Keith Jarrett, Royal Festival Hall, London

Royal Festival Hall, London

Around the South Bank the pavements are jammed and the car parks full. A Keith Jarrett concert is a big event on the jazz calendar and the discerning faithful are making their way to hear one of the most original and successful improvising pianists of the postmodern era. It's not one of his legendary solo concerts, but a gig with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, a trio that has been performing together for more than 20 years with an empathy and collective virtuosity comparable to the great bands of jazz history.

The repertoire consists of show songs, such as the opening A Foggy Day in London Town, and jazz standards, including a Monk-ish version of Now's the Time. Four's sparky tune is merely the starting point for a long piano solo that elicits gasps and cheers from the audience. The bass solos are generally shorter, but Peacock explores a different harmonic and stylistic language for each one.

DeJohnette gets a wide range of timbres from his kit. Most of the numbers employ a swinging, continually evolving jazz pulse. When they introduce a bit of funkiness it's like 1960s boogaloo with 21st-century clarity. The drummer has expanded his kit with a set of resonating cymbals that can sound like crotales or temple bells or Tibetan bowls. At the close of the trio's up-tempo version of Autumn Leaves, DeJohnette uses these new sounds to create an other-worldly, gamelan-like improvisation. Jarrett's understated reprise of the tune is the ultimate in cool culture-clash.

You can see why Jarrett, as a swinging one-stop shop, inspires such devotion: his trio draws on the stylistic adventures of jazz's classic period - from the 1930s to the 1960s - and turns them into chamber music that's as playful as Louis Armstrong, as serious as Pierre Boulez. There's an effortless complexity to their reinvention and reharmonisation of the great American songbook that recalls the Bill Evans trio, plus the inquisitive abstraction of Miles Davis's best bands. Few artists - in any kind of music - put so much into one evening.

Contributor

John L Walters

The GuardianTramp

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