Some things about Friday’s solo performance by Keith Jarrett, the American jazz pianist, were familiar. His Royal Festival Hall concert as part of this year’s EFG London jazz festival had sold out within hours, and before the start of the show ushers ran anxiously about waving “no photography” placards, since the star is legendarily tetchy about the distractions of cameras and even the audience’s coughs.
But just as familiar, and much more uplifting, was the concert’s rich and unpredictable journey, steered by the pianist’s voluminous musical memory and spontaneous reflexes.
He plays more pensively now, and with fewer catchy song-like thoughts at 70 than he had when he made the terrifying art of all-improvised solo piano performance his own with his bestselling The Köln Concert 40 years ago.
But he has always balanced punctilious respect for traditions (whether those of Bach and Mozart, or Miles Davis) with the conviction that improvisation has been at the heart of every kind of creative music-making down the centuries and still is.
Jarrett began on Friday with a weave of zigzagging lines seamlessly crossing between his hands, and turned the pert theme that eventually bloomed into a skipping dance. He played a dark, stalking blues, two sumptuous ballads, a foot-stamping train-rhythm swinger and – in the second half – a jagged folk-dance hook over a left-hand trill like a drone, a delectable slow rumination brimming with precise, Bach-like turns, and an enthralling improvisation spun from hints of gospel music.
He spotted a camera in the adoring crowd before the encores began, left, came back, shouted “go away and take as many pictures as necessary to kill that fucking camera” and then, as if stung, roared off into a maelstrom of thundering counterpoint. The maestro’s tantrums can be catastrophic but this one was short. Smiling, and reacting to a clamour of requests, he played Danny Boy surprisingly straight, as if the song’s yearning melody was just fine left as it is.
Through its resourceful mix of jazz legends like Jarrett, young innovators from all over the globe, and an idiomatic embrace that takes in world music, hardcore jazz and dancefloor beats, the EFG London jazz festival has in recent years regularly pulled 100,000 or more visitors of all tastes over its 10-day run, and this year added some new ingredients.
The Streets project, a collaboration with arts funders and outer-London boroughs, dispatched artists from the concert stages and clubs to the high streets of Kingston and Leyton. And there was an almost unthinkable radio collaboration between the BBC and commercial operators JazzFM to produce a jointly-run pop-up station.
