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Chapter III

His Way of playing

          1) Elements in his playing & his influences (his career and him being sideman)

          2) Relation between Jazz and Classical

1) The evolution of his musical language

At the end of the 60s, Miles Davis started a revolution in the jazz scene, giving life to a current of artists who started slowly to get away from the Jazz language so they could reach easier the general public: that's the reason their musicality has been influenced from that time current genre, the Rock music.

Jarrett, as previously mentioned, collaborated with Miles Davis. For him it was not like for other emerging pianists such as Chick Corea, Joseph Zawinul and Herbie Hancock who were already taking their first steps towards rock-jazz and have continued on that path; on the contrary, his career has since then been centered on improvisation which incorporated the classical, the baroque but also the gospel and country.

From the 70s Keith began to record for ECM, among which the first solo piano album, Facing You. It was the return to the acoustic piano, to its rarefacts, to the exploitation of the sonority of the piano's soundboard and to the use of the tonal pedal in eight pieces composed entirely by him.

The critics gave a lot of attention to him, because Jarrett took up the speech left open by Bill Evans but ranged even further, returning to the classical concertism of jazz, as Evans had already anticipated. The same thing happens in 1975 in Cologne, when alone, in front of a piano, he retraced the entire history of music, leaving the canons of jazz; in a sort of total improvisation.

After the release of The Koln Concert, all jazz lovers expected the explosion of a new genius in the musical field. Jarrett threw himself into continuous explorations ranging from classical jazz to Indian music, from the reinterpretation of Bach's well-tempered harpsichord to musical experimentation.

There were also denigrators who accused him of having rejected electronics, jazz-rock, fusion and free jazz without ever having really tried them. But that wasn't quite the case; Jarrett in 1974 had established a long collaboration with the saxophonist Jan Garbareck, with whom he formed the quartet Belonging band.

Garbareck had been greatly influenced by John Coltrane of the 60s, who was interested in Indian music and mystical religions, who wanted to summarize all the sounds in a sort of love message.

Keith absorbed this intuition, processing it in a different way, with relaxing and introspective results, but full of inner tension typical of oriental meditation, which manifested itself in songs such as Mandala from the My Song album, the same inner meditation that would lead him to the album Sacred Hymns of 1980.

Coltrane and other musicians were looking for a path to follow to create a "universal sound" based on harmonic and melodic experiments based on microtonal intervals that bordered on noise. But what he sowed was not understood by many.

Jarrett himself in Down Beat magazine (October 16, 1974) declared to music critic Bob Palmer.

“One thing I can say is that Coltrane’s influence after he died was very negative, mostly because he couldn’t control it anymore. He didn’t intend there to be a big gap, he intended that there be more space for everyone to do what they should do. That’s what his music represents to me, that there is a much greater potential than anyone thought before for a human being and an instrument. That and the fact that people are so attached to Miles is very unhealthy. It seems like people don’t know anymore what’s good in their own playing and they’re wandering off into far reaches where they have less knowledge of what they’re doing than if they were playing what they played years before.”[1]

Jarrett continued to experiment, until his continuous research made him lose sight of simplicity and freshness, which are the basis of Jazz. The critics began to go down hard on him declaring that the "Jarrett phenomenon" would slowly fade away. What had seemed the new guiding spirit of jazz had now become a slave to the contradictions due to the cage that the music industry had built around him.

“If you let a record company use a slogan like the new piano giant, 

you'll always be the new piano giant. 

You are forced to: it is the only way left for you to survive"[1] 

The accusations made against Jarrett were of inability to find a mediation between jazz and contemporary classical music, thus impersonating a role for which he was perhaps not up to par. Fortunately they were wrong, like it or not he managed to impose his name as the most loved, discussed, hated, imitated and certainly most listened jazz pianist.

His overwhelming improvisational flow incorporated the classic, the baroque, the gospel, the country by making them flow one after the other.

“It is now commonly believed that it was the most important piano phenomenon after the advent of Cecil Taylor. But the road that the two had traveled was totally different. Jarrett's evolution had nothing in common with the avant-garde because the path he walked on was the one traced by Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans.”[2]

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It is said that Keith began studying piano when he was only three years old because he was surrounded by a musical environment at home. Like almost all children who met music early on, he developed a marked propensity for hard and patient studies. From an early age he devoted himself to the classics, loving Bach, Mozart and Chopin, but also Scott Joplin's ragtime and Bud Powell's Jazz.

The young Jarrett was struck by the rhythmic-percussive part of the keyboard, studying sounds and learning to exploit the piano, of which he became an exceptional virtuoso.

In particular he was fascinated by Ahmad Jamal, the American pianist, heir to the tradition founded by the great Nat King Cole, who played an important role in the evolution of the jazz trio.

As he stated in an interview for the BBC in 2009.

“KJ:  Yes. I said to myself, “Who’s this? I know the other guys: I’m always seeing Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Andre Previn…” (I was forced to think of Previn as a jazz player for quite some time.) “But who’s this Ahmad Jamal?”

I always wanted to find out what was happening, so I bought it    It changed everything about what I thought could happen. Up to then it was a virtuosity thing: playing fast, or swinging. (At least swinging was there.)”[1]

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Keith Jarrett, after turning down a scholarship offered by Nadia Boulanger in Paris, obtained one for the Berklee School of Music. It may seem funny that at that time there were no jazz teachers in the college, only classical music teachers. It is perhaps for this reason that, even in the years in which he played with Miles Davis, Jarrett privately never stopped playing Beethoven and Prokofiev.

During the time he was playing with Miles, he didn't seem to have much to do with that music. However, he fitted well into the lineup due to his knowledge of rock and pop. In the solo passages Keith deliberately reproposed his own music which.

Indeed Jarrett didn't like that music, or rather he didn't like that kind of electronic sounds. Bob Palmer published an interview with Keith Jarrett on Down Beat about electronic sounds.

“Palmer: I’ve never heard a synthesizer that didn’t sound like a synthesizer. They really don’t sound like flutes, or orchestras…

Jarrett: If they did, that would be sacrilegious to me. If they did, then why all this history—we might as well erase the violin and have one guy to play everybody’s music. Now if they keep building pianos worse I may have to… no, I’ll find a way. I think it’s best just to say that I do not wish to deal with electric instruments.”[1]

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An important step in the development of his continuous musical change occurred when he formed the European jazz quartet with Jan Garbareck, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. It was the sign that Keith was progressively freeing himself from the black way of playing jazz, to turn towards an intimism of expression that led to the extreme late-romantic consequences of Bill Evans.

What Jarrett was doing together with European musicians was a more elaborated music, absolutely introspective, contemplative and tremendously melancholic, as documented by the albums Belonging, My Song and Nude Ants.

Jarrett's trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian was perhaps the most balanced piano trio in the entire history of jazz, going to represent the most advanced position of those group forms usually called piano trios. In the twenty-first century, the albums Inside Out and Always Let Me Go from 2001 signed a renewed interest of the trio in absolute improvisation.

Let's hear what Jarrett and DeJohnette tell Mike Dibb in 2005.

“It has always struck me how fresh we are in playing standards, yet we are not that young. Gary is much older than me, JacK is a little older, and I am certainly not a child”[1]

The starting point was Nat King Cole's trio in 1939. Other stages in Jarrett's trio evolution were Art Tatum 1943, Ahmad Jamal's trio 1952 and Bill Evans' trio from 1959. After Evans' death in 1980, the scepter passed to the Jarrett trio where each member expressed a small miracle of balance and creativity, of inspiration, of formal perfection and where everyone was perfectly integrated, with equal rights.

Facing You was a significant album in terms of his solo piano playing. We're talking about an album that has become justly famous for the variety of situations, absolute emotional availability of the pianist, solid sense of taste and measure. And that imposed new reference standards in terms of freedom for the artist and perfection of sound most likely deriving from the absence of playing with other musicians.

The Koln Concert is the key to his improvisational pianism and how in it the classical experience is placed at the service of the gospel of ragtime and jazz. Jarrett improvised melodically, harmonically and rhythmically without any pre-established structure, and undoubtedly the secret was not in the fact that Jarrett had no theme or pattern in mind, but in the fact that his fingers expressed in real time what his soul suggested to him.

In Radiance, compared to the famous Koln Concert, attention was concentrated on strong expressionistic hues, the use of techniques such as staccato, the application of serial techniques, the search for dissonances and attention to dynamics. The search for atonal ideas, exploiting the decisive contribution of the left hand on the low registers of the keyboard with lashing rhythmic accents.

Despite Keith's different approach, melody is always the basis of Jarrett's musical message.

“But the thing is, partly because I was trained as a classical player, I believe your hands aren’t supposed to have one be dead and one be alive.”[1]

2) Relation between Jazz and Classical

“Jazz musicians who had studied the “serious” European tradition from the Baroque to the modern can be found here and there in the history of Jazz. In New York in 1940, Benny Goodman premiered Béla Bartok’s trio Contrasts violinist Joseph Szigeti and the composer on the piano, and in 1956 he was the soloist in a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Boston Symphonic Orchestra under Charles Munc. In 1983, Wynton Marsalis attracted public attention with his stupendous recordings of the trumpet concerti by Joseph Haydn, Johan Nepomuk Hummel and Leopold Mozart. Examples of jazz musicians with classical aspirations can be discovered right from the primeval times of ragtime to the immediate present, even if they themselves often saw their work as aesthetic loosening-up exercises or tongue-in-cheek invasions of foreign territory.”[1]

With the album In the light (1973) Keith Jarrett officially presented compositions for flute and strings, a quintet for brass, a string quartet, a piece for guitar and strings, and finally a piece for two pianos. Thus demonstrating that the musician Jarrett did not let himself be imprisoned in any stereotype but ranged with competence and skill in every field.

“I thought I had to prepare very well for classical music concerts because I came from that strange world which was not accepted. I was kind of an intruder so I totally got involved. At one point I was no longer an improvising jazz musician but neither was I a classical musician playing Mozart and Bach. These are different and separate universes so it is necessary to completely forget one to do justice to the other. If I want to do Mozart justice, I don't have to play jazz”[1]

Despite the presence of expert improvisers such as Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, the music of the European classical tradition has always been dominated by the composer and his musical writing. In jazz, on the other hand, the music is based only on the performer. Even if the performers of the classical tradition actually vary from time to time, their interpretations of the same piece of music are almost identical, because the classical musician faithfully reads what is written. The differences between a Beethoven piano sonata by the same performer are minimal compared to two versions of Impression performed by John Coltrane.

Jarrett began his career playing classical music from Bach to Prokofiev, and never lost sight of it during his ascent to the heights of celebrity as an international jazz pianist. In 1979 he interpreted works by the musical misfits Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under Dennis Russell. In 1982, Jarrett played at a festival for contemporary music at Cabrillo College, Aptos in California with Stravinsky's Piano Concerto and John Cage Dance/4 Orchestra and in the 1984 again with the Harrison's Piano Concerto.

In Europe, Jarrett had made appearances performing also some contemporary music concerts. On July 1 and 2, 1984, in Saarbrucken attracted such a large crowd, in 1984 and 1985, the musical world experienced a Keith Jarrett diversely involved in classical and contemporary music; he performed sonatas by Scarlatti, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach's French Suites, piano concertos by Mozart, Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, preludes and fugues by Shostakovich, Bartòk's second and third piano concertos, and interpreted his own classical compositions.

This vast recording legacy in the field of classical music gives us an idea of his ability to adapt and, if necessary, revise his artistic vision in performances. He was conscious of the different way which the whole muscular apparatus of arms, hands and the body were to be employed in playing classical music. But it is this quality of him, in understanding how to use his vision and his technique, in a context as diverse as that of classical music, that surprises listeners and musicians of the "serious music" with whom he has collaborated.

As stated by the violinist Michelle Makarski, who performed her compositions on the album Bridge of Light (1993);

“Keith is incredibly respectful of classical music,” she said, “but as a jazz pianist he knows how to listen and react to his partner in a different way than non-jazz pianists listen.”[1]

                                                                           (go to Chapter IV)