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.
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.
thanks for your comment. I agree but want to narrow the field a bit. Both Metheny and Jarrett play in a lot of different genres. I can't riff about Metheny offhand the way I can with Jarrett, but Metheny certainly sounds good playing "jazz." I would not say there's no Wes Montgomery in his playing when he's dealing with "Blues for Pat" alongside Haden and Higgins. If Metheny sat in at Smalls tonight he'd sound killing.
ECM as a style, yes...but the common root is Gary Burton, who both Jarrett and Metheny played with. That folk/rock/Nashville thing. Burton also not a bebopper. As I write in the essay, I think Vince Guaraldi is also a puzzle piece. Literally Burton, Jarrett, and Metheny all play their own version of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind."
For myself, I admit I find Jarrett heavier than Metheny and Burton; Keith also played so many standards with Gary and Jack that his approach is part of the language of whatever "straight-ahead" is today. Metheny and Burton have not left that kind of footprint in terms of swinging jazz.
At any rate, Jarrett is a big personal influence. Sorting all that out for myself is why I wrote this somewhat navel-gazing post. What do I take and what do I leave?
Good point about Pat, I am so enamored with his idiosyncratic stuff that I forget (and almost never listen to) his more tradition-bound playing.
The first solo piano I fell in love with was... (preparing my shield).. George Winston playing "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" on a CD my dad brought home when I was 7 or 8 years old. I still love George Winston though he's in a different musical world, and I love Vince.
Specific to this discussion - Keith has an unyielding creative spark and he's tried a number of things that didn't quite work - but he tried them. I'll always respect that. He also tried a lot of things that worked incredibly well. And Keith was always doing Keith. His commitment to fully developing his musicianship is so admirable. I think you share this commitment. If all you take from him is that relentless drive for exploration - that is enough and does him and his work great honor. In addition to stealing, great artists inspire.
It's a great point, I think Pat has (perhaps intentionally?) avoided playing many standards, mostly. The only ones I'm aware of are:
All The Things You Are (various trios, duo with Jim Hall, clearly a favorite of Pat's)
Old Folks (from Question and Answer with Holland and Haynes)
Soon (from Like Minds, Burton Haynes Holland Corea)
and then there is that record "The Song Is You" where they play a bunch of standards. But this is obviously nothing like Jarrett's breadth, in terms of standards.
Hi Paul! You are obviously correct, but I'd just mention REJOICING again, which has blues, rhythm changes, and a Horace Silver ballad. Pat also played various tunes with Kenny Garrett or Joshua Redman. THere's also a couple of things on Trio 99 → 00
To belabor "point" as well as "the point" - I missed the point of Ethan's post which was really about Keith on standards, and I chose to comment about Keith on everything BUT standards AND bring Pat in (completely irrelevant) immediately derailing the conversation before it started.
I saw a slim opening to mention something I've thought about a lot and kinda forced it in
I’m intrigued by this “More bebop, less Bach” critique. Unique I think and respectfully provocative. I’m wondering what your overall take on John Lewis might be: grounded in modernist bebop, and Basie-inspired lean blues, then... Bach. Do you hear him similarly? Best wishes. cm
Hi Chuck of course I love John Lewis, as does Keith. However, I see Lewis as playing almost a swing era vocabulary when he is improvising. I don’t put Lewis in the Bud Powell or Barry Harris camp really. There’s a Lewis solo on “all the things you are” with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie which is just perfect. It’s a little too slow and melodic to be classic bop-style playing.

Of course Lewis loved Bach, but actually playing/composing fugues is a slightly different topic then what you play while improvising with bass and drums. I believe the greatest jazz fugue so far is Lewis’s “Concorde.”
Excellent! Thanks for the reply. I agree about Concorde, and I think for a certain sort of pure pleasure, over the years, I’ve returned to Blues On Bach as much as any album of its time.
Captaintrips comment re: the “church” in Jarrett’s approach rings true for me. Not entirely off-topic: heard Branford Marsalis play “Long as You’re Living Yours” live Saturday night and it swung. I see that he recorded “The Windup” on a recent album. Guess he likes that “Belonging” album!
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.
interesting comments
As you probably know, I interviewed Steve Swallow about BASRA
https://jazztimes.com/features/columns/steve-swallow-pete-la-roca/
I really love what Swallow plays on FOOTLOOSE also
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.
thanks for your comment. I agree but want to narrow the field a bit. Both Metheny and Jarrett play in a lot of different genres. I can't riff about Metheny offhand the way I can with Jarrett, but Metheny certainly sounds good playing "jazz." I would not say there's no Wes Montgomery in his playing when he's dealing with "Blues for Pat" alongside Haden and Higgins. If Metheny sat in at Smalls tonight he'd sound killing.
ECM as a style, yes...but the common root is Gary Burton, who both Jarrett and Metheny played with. That folk/rock/Nashville thing. Burton also not a bebopper. As I write in the essay, I think Vince Guaraldi is also a puzzle piece. Literally Burton, Jarrett, and Metheny all play their own version of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind."
For myself, I admit I find Jarrett heavier than Metheny and Burton; Keith also played so many standards with Gary and Jack that his approach is part of the language of whatever "straight-ahead" is today. Metheny and Burton have not left that kind of footprint in terms of swinging jazz.
At any rate, Jarrett is a big personal influence. Sorting all that out for myself is why I wrote this somewhat navel-gazing post. What do I take and what do I leave?
Good point about Pat, I am so enamored with his idiosyncratic stuff that I forget (and almost never listen to) his more tradition-bound playing.
The first solo piano I fell in love with was... (preparing my shield).. George Winston playing "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" on a CD my dad brought home when I was 7 or 8 years old. I still love George Winston though he's in a different musical world, and I love Vince.
Specific to this discussion - Keith has an unyielding creative spark and he's tried a number of things that didn't quite work - but he tried them. I'll always respect that. He also tried a lot of things that worked incredibly well. And Keith was always doing Keith. His commitment to fully developing his musicianship is so admirable. I think you share this commitment. If all you take from him is that relentless drive for exploration - that is enough and does him and his work great honor. In addition to stealing, great artists inspire.
It's a great point, I think Pat has (perhaps intentionally?) avoided playing many standards, mostly. The only ones I'm aware of are:
All The Things You Are (various trios, duo with Jim Hall, clearly a favorite of Pat's)
Old Folks (from Question and Answer with Holland and Haynes)
Soon (from Like Minds, Burton Haynes Holland Corea)
and then there is that record "The Song Is You" where they play a bunch of standards. But this is obviously nothing like Jarrett's breadth, in terms of standards.
Hi Paul! You are obviously correct, but I'd just mention REJOICING again, which has blues, rhythm changes, and a Horace Silver ballad. Pat also played various tunes with Kenny Garrett or Joshua Redman. THere's also a couple of things on Trio 99 → 00
To belabor "point" as well as "the point" - I missed the point of Ethan's post which was really about Keith on standards, and I chose to comment about Keith on everything BUT standards AND bring Pat in (completely irrelevant) immediately derailing the conversation before it started.
I saw a slim opening to mention something I've thought about a lot and kinda forced it in
Well, all digressions are welcome at this thread! 😂
Hi Ethan:
I’m intrigued by this “More bebop, less Bach” critique. Unique I think and respectfully provocative. I’m wondering what your overall take on John Lewis might be: grounded in modernist bebop, and Basie-inspired lean blues, then... Bach. Do you hear him similarly? Best wishes. cm
Hi Chuck of course I love John Lewis, as does Keith. However, I see Lewis as playing almost a swing era vocabulary when he is improvising. I don’t put Lewis in the Bud Powell or Barry Harris camp really. There’s a Lewis solo on “all the things you are” with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie which is just perfect. It’s a little too slow and melodic to be classic bop-style playing.

Of course Lewis loved Bach, but actually playing/composing fugues is a slightly different topic then what you play while improvising with bass and drums. I believe the greatest jazz fugue so far is Lewis’s “Concorde.”
Excellent! Thanks for the reply. I agree about Concorde, and I think for a certain sort of pure pleasure, over the years, I’ve returned to Blues On Bach as much as any album of its time.
Chuck, I don’t really know Blues on Bach, so thanks for the tip, I’m going to listen!
Captaintrips comment re: the “church” in Jarrett’s approach rings true for me. Not entirely off-topic: heard Branford Marsalis play “Long as You’re Living Yours” live Saturday night and it swung. I see that he recorded “The Windup” on a recent album. Guess he likes that “Belonging” album!
for sure there's a lot of gospel in Keith's thing, although less so when he plays standards, with the exception of "God Bless the Child"