Keith Jarrett

Emerging during the closing years of the twentieth century, Keith Jarrett ranks among the era’s most inventive and fiercely independent figures as a pianist, composer, and ensemble leader. In his role at the keyboard—he also commands numerous other instruments—he reshaped the language of spontaneous music by establishing an entirely fresh approach to unaccompanied recitals, wherein every note arose without predetermined structure from start to finish. More than one hundred albums document his leadership across jazz and classical realms. His initial outing as a bandleader, Life Between the Exit Signs from 1967, opened the door to a brief stint alongside Miles Davis. Subsequent releases appeared on Atlantic, Columbia, and Impulse, among them The Mourning of a Star, Expectations, and Bop-Be. In 1972 he aligned with ECM, unveiling the solo studio album Facing You. The fully improvised The Köln Concert of 1975 ranks among the highest-selling piano recordings in jazz history. His extensive ECM catalog spans international trios and quartets, intimate duets, orchestral works, and further solo recitals. The so-called standards trio, launched in 1981 with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, endured more than three decades. Classical recitals featuring music by Bach and Shostakovich also entered his discography, while 1997’s La Scala marked a return to improvised solo performances. Throughout the twenty-first century Jarrett sustained both live solo appearances and the issuance of previously unreleased material, including Rio in 2011, Creation in 2015, and the 2016 box A Multitude of Angels, drawn from 1996 performances. Although two strokes in 2018 ended his ability to perform, archival concerts continued to surface, such as 2022’s The Bordeaux Concert, taped during the 2016 European itinerary, and 2023’s Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a 1994 reading of the Württemberg Sonatas.

Jarrett entered the world on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Piano study commenced at age three. Formal classical training began at eight, and by fifteen he pursued composition before a short enrollment at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. While still a teenager he contemplated further academic work in Paris, yet ultimately relocated to New York in 1964 to pursue jazz. He quickly integrated into the city’s scene through sit-in appearances at venues such as the Village Vanguard. His first road engagement came with Art Blakey’s New Jazz Messengers, a tenure that lasted until 1966. The sole recording from that association, Buttercorn Lady, captured live at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, also featured trumpeter Chuck Mangione. In 1966 Jarrett joined Charles Lloyd’s celebrated quartet, a group whose eclectic direction mirrored the broader transformations then reshaping jazz and popular music alike, bringing the ensemble worldwide acclaim on both record and stage.

Departure from Lloyd occurred in 1968, the same year Jarrett issued his debut solo album, Restoration Ruin, on Vortex. He performed every part himself—soprano saxophone, harmonica, drums, guitar, and piano—while also singing; the project remains an outlier in his catalog as a folk-rock effort rather than jazz. Issued the same year on Atlantic, Life Between the Exit Signs introduced a trio completed by bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian. That unit, later expanded to a quartet with saxophonist Dewey Redman, recorded together for eleven years and achieved legendary status through its exploratory interplay. Between 1970 and 1971 Jarrett contributed organ and electric piano to Miles Davis, appearing on Live at the Fillmore and Live/Evil; further documentation surfaced on the trumpeter’s 1974 album Get Up with It and the 2005 box Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Session 1970. Additional sideman work from the period includes Airto’s Free, Barbara & Ernie’s Prelude To…, and Donal Leace’s self-titled 1972 release. A self-titled duo album with Gary Burton arrived on Atlantic in 1971, coinciding with the trio’s The Mourning of a Star.

A brief Columbia affiliation yielded the 1972 album Expectations, featuring guitarist Sam Brown and drummer/percussionist Airto alongside the core trio. That year also introduced Facing You, Jarrett’s first solo piano recording for Manfred Eicher’s nascent ECM imprint, an alliance that would prove enduring. Redman joined late in 1971, and Birth marked the expanded ensemble’s first Atlantic release. Subsequent Impulse! titles included Fort Yawuh (1973), Treasure Island (1974), Death and the Flower and Backhand (both 1975), Mysteries (1976), ByaBlue (1977), and Bop-Be (1978), while El Juicio (The Judgement) appeared on Atlantic in 1975.

Jarrett’s musical scope expanded markedly in the early seventies as his ECM relationship deepened. The 1972 duet Ruta and Daitya with Jack DeJohnette preceded the landmark improvised Solo Concerts: Bremen & Lausanne of 1973. The double-live solo piano album The Köln Concert emerged in 1975, its warmth and accessibility establishing it as one of the most enduringly popular solo piano recordings in jazz. Additional ECM solo piano releases encompass Staircase, the ten-album Sun Bear Concerts, Moth and the Flame, Concerts, Paris Concert, Dark Intervals, Vienna Concert, La Scala, Carnegie Hall Concert, and Rio.

An European quartet formed in the seventies constituted the second of Jarrett’s three storied groups. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Jon Christensen joined for the 1974 debut Belonging. Concurrently Jarrett pursued further American quartet activity and compositional experiments; the 1974 double album In the Light highlighted his interest in modern classical forms, including a string quartet, a brass quintet, and “Crystal Moment (Piece for Four Celli and Two Trombones).” Co-led projects with Garbarek yielded Luminescence (1975), augmented by strings, and the popular Arbour Zena, which also featured Haden and chamber strings. The provocative 1976 double album Hymns/Spheres presented improvisations on an eighteenth-century organ in the Benedictine Abbey Ottobeuren.

My Song, issued by the European quartet in 1978, drew more traditional jazz listeners, especially alongside Bop-Be and The Survivor’s Suite, the first of two American quartet releases on ECM. Eyes of the Heart, the final album by that American group, appeared as a live double in 1979.

The eighties opened with Celestial Hawk: For Orchestra, Percussion and Piano, recorded at Carnegie Hall, fusing Jarrett’s improvisational command with formal compositional ambitions in both classical and jazz domains. That year the European quartet also released the live Nude Ants, taped at the Village Vanguard, and Sacred Hymns, a solo piano set of compositions by metaphysical philosopher/musician Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

In 1983 Jarrett formed a trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, an alliance that persisted thereafter. Their initial session produced Standards, Vol. 1, Standards, Vol. 2, and Changes, the latter devoted to free improvisation. Throughout the decade the group alternated standards interpretations with freely improvised material, including Standards Live (1986) and Changeless (1989).

Two deeply personal albums also emerged: the 1986 double Spirits, on which Jarrett played piano, flute, recorder, soprano saxophone, guitar, and percussion, and the 1987 clavichord-only double Book of Ways.

Classical recording began in earnest in 1988 with Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier Buch I, followed the next year by the Goldberg Variations. Jazz commitments continued with the European quartet’s Personal Mountains and the American trio’s Changeless, both appearing in 1989.

The nineties opened with the solo Paris Concert, while the trio maintained an active touring schedule and recorded Bye Bye Blackbird in 1991 as a tribute to Miles Davis. Classical projects dominated the first half of the decade, encompassing Handel and Bach sonatas with recorderist Michala Petri, the award-winning Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 (1992), Bach’s French Suites (1993), and Bach: 3 Sonaten für Viola da Gamba und Cembalo with violist Kim Kashkashian (1994). The previously unreleased W.A. Mozart Piano Concertos K. 467, 488, 595, Masonic Funeral Music K. 477 & Symphony in G Minor K. 550, recorded with conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart Symphony, finally surfaced in 2004.

At the Deer Head Inn with Peacock and DeJohnette appeared in 1994. A six-CD box, Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note: The Complete Recordings, documented the trio’s June 1994 engagement. Chronic fatigue syndrome, triggered by parasitic bacterial infection, struck during a 1996 European tour and sidelined Jarrett for three years. ECM issued the 1995 solo concert La Scala in 1997 and the trio document Tokyo ’96 in 1998. While ill, Jarrett recorded the intimate Melody at Night, With You in his home studio in 1997; the solo piano collection of concise standards, ballads, folk songs, and a single original, regarded as his most personal statement, reached the public in 1999, the year he resumed trio touring. His first twenty-first-century release, Whisper Not, captured standards from that renewed activity.

Over the ensuing four years the trio toured extensively, yielding ECM albums such as the standards collections Up for It and The Out of Towners alongside the freely improvised Inside Out and Always Let Me Go. My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreux marked the trio’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007, the same year the solo piano Carnegie Hall Concert appeared. The Cure, a 1990 standards performance, surfaced from the vault in 2008.

Paris/London solo concerts followed in 2009, succeeded in 2010 by the Haden duet Jasmine. Rio appeared in 2011 shortly after the concert itself. ECM excavated Sleeper: Tokyo, April 16th, 1979, an unreleased European quartet date, in 2012. The Luzern Concert Hall performance from July 2009 emerged as Somewhere in May 2013. November of that year brought No End, a 1986 home-studio recording on which Jarrett played every instrument, followed in December by the three-disc Concerts: Bregenz München reissue from 1981. June 2014 saw additional 2007 Haden duet material released as Last Dance.

For Jarrett’s seventieth birthday in May 2015, ECM simultaneously issued an orchestral classical album pairing Barber’s Piano Concerto and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with separate orchestras and the solo piano Creation, assembled from selected performances in Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, and Paris. The four-disc A Multitude of Angels appeared in fall 2016, preserving the final four solo recitals of 1996 in Modena, Ferrara, Torino, and Genova. La Fenice, a double album documenting the July 2006 solo concert at Venice’s Gran Teatro la Fenice, arrived in 2018, presenting eight spontaneously composed pieces that traversed blues to avant-garde dissonance together with readings of “My Wild Irish Rose,” “Stella by Starlight,” and a new interpretation of “Blossom.” The release coincided with Jarrett becoming the first jazz musician awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the International Festival of Contemporary Music of the Biennale di Venezia, an honor previously bestowed upon composers such as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, György Kurtág, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Steve Reich.

A February 2017 Carnegie Hall appearance prompted Jarrett to thank the audience for “bringing me to tears,” with plans made to repeat the event the following March. Both the rescheduled performance and ensuing tour were abruptly canceled, attributed at the time to “health issues.” In a September 2020 New York Times interview with Nate Chinen promoting the October archival release Budapest Concert from 2016, Jarrett disclosed that two strokes—one in February 2018 and another in May—had left him dependent on a cane and unable to use his left hand, thereby ending his performing career.

During recovery Jarrett collaborated with ECM on the reissue of archived concerts. The Bordeaux Concert, recorded on the 2016 European tour, appeared in 2022. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, featuring 1994 interpretations of the Württemberg Sonatas recorded at Cavelight Studio, followed the next year.