Keith Jarrett once said that while a composer can hang around for ecstatic states to show up, an improviser needs them at eight o'clock tonight. That's audible in Jarrett's piano-playing and his famous vocal tics on this partly-reissued three-disc set of 1981 solo concerts in Germany – but he plays with a high-risk confidence, deploying his rich classical, jazz and gospel vocabularies with more freedom even than on the 1975 Koln Concert that made him a star. At Bregenz, he is at his most stompingly rhythmic, and quickwittedly accurate in switching from romantic dances to springily capricious ones. At Munich, he begins in a contrapuntally lyrical dream-state, wheels through high-speed free-improv, pulsing pop-grooves and glockenspiel-like flickers, and departs on his film-theme Mon Coeur est Rouge and the gentle gospel ballad Heartland. There's plenty of solo Jarrett material around, but this period in his career seemed to balance the energy of youth and the resources of experience in a very special way.
Contributor
John Fordham
John Fordham is the Guardian's main jazz critic. He has written several books on the subject, reported on it for publications including Time Out, Sounds, Wire and Word, and contributed to documentaries for radio and TV. He is a former editor of Time Out, City Limits and Jazz UK, and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 3's Jazz on 3
John Fordham
The GuardianTramp
