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Artist Profile — Pianist Keith Jarrett

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Keith Jarrett

By Thomas Staudter

Keith Jarrett performing at Carnegie Hall September 26, 2005
(photo credits: Richard Termine / ECM Records)

There is an iconic color photograph of Keith Jarrett on the cover of his latest recording, the 2-CD set simply titled The Carnegie Hall Concert, that's worth regarding. Why? Because in a long career as a bandleader and solo artist whose work has resounded in both jazz and classical idioms, you can count on one hand the number of album and CD covers that have carried his image. And there has been none in the past decade.

Seated alone at the piano under a dimmed white spotlight, Jarrett is captured in the midst of a much anticipated occasion, his first solo improvisational concert in North America in ten years. His black shirt and trousers disappear into the black background, as does much of the black Steinway Model D concert piano. Jarrett's head is tilted and turned to the camera; he grimaces in artistic execution, a bulging lateral vein visible on his forehead above wire-rim shades. The spotlight glares off his short-cropped, silvery pate, and abstractly off a stack of white towels above the keyboard, while the lid prop shines, too, right in the middle of the image, looking like a caricature of the Empire State Building. The tops of Jarrett's hands, busy on the keyboard, bask in the light as well.

It's an image that creates curiosity about the music being played, thanks to Jarrett's visage and half-reckoned hands. Looking closer, there's the obvious singularity of Jarrett's purpose, his close connection to the instrument and the contrast between the sleek cosmopolitan elegance of the setting and the artist's recognizable intensity. On a whole, the photographic figure of Jarrett is approachable, but that grimace suggests a fervor beyond the commonplace.

Inside the CD booklet is another photograph, taken by Jarrett, of a Manhattan apartment building at daybreak half-shrouded in shadow and ringed by mysterious clouds. Not surprisingly, Jarrett is walking around his 150-year-old northwest New Jersey farmhouse, where he has lived since the early 1970s, and carrying a camera with a sizable telephoto lens when this writer arrives on a late fall afternoon for an interview. Jarrett's wife, Rose Ann, greets the visitor, and a young man on a bicycle, later identified as Jarrett's chiropractor and aide de camp, scoots away.

Jarrett is a serious shutterbug. New photographic equipment — cameras, lens and other apparatus — rests on the small dining room table near the front door, and he admits to spending a good part of the afternoon testing out his latest haul. In time we walk upstairs to his office. Jarrett and his wife are both short and trim, so the low ceilings and narrow hallways of their abode fit them right, but the hulking visitor feels somewhat claustrophobic. The office is cluttered, too, with stereo equipment and all of the shelving and much of the floor space given to CDs and tape boxes.

It's mentioned that the writer was introduced by his father to Jarrett's work back in the mid 1970s, specifically The Köln Concert, the extraordinary improvisational recording that changed the jazz world overnight and still stands as the bestselling solo piano album ever. "I've been performing long enough that now I'm never sure if the kids are bringing their parents or grandparents to my shows, or if it's the other way around.,"Jarrett, now 61, replies. "And I truly appreciate this phenomenon. If the audience is multi-generational, then that means my message is multi generational as well."

Recorded in front a packed house at the Isaac Stern Auditorium inside the landmark edifice on September 26, 2005 (and released exactly a year later on ECM Records), The Carnegie Hall Concert is a stunning achievement by any measure. For the 3000-plus concert goers, it was a validation of Jarrett's piano primacy and a perfect confluence of all the elements necessary to create artistic magic for the ages: the virtuoso, a sterling instrument, one of the best concert halls in North American and an audience that Jarrett says "is always acute and astute."

"Whenever I play in New York City I'm aware of the potential for a kind of listening and dynamic range that the audience has and which contributes to what I do in a way that no other city can. There are cultural things that are different about every place I play, and that's a good thing in the giant spectrum of what I do. But for me there's comfort when I know the mix will be so thorough, as the New York audience tends to be. The audience gives me a feeling, a response to what I'm playing, that tells me I have this complete freedom to hand them something that they might not have expected."

Jarrett rose to fame in the jazz world as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet and Miles Davis's groundbreaking fusion groups during the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the time of The Köln Concert, though, Jarrett was leading a visionary quintet that included the late saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian. But it was his long, uninterrupted flights of improvisational fancy in concert that brought notice from mainstream audiences and crossover fans from the classical world. In 1983 Jarrett formed his "Standards" trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and together they've created a body of music that has helped reshape notions of what a jazz piano trio can accomplish.

At the height of his powers Jarrett was afflicted with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1996, and the illness devastated him. For long stretches of time he could hardly sit up in a chair. Listening to music, he says, was even too much of an exertion. Playing the piano was out of the question. Finally, after the three years he was able to practice again, and after returning to form, albeit with his stamina still a question, he recorded an album of "standards" privately for his wife in gratitude of her steadfast care of him during his illness. (Titled The Melody At Night, With You, it was eventually released to the public.) A triumphant return to the stage of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center with his trio, which he now referred to as "safety net," followed, and in 2002 Jarrett was again playing a handful of solo improvisational concerts. "I really can't tell which way my health will turn," he says, "and so I'm now performing with the idea in mind that each show could be my last — something I used to admonish my students with and now know too well myself."

Fastidious and disciplined as ever, Jarrett practiced hard for the concert at Carnegie Hall, but riding into the city that afternoon through heavy rain he felt weak, he says, and worried about his energy level. "But in the middle of dinner backstage I suddenly sensed everything was going to be fine," Jarrett remembers. "I felt this moving away of bad weather; it's hard to describe. Going back some, in my preparations I knew this would be a make or break event. I also realized that this could be my definitive New York concert; we'd had countless difficulties recording in New York, and here was a special opportunity. I was reading a New York author, Nick Tosches, and I was thinking a lot about all those craggy avant-garde American composers Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Samuel Barber. I knew this concert had to include all of these elements.

"Right before I walked onstage for the sound check this cosmic 'this is the one place in the world I should be' feeling came over me. I played a few notes on different part of the piano, knew the instrument was balanced, and that was it. (I always worry about playing something good during soundcheck, and then it's wasted.) I had been going through a lot of personal and physical problems, like everybody does. Now I knew I was heading toward the one place where none of this applies. I got dressed and walked out on stage. Everything I had thought about the audience not only was it true, but it was multiplied. I was immediately told by that room, "What I do is up to me; we trust you." I was a mandate good one."

A few years ago, after Jarrett had returned to playing solo improvisation concerts, he decided that he no longer had to play one continuous, concert length piece of music. A recording culled from two solo concerts in Japan, Radiance, illustrated Jarrett's new approach, and The Carnegie Hall Concert was performed similarly. There are ten separate improvisations and five remarkable encores. The first, titled "The Good America," is meant to be heard as part of the other improvisations (which are unnamed). Jarrett admits that several of the improvisations are "thorny and spiky" — strangely dissonant and challenging excursions that probably reflect for a New York audience a semblance of daily life. One of the biggest ovations of the night comes after the seventh piece, an uplifting gospel flavored invention that finds Jarrett in full exaltation. "After the harder music, the audience needs sweetness and therapy," Jarrett says later. "In fact, I needed it, too."

Born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Jarrett was picking out melodies from the radio on a converted player piano when he was three. His mother was told he had perfect pitch, and so he was started on lessons the following year. At 6 he performed his first recital. For his eighth birthday, he received an Everett piano, although he also wanted walkie-talkies and an elephant. His music teachers and friends were all present when the piano was unveiled, and on many nights Jarrett says he slept under the piano.

When he was in his late twenties, Jarrett began asking for Steinway pianos on all his contract riders. "First, I asked that I be given a grand piano and ran into all kinds of instruments. I've played Steinways since my childhood I can't remember the first one I played, thoughout over the years it occurred to me that a Steinway piano would have the kind of consistency that would allow me to mold my work through it. There are other grand brands of piano out there. I don't have my own material, however, and the older I get, the more sensitive I am about instruments having enough colors in the palette to be able to cover what's in my head." Jarrett sold the Everett to Paul Motian and bought his first Steinway grand in the late 1970s, and still uses it as his practice instrument. A few years ago he bought a German Steinway, which is in a specially — built studio separate from his house. He still cringes at the memory of a journalist who'd come to visit right after the Steinway had arrived from Hamburg and who sat at the bench and began playing it before Jarrett had had a chance to touch the new instrument. In the early 1980s Jarrett became a Steinway Artist, following a long list of jazz greats who have been given the honor, including Duke Ellington and Ahmad Jamal, among many others.

The interview ends and Jarrett goes into the kitchen to see what Rose Ann is making for dinner. The chiropractor returns on his bicycle for another session. The following day Jarrett is set to fly to Paris for two solo concerts and then a short tour through Europe with the trio. "I have great respect for people who reach a point and say, I'm not doing this anymore' because they feel the audience will be paying for something and not getting it," Jarrett says. "As for just whittling down my schedule some, my wife would like that. She knows what I'm going through physically — with arthritis and deterioration of discs in my neck. But my game plan now is to bop 'til I drop."