Whilst many of the most famous jazz albums in history come from the golden age of 1950s and 1960s, there is one which holds its own despite arriving in the mid-1970s…
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Keith Jarrett Confronts a Future Without the Piano
The New York Times, Nate Chinen writes, “The pathbreaking musician reveals the health issues that make it unlikely he will ever again perform in public.”
Keith Jarrett’s left side is still partially paralyzed by a pair of strokes in 2018. “I don’t feel right now like I’m a pianist,” he said.Credit...Daniela Yohannes/ECM Records
The last time Keith Jarrett performed in public, his relationship with the piano was the least of his concerns. This was at Carnegie Hall in 2017, several weeks into the administration of a divisive new American president.
Mr. Jarrett — one of the most heralded pianists alive, a galvanizing jazz artist who has also recorded a wealth of classical music — opened with an indignant speech on the political situation, and unspooled a relentless commentary throughout the concert. He ended by thanking the audience for bringing him to tears.
He had been scheduled to return to Carnegie the following March for another of the solo recitals that have done the most to create his legend — like the one captured on the recording “Budapest Concert,” to be released on Oct. 30. But that Carnegie performance was abruptly canceled, along with the rest of his concert calendar. At the time, Mr. Jarrett’s longtime record label, ECM, cited unspecified health issues. There has been no official update in the two years since.
But this month Mr. Jarrett, 75, broke the silence, plainly stating what happened to him: a stroke in late February 2018, followed by another one that May. It is unlikely he will ever perform in public again.
“I was paralyzed,” he told The New York Times, speaking by phone from his home in northwest New Jersey. “My left side is still partially paralyzed. I’m able to try to walk with a cane, but it took a long time for that, took a year or more. And I’m not getting around this house at all, really.”
Mr. Jarrett didn’t initially realize how serious his first stroke had been. “It definitely snuck up on me,” he said. But after more symptoms emerged, he was taken to a hospital, where he gradually recovered enough to be discharged. His second stroke happened at home, and he was admitted to a nursing facility.
During his time there, from July 2018 until this past May, he made sporadic use of its piano room, playing some right-handed counterpoint. “I was trying to pretend that I was Bach with one hand,” he said. “But that was just toying with something.” When he tried to play some familiar bebop tunes in his home studio recently, he discovered he had forgotten them.
Mr. Jarrett’s voice is softer and thinner now. But over two roughly hourlong conversations, he was lucid and legible, aside from occasional lapses in memory. He often punctuated a heavy or awkward statement with a laugh like a faint rhythmic exhalation: Ah-ha-ha-ha.
Mr. Jarrett in 1975, when he performed what would become “The Köln Concert” — a sonorous, mesmerizing landmark that still stands as one of the best-selling solo piano albums ever made.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Raised in the Christian Science faith, which espouses an avoidance of medical treatment, Mr. Jarrett has returned to those spiritual moorings — up to a point. “I don’t do the ‘why me’ thing very often,” he said. “Because as a Christian Scientist, I would be expected to say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ And I was doing that somewhat when I was in the facility. I don’t know if I succeeded, though, because here I am.”
“I don’t know what my future is supposed to be,” he added. “I don’t feel right now like I’m a pianist. That’s all I can say about that.”
After a pause, he reconsidered. “But when I hear two-handed piano music, it’s very frustrating, in a physical way. If I even hear Schubert, or something played softly, that’s enough for me. Because I know that I couldn’t do that. And I’m not expected to recover that. The most I’m expected to recover in my left hand is possibly the ability to hold a cup in it. So it’s not a ‘shoot the piano player’ thing. It’s: I already got shot. Ah-ha-ha-ha.”
IF THE PROSPECT of a Keith Jarrett who no longer considers himself a pianist is dumbfounding, it might be because there has scarcely been a time he didn’t. Growing up in Allentown, Pa., he was a prodigy. According to family lore, he was 3 when an aunt indicated a nearby stream and told him to turn its burbling into music — his first piano improvisation.
Broad public awareness caught up with him in the late 1960s, when he was in a zeitgeist-capturing group led by Charles Lloyd, a saxophonist and flutist. The brilliant drummer in that quartet, Jack DeJohnette, then helped Miles Davis push into rock and funk. Mr. Jarrett followed suit, joining an incandescent edition of Davis’s band; in live recordings, his interludes on electric piano cast a spell.
Mr. Jarrett in Bologna, Italy, in 1969. In the late ’60s, he was part of a zeitgeist-capturing jazz group led by Charles Lloyd.Credit...Roberto Polillo/CTSIMAGES
Mr. Jarrett soon hit on something analogous in his own concerts, allowing improvised passages to become the main event. He was a few years into this approach in 1975, when he performed what would become “The Köln Concert” — a sonorous, mesmerizing landmark that still stands as one of the best-selling solo piano albums ever made. It has also been hailed as an object lesson in triumph over adversity, including Mr. Jarrett’s physical pain and exhaustion at the time, and his frustration over an inferior piano.
That sense of overcoming intransigent obstacles is an enduring feature of Mr. Jarrett’s myth. At times over the years, it could even seem that he set up his own roadblocks: turning concerts into trials of herculean intensity, and famously interrupting them to admonish his audience for taking pictures, or for excessive coughing. A New York Times Magazine profile in 1997 bore a wry headline: “The Jazz Martyr.” The following year, Mr. Jarrett announced that he’d been struggling with the consuming and mysterious ailment known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Mr. Jarrett in Berlin in 1972. His concerts became known as feats of herculean intensity, marked by his admonishments of the audience.Credit...Binde/Ullstein Bild, via Getty Images
While regaining strength, he recorded a series of songbook ballads in his home studio (later released as the touching, exquisite album “The Melody at Night, With You”). Then he reconvened his longtime trio, a magically cohesive unit with Mr. DeJohnette and the virtuoso bassist Gary Peacock.
Their first comeback concert, in 1998, recently surfaced on record, joining a voluminous discography. It captures a spirit of joyous reunion not only for Mr. Jarrett and his trio partners but also between a performing artist and his public. He titled that album “After the Fall”; ECM released it in March 2018, unwittingly around the time of his first stroke.
Loss has shrouded Mr. Jarrett’s musical circle of late. Mr. Peacock died last month, at 85. Jon Christensen, the drummer in Mr. Jarrett’s influential European quartet of the 1970s, died earlier this year. Mr. Jarrett also led a groundbreaking American quartet in the ’70s, and its other members — the saxophonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie Haden, the drummer Paul Motian, all major figures in modern jazz — have passed on, too.
Faced with these and other difficult truths, Mr. Jarrett hasn’t exactly found solace in music, as he once would have. But he derives satisfaction from some recordings of his final European solo tour. He directed ECM to release the tour’s closing concert last year, as “Munich 2016.” He’s even more enthusiastic about the tour opener, “Budapest Concert,” which he briefly considered calling “The Gold Standard.”
AS HE BEGINS to come to terms with his body of work as a settled fact, Mr. Jarrett doesn’t hesitate to plant a flag.
“I feel like I’m the John Coltrane of piano players,” he said, citing the saxophonist who transformed the language and spirit of jazz in the 1960s. “Everybody that played the horn after he did was showing how much they owed to him. But it wasn’t their music. It was just an imitative thing.”
Of course, imitation — even of oneself — is anathema to the pure, blank-slate invention Mr. Jarrett still claims as his method. “I don’t have an idea of what I’m going to play, any time before a concert,” he said. “If I have a musical idea, I say no to it.” (Describing this process, he still favors the present tense.)
Beyond his own creative resources, the conditions of every concert are unique: the characteristics of the piano, the sound in the hall, the mood of the audience, even the feel of a city. Mr. Jarrett had performed in Budapest four times before his 2016 concert at the Bela Bartok National Concert Hall, feeling an affinity he ascribes to personal factors: His maternal grandmother was Hungarian, and he played Bartok’s music from an early age.
“I felt like I had some reason to be close to the culture,” he said.
A galvanizing jazz artist, Mr. Jarrett (shown here in 1973) has also recorded a wealth of classical music.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The embrace of folkloric music by Bartok and other Hungarian composers further nudged Mr. Jarrett toward a dark quality — “a kind of existential sadness, let’s say, a deepness” — powerfully present in the concert’s first half. The second half, as admirers of “The Köln Concert” will appreciate, features a few of Mr. Jarrett’s most ravishing on-the-spot compositions. Those ballads, like “Part V” and “Part VII,” spark against briskly atonal or boppish pieces, gradually building the case for a mature expression that might not have been possible earlier in his career.
Part of that evolution has to do with the structure of Mr. Jarrett’s solo concerts, which used to unfold in long, unbroken arcs but now involve a collection of discrete pieces, with breaks for applause. Often the overarching form of these more recent concerts is only apparent after the fact. But Budapest was an exception.
“I saw this one while I was in it, which is why I chose that as the best concert on that entire tour,” Mr. Jarrett said. “I mean, I knew it. I knew something was happening.”
The crucial factor, he acknowledged, was an uncommonly receptive audience. “Some audiences seem to applaud more when there’s something crazy going on,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I wasn’t looking at that in Budapest.”
Given that Mr. Jarrett has made all but a small portion of his recorded output in front of an audience, his cantankerous reputation might best be understood as the turbulent side of a codependent relationship. He put the matter most succinctly during a Carnegie Hall solo concert in 2015, when he announced, “Here’s the big deal that nobody seems to realize: I could not do it without you.”
Mr. Jarrett in rural New Jersey, where he still lives, in 1982.Credit...Norman Seeff
As he renegotiates his bond with the piano, Mr. Jarrett faces the likelihood of that other relationship — the one with the public — coming to an end.
“Right now, I can’t even talk about this,” he said when the issue came up, and laughed his deflective laugh. “That’s what I feel about it.”
And while the magnificent achievement of “Budapest Concert” is a source of pride, it’s not hard to see how it could also register as a cosmic taunt.
“I can only play with my right hand, and it’s not convincing me anymore,” Mr. Jarrett said. “I even have dreams where I am as messed up as I really am — so I’ve found myself trying to play in my dreams, but it’s just like real life.”
Gary Peacock, Master Jazz Bassist, Is Dead at 85
The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello, “He was a free-jazz pioneer early on before becoming part of Keith Jarrett’s enduring trio, where he infused American standards with a Zen sensibility.”
Gary Peacock playing alongside the drummer Paul Motian in a club performance in Manhattan in 2007. He brought to his music a sensibility steeped in Zen Buddhism. Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Gary Peacock, an upright bassist whose fastidious but open-minded style carried him through a diverse career in jazz, culminating in a three-decade run with the pianist Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, died on Friday at his home in Olivebridge, N.Y. He was 85.
The pianist Marilyn Crispell, a longtime collaborator, confirmed the death but did not give a cause.
Mr. Peacock earned a permanent place in the pantheon of free-jazz pioneers in the 1960s thanks largely to his partnerships with the pianist Paul Bley and the saxophonist Albert Ayler. As a member of Ayler’s various bands, he recorded, among other albums, the now-classics “Ghosts” (1964), “Spiritual Unity” (1965) and “New York Eye and Ear Control” (1965), blending the unbounded expressions of Black postmodernism — à la Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor — with the vocal melodicism of gospel.
Mr. Peacock spent a short but equally formative stint in the mid-1960s with the eminent pianist Bill Evans’s trio. There he picked up on the innovations of his predecessor, the bassist Scott LaFaro, who had died in a car crash in 1961 at age 25 after making a series of landmark recordings with Evans.
Like LaFaro before him, Mr. Peacock treated the bass as hallowed ground to be endlessly explored — sounding cool, low tones; scampering up the neck in cross-stroking patterns; occasionally injecting a dose of deep harmony.
He was most known in his later career as part of Mr. Jarrett’s Standards Trio, completed by the drummer Jack DeJohnette. The group had one mission: coaxing often extravagant amounts of beauty out of the Great American Songbook. In a 2007 interview with the website All About Jazz, Mr. Peacock said the band’s music was “like flowers.”
“The idea is to really nourish them,” he said, explaining how the trio handled each song. “You wouldn’t trample them; you wouldn’t give them too much water, or you’d drown them. How do I nourish these flowers so they can really express themselves?”
The trio’s reverence for its material fell into step with Mr. Peacock’s explorations of Zen philosophy, which he studied while living in Japan in the 1970s.
“The question is, How much are you willing to give up to play this music?” he told All About Jazz. “I don’t think it can work if you still have an agenda, if you feel you still need to prove something musically. That’s not the point — it’s just about the music. So you’re going to serve that, not yourself or somebody in the audience, not the critics or the reviewers. It’s just the music.”
Mr. Peacock, left, with the drummer Jack DeJohnette, center, and the pianist Keith Jarrett during a performance as the Standards Trio in Paris in 2001. Credit...David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images
Gary George Peacock was born on May 12, 1935, in Burley, Idaho, in the southern part of the state, and grew up in various places in the Northwest. His father, Edgar Peacock, worked as a business consultant for grocery stores, and his mother, Laura (Connor) Peacock, worked at a variety of jobs.
Mr. Peacock’s first instrument was the piano, which he played in high school in Yakima, Wash., and studied at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles. He turned to the bass while he was a pianist in an Army band stationed in West Germany in the mid-1950s. When the bassist quit, he took over that chair and immediately fell in love with the instrument, making it his main one.
He returned to Los Angeles after his military service and became active in its music scene, playing with the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida, the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, among others.
In the early 1960s he married Annette Coleman, a vocalist and composer whose own explorations in music and spirituality ran alongside his. The marriage was brief, and after they separated, she left for New York and became involved with Paul Bley, although she kept Mr. Peacock’s last name. When Mr. Peacock arrived in New York in the mid-’60s, he became a close collaborator with the couple.
Together the three helped cast the mold for the distinctive sound of the ECM record label: influenced by Romantic piano music and existentialist philosophy, with a stark focus on melody. The third album released by ECM was “Paul Bley With Gary Peacock” (1970), featuring compositions by Ms. Peacock, Mr. Bley and Mr. Peacock.
He and his second wife, Nancy (Brown) Peacock, had three sons, Eliott, Collin and Niles. They all survive him, as does a sister, Patty Robbins, and two grandchildren. His second marriage also ended in divorce.
During the 1960s Mr. Peacock also played with Tony Williams, the wunderkind drummer, appearing on his debut album, “Life Time” (1964). Based on Mr. Williams’s recommendation, he substituted for Ron Carter for two months in Miles Davis’s famed quintet of the mid-’60s.
Mr. Peacock spent two years in Japan in the late 1960s and early '70s, studying Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophy and playing with musicians there. He released his first two albums as a leader during this time, for the Japanese arm of the CBS/Sony label. The releases, “Eastward” (1970) and “Voices” (1971), featured the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who would become a lifelong collaborator, as well as the drummer Hiroshi Murakami.
Mr. Peacock returned to the United States in 1972 and enrolled as a biology student at the University of Washington, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1976. The next year he released “Tales of Another,” a collection of six spare Peacock originals. The album, his first for ECM as a leader, was also the first recording to feature him alongside Mr. Jarrett and Mr. DeJohnette. The trio bonded immediately.
Mr. Peacock performed with Mr. Jarrett and Mr. DeJohnette at Carnegie Hall in 2010. Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times
“One of the first things I heard when we started playing together was the depth,” Mr. Peacock told JazzTimes in 2008. “There were three individuals, but there was one mind expressing itself. We knew that there was something very special there.”
He continued to compose and perform as a bandleader throughout the rest of his career, with collaborators including Ms. Crispell, the guitarist Ralph Towner and a trio featuring the pianist Marc Copland and the drummer Joey Baron. Toward the end of his life, he completed the manuscript for a memoir, which remains unpublished.
While he lived for music, Mr. Peacock valued its opposite equally. “Where I live is very silent,” he told All About Jazz from his home, in the Catskill region of upstate New York. “I really love it. There’s no cars, no people, just the wind in the trees, a deer walking around, a cowbell, a brook. So mostly I spend a lot of time in silence.”