Over his momentous four-decade career – much of it spent in the company of this trio, who have sold out the Royal Festival Hall – Keith Jarrett has done everything he could to make audiences sense the illuminating precariousness of improvisation. His occasional on-stage rants about listeners coughing or taking his picture have not been the posturings of a prima donna, but signs of a kind of innocent hope that – for the duration of a gig, at least – his witnesses might be distracted by nothing but their feelings about each passing musical moment.
In search of that transported state, Jarrett often begins tentatively, and his trio's latest London show was no exception; a sound-balance that weighted Jack DeJohnette's drums against the piano volume didn't help, either. But the pianist's longer lines soon began to swell out of softly curled short figures on Dave Brubeck's In Your Own Sweet Way and against the rocking riff of Basin Street Blues. Clifford Brown's bop blues Sandu brought the band to the boil, with DeJohnette's brushwork bumping and nudging the piano lines and Gary Peacock's bass weaving through the spaces, before an exquisite Answer Me My Love brought out all Jarrett's legendary delicacy and eloquence in the unveiling of a ballad's secrets.
Jarrett's own Bop-Be snapped the second set into action with a torrent of silvery runs and sly pace-changes. Yesterdays was a reverie of rippling impressionism, Ornette Coleman's When Will the Blues Leave brought an astonishing solo of flurrying snare-patterns and rattling rimshots from DeJohnette, and the pianist's famously funky account of God Bless the Child launched a succession of encores that wound up on a jubilantly swinging When I Fall in Love. The gig didn't see Jarrett at his most blazing, but it was upbeat, inventive and left a very warm feeling in its wake.
