Keith Jarrett: Creation review – dazzling nine-part song suite

ECM reissued some of Keith Jarrett’s 1980s solo performances two years ago, but Creation is his first release of new unaccompanied music since Rio in 2011. Jarrett was 70 last week, and as Geoff Dyer observes, the variety and sustained creativity of this unique musician’s work remains dazzling. In its pensive melodies and post-Romantic chord voicings, Creation is a very different proposition to the jubilant Rio. It comprises selections from six different 2014 concert performances in four cities, reordered to make a nine-part suite that sounds like a free-flowing single work. Some sections unfold as treble ripples turning to ballad-like songs, while glimpses of gospel chord-changes surface and then evaporate, and rolling, low-register ostinatos gently modulate. It’s dark, and sometimes melancholy, but as usual with Jarrett, full of improvised motifs that suggest long-forgotten songs. ECM are simultaneously releasing a set of Jarrett’s classical interpretations of music by Samuel Barber and Bartók.