln Concert
This record-breaking album still gets a chilly reception from jazz fans. But the inspiration behind its
inception lives on

John Fordham
Monday 31 January 2011 16.47GMT

Thirty-six years ago, Keith Jarrett, the now 65-year-old pianist and composer from Allentown,
Pennsylvania, crossed a chasm usually unbridgeable for either jazz or classical performers
and this virtuoso happens to be both.

Jarrett's message from the keyboard took o from the small enclave of an informed and
dedicated minority audience, and reached the huge worldwide constituency of listeners. His
albums would turn up in the collections of people who would otherwise cross the street to
avoid buying a jazz record. From the mid-70s on, his concerts began to resemble religious
rituals, attended by ocks of devotees for whom his music had a meditative, spiritual and
transformative power. And all this stemmed from the recording of a single album conceived
as a live concert by a sleep-deprived Jarrett on a faulty grand piano made in Kln, Germany,
on 24 January 1975. Sales of The Kln Concert, on Munich's edgling new-music label, ECM,
broke records of all kinds. It remains the bestselling solo album in jazz, and the bestselling solo
piano album in any genre.

From the glistening, patiently developed opening melody, through sustained passages of
roaring ris and folksy, country-song exuberance, the pianist is utterly inside his ongoing
vision of the performance's developing shape a fusion of the freshness of an improvisation
with the symmetries of a composition that's central to the album's communicative power.
Harmonically and melodically, it wasn't a particularly "jazzy" record by the piano-jazz
standards of that time, which might also have eased its progress across the sectarian divides of
jazz, pop or classical tastes. There had been, however, an earlier clue to the possibilities of this
journey into the largely uncharted waters of improvised solo-piano performance. The great
pianist Bill Evans, one of the young Jarrett's jazz models and an artist similarly steeped in
classical music, had recorded the meditative solo improvisation Peace Piece 16 years before,
and built it around a simple two-chord vamp in which the harmonies stretched increasingly
abstractly as the performance progressed. Much of Jarrett's playing on The Kln Concert
similarly developed around repeating hook-like motifs, instead of unfolding over song-
structure chord sequences as most bop-based jazz solos did.

Jarrett's improvisation was also hypnotically rhythmic, bordering on mantra-like. He was

unafraid to locate a compelling idea and stick with it, building intensity on a single rhythmic
notion in a manner that still sounds urgently contemporary. A pop-like deployment of
repetition, and a reassuringly anchored sense of tonal consistency the latter occasioned by
the pianist's hugging of the acceptable middle-register of an otherwise tinny piano he had
almost cancelled the gig to avoid contributed to the music's astonishingly organic feel.

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Jarrett's desire to make a solo-piano album had led to his earlier departure from Columbia
Records, and to his relationship with the compatible Manfred Eicher of ECM (with whom he
was travelling around Europe, jammed into a Renault 5, on the tour that included Kln), a
visionary producer who heard new music in the same eclectic way. Though he was only 29 at
the time of The Kln Concert, Jarrett had already had a brief irtation with electronics in Miles
Davis's fusion band (declaring afterwards that he wouldn't touch a plugged keyboard again)
and rich regular-jazz and early-fusion experiences in the popular bands of saxophonist Charles
Lloyd and drummer Art Blakey. He had also made some compositionally distinctive and now
highly regarded postbop recordings of his own, in the legendary early-70s "American quartet"
with saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian. But Kln
was Jarrett's moment, and a turning point for the immensely inuential ECM label too, which
the album helped to bankroll for years to come.

The Kln Concert isn't universally admired by jazz listeners. Some nd it close to easy listening
in its repetition of catchy melody, or a irreconcilable split from the jazz tradition in its
avoidance of many of the genre's familiar materials. But Jarrett's remarkable output in the
years since, his interpretations of classical works, reinvention of the Bill Evans-inspired
conversational trio, engagement with everything from symphony orchestras to cathedral
organs, and through it all an enduring popularity that sells out the world's great concert halls
months in advance, testify to his creativity and eloquence.

In 2006, he released a similarly unpremeditated solo-piano concert from Carnegie Hall that ran
to 90 minutes and ve encores. When I discussed it with him for the Guardian, Jarrett said:
"My glasses were falling o, my pants were twisted up, I was sweating, crouching, standing up,
sitting down, and I was thinking 'nothing can stop me now'." He also said he'd had the same
feeling of total trust in his imagination on The Kln Concert more than 30 years before.

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Topics
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