TT 220: Jarrett Video
Rick Beato has interviewed Keith Jarrett for a reasonably slick video presentation. Any one who cares for Jarrett will need to watch. While it is tragic to see a giant after a debilitating stroke, Jarrett is unexpectedly and joyfully straight up in his rap, quite unlike much of his personal presentation in the past.
My own (print) interviews with the titan are here and here. The survey of the American Quartet with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian is one of my more substantial efforts as a critic.
Truly ESOTERIC and UNFRIENDLY commentary:
Yesterday I listened to Keith Jarrett’s recording of “Stella by Starlight” from Standards Live. In my high school years I loved this record, but I’m less positive now.
Of course I still find wonderful things. The flexibility of his phrasing is undeniable; also, Keith rarely overplays. He could start in top gear from the git-go, bursting in with a thousand notes per square inch like Oscar Peterson or another super-virtuoso, but he almost never does. It’s a trio with two other major voices, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, and the pianist is inside the music with the bass and drums, not merely on top of the bass and drums. The ebb and flow of the trio is hypnotic.
In the Beato video, Jarrett says that when he was finding his voice, he didn’t want to play modal like McCoy Tyner. He then says he wanted to be more “Bach-ian,” meaning voice-leading in the contrapuntal European tradition like Bach.
I am about to make too much of this, but this snippet of discussion with Beato reinforces my priors. In the essay I suggest that while I prefer Keith Jarrett to Chick Corea, Chick actually knows more about bebop: the real bebop of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and so forth.
Jarrett learned Bach as a kid. Then he learned modal jazz a teenager because that was the dominant style. (He plays quite a bit like McCoy Tyner on his first notable record, Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower.) Then, seeking to become even more personal, he added “Bach” back into his aesthetic…and that was basically that, at least in terms of playing with swinging bass and drums. Keith never really did his bebop homework, not like Chick did. Keith told me himself that he didn’t know who Bud Powell was when he showed up for his first DownBeat interview.
In the end part of the real bebop is a specific relationship to clave. I’m not sure what else is in the mix, we need to consult Barry Harris or another higher authority. But there’s something in there that Keith doesn’t have, and if he had that too, the Standards Trio would have been even greater.
What ever it is, Bach doesn’t help. (Bud Powell would help.)
Jarrett didn’t want to cop too much McCoy, but McCoy certainly had a thorough grounding in the real bebop. Indeed, McCoy learned some of those folkways and mores in person from Bud Powell himself. When Jarrett replaced McCoy with “Bach-ian” in his personal hierarchy, he skipped a step.
This is a fairly obscure point, perhaps only relevant to my own personal journey. Indeed, I am so far down the bebop wormhole that I almost don’t like Jarrett’s “Stella by Starlight” anymore…and it used to be my favorite thing. My opinions go in cycles: In another decade I will possibly love it again.
Everyone knows that Jarrett sounds great pretty much all of the time. On the Beato video, even in these reduced circumstances, Keith’s line sings. His relationship to the keyboard is unique.
To be clear, if the genre is not swinging jazz, then it becomes an entirely different topic. The latest Jarrett release is Bordeaux Concert from 2016. His growth as a solo improvisor has not been in the forefront of the discourse, but in terms of the esoteric "atonal yet pulsing" aesthetic — like the first track of Bordeaux — Keith is perhaps proving to be the greatest of all time. A lonely path. Due respect.
I'm very late to this thread but enjoyed reading Ethan's analysis, and the conversation below it. I also can't believe we were denied a standards trio with Steve Swallow (!) rather than Peacock, per the video.
I've been thinking a lot about the connection between Jarrett, Corea, and be-bop. The "hole" in Jarrett's bebop playing probably comes down to vocabulary, but I wonder how much can be explained by a distinct lack of "playfulness" in his approach to jazz (and life...). Bebop is not ONLY playful music (I couldn't describe most of Bud Powell that way) but Bird, Dizzy, Monk, even Barry Harris, etc. were often very humorous and jovial in ways that Jarrett isn't. (The only real joke in his oeuvre that I'm aware of is the famous "opera chime" figure that opens Koln.) Jarrett chose a more lyrical path, even when he went "out" (a la Ornette). This choice certainly appears to have aligned with his temperament.
Now take Corea: smiling, winking, goosing to the core. His "out" stuff is pretty playful, too, and nearly always entertaining. (A side note: Bud Powell might not be all that playful, but "Bud Powell," the Chick Corea tune, is—while incorporating a fair amount of Bud.) Corea obviously listened to more bebop than Jarrett and had the vocabulary down. But his impish personality at the keyboard may have provided an important piece of the puzzle. (I wonder, in fact, how much of Chick's humor was drawn from the bebop playbook he studied.) He may have in fact OVERemphasized this aspect of bebop at times, but it's notable that it still feels authentic when he does.
I feel this way about Metheny also - it's a failure of classification, not the musicians. We call all of this improvisational music "jazz". Jarrett plays "Jarrett Music" and Metheny plays "Metheny Music" which could be grouped into a genre called "ECM music".
In Keith in particular I hear a lot of "church" and not just Bach's sacred music. His playing has a folk-gospel aspect - a total detour from bebop, bebop's children, and "soul jazz". It's almost as though he was a fully formed musician from another universe who was injected into the jazz world without a map.
Metheny likewise claims a deep Montgomery influence, but I don't hear it - he too, very explicitly in album titles, has this midwestern plains open space thing going on that is very NOT bop nor blues nor anything else obviously carrying the Black American musical lineage - that lineage more subtly guides his approach, it's always there but maybe as a set of principles rather than style.
I think of them both as "jazz" musicians because they simply have nowhere else to be - that's where they fit best even if the fit is often imprecise.
And lastly, regarding Keith - if Steely Dan copped something I wrote, I'd consider it the greatest achievement of my life. It is probably out of Keith's top ten thousand.