Gary Peacock, Keith Jarrett’s double bassist in the piano star’s 35-year-old Standards Trio, once told JazzTimes that when: “You don’t feel you have to make a statement any more, you enter a space of enormous freedom.” It was perhaps a disingenuous observation, since Jarrett almost certainly had a statement in mind when he founded this influential band in 1983 – to cherish some old-school standards about melody, swing and acoustic sound, as well as celebrating the standard songbook repertoire from which so much original jazz has been launched.
But in an era in which people can’t fall over each other fast enough to make statements, the trio’s casual bearing of familiar baggage, and liberated delight in spontaneous playing feels increasingly, timelessly fresh. Jarrett, Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette’s previously-unreleased After the Fall goes back to 1998, but it sounds no more dated than any creative classical music reappraisal of repertory materials. The pianist was emerging from chronic fatigue syndrome’s two-year silence, and this 1998 concert in Newark – just an hour’s drive from his home – was his comeback to the stage.
The set bubbles with rediscovered energies and reconsidered meditations. The Masquerade Is Over, a softly unaccompanied opener at first, swells into briskly grooving, logically shapely piano variations. Charlie Parker’s bebop classic Scrapple from the Apple spins through brittle, hopping Jarrett figures, or lean and sleek ones turning on breezy elisions and trills. Bud Powell’s Bouncin’ With Bud is playful and snappy; Sonny Rollins’ slinky swinger Doxy is a group conversation; One for Majid a tumbling, staccato blues; Santa Claus Is Coming To Town is a sonorously gospel tease and John Coltrane’s Moment’s Notice a heedless gallop that betrays none of the pianist’s travails. The content and the backstory of this powerful release catapult it straight to the forefront of Jarrett’s voluminous catalogue.
Also out this month
The no-hiding-place exposure of an improvising sax/piano duo is a tough call but the British pairing of pianist Alcyona Mick and tenor saxophonist Tori Freestone make light of it (with singer Brigitte Beraha a significant interventionist) on the mix of Monk, Brazilian music, postbop and folk moods of Criss Cross. With album Red Alert, London pianist Janette Mason’s trio – fuelled by energies from the Bad Plus, David Bowie, Goldfrapp, Robert Wyatt and plenty more – uncork a typically eclectic, skilful and audience-friendly brew.
