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Paris/London - Testament
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3-CD Box Set.
Jarrett’s solo concert tradition continues with two highly creative
performances of recent vintage – from Paris’s Salle Pleyel on November
26, 2008, followed by London’s Royal Festival Hall on December 1. The
English date was Jarrett’s first London solo concert in many years and,
in the words of one reviewer, “triggered the sort of ecstasy that might
greet a returning prophet”. As with “Radiance” and “The Carnegie Hall
Concert”, the music covers a wide arc of expression, as “that old
Jarrett magic forges majestically on” (The Guardian).
At the end of 2008, Keith Jarrett added two concerts to his schedule at
short notice – one at Paris’s Salle Pleyel (November 26), one at
London’s Royal Festival Hall (December 1) . The music on “Testament” is
from these concerts. Their range is compendious, Jarrett’s
improvisational imagination continually uncovering new forms, in a
music stirred by powerful emotions. In his liner notes, the pianist is
forthright about the personal circumstances promoting a need to lose
himself in the work once more.
He also reminds the reader/listener that “it is not natural to sit at a
piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas
and play something that is of lasting value and brand new.” This,
however, has been the history and substance of the solo concerts since
Jarrett initiated them, almost forty years ago . Over time their
connection to ‘jazz’ has often become tenuous, yet Jarrett’s solo
concerts, with the foregrounding of melody and the continual building,
and relinquishing, of structure, are also removed from “free
improvisation” as a genre. Jarrett’s solo work is effectively its own
idiom, and has been subject to periodic revisions by the pianist. “In
the early part of this decade, I tried to bring the format back:
starting from nothing and building a universe.”
Since the “Radiance” album and the “Tokyo Solo” DVD of 2002 Jarrett has
been adjusting the flow of the work, more often working with shorter
blocks of material. “I continued to find a wealth of music inside this
open format, stopping whenever the music told me to.” This approach
distinguished “The Carnegie Hall Concert” (2006), and it is most
effectively deployed in “Testament” , where the strongly-contrasting
elements of the sections of the Paris concert in particular have the
logic of a spontaneously-composed suite. The nerves-bared London
performance (the first UK solo show in 18 years) is different again:
“The concert went on and, though the beginning was a dark, searching,
multi-tonal melodic triumph, by the end it somehow became a throbbing,
never-to-be-repeated pulsing rock band of a concert (unless it was a
church service, in which case, Hallelujah!).”
In the end, the improviser does what must be done. As Keith Jarrett
said, a long time ago, “If you’re a rock climber, once you’re halfway
up the face of the cliff, you have to keep moving, you have to keep
going somewhere. And that’s what I do, I find a way.”
These days, however, Jarrett is rationing the number of ascents: there
have been less than thirty solo concerts in the last decade, making
“Testament” a special event indeed. Two further solo performances are
scheduled for 2009 – at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels on
October 9, and at Berlin’s Philharmonie on October 12.
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ARTISTS
Keith Jarrett (piano) |
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