What is your favorite Keith Jarrett recording? Why do you like it so much? Can you put it into words?

If you had to select one Jarrett piece that people will still be enjoying three hundred years from now, which would you choose?

For me, it's the first Jarrett album I ever heard. Standards Volume 1.

As far as one single track, I love his version of
You don't konw what love is / Muezzin that he plays on one of the 'live at the blue note' sessions.

I think it varies over time, but right now the track I listen to the most by far is My Song from the Carnegie Hall album.

There is so much in that recording that I just never get tired of listening to it.

The Koln Concert. My mentor transcibed the entire album note for note decades ago, so I had access to it from the time I started to study with him.
Jarrett was at his peak of creativity and pianism during that period. All his recordings from that time frame are the apex of his output.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzqMJWlKMsY

Ditto... Koln Concert, part 1 especially. I could listen to that forever.

I bought the sheet music to the Koln concert a couple of years ago in a fit of optimism and naivete but found myself quickly stymied by the fast runs and odd rhythms. Oh well. I will never play like Jarrett but I can enjoy listening to him.

Radiance, I think. The pieces are much more varied and interesting than those in his previous solo concerts and several of them break new ground. Although very good, his Carnegie concert does not seem to me to continue the musical impact of Radiance.

He will probably be remembered most for his jazz renditions of tunes, but I would like to think he will also be remembered for making free personal improvisation a legitimate art form in public perception. That to me has been his outstanding musical contribution.

It's not that difficult pianistically. However, rhytmically it can be challenging as Jarrett's greatest pianistic/improvisational strength is his unorthodox rhymthmic/metric interplay between left and right hands.

Jarrett is a master accompanist, even when accompanying his own improvised stretches and his sense of time, even his rubato clearly marked by the flow he's creating, is always constant, his notes carefully placed and their durations carefully controlled by what he hears.

If you can play Mozart Sonatas, you can play this.
Listen carefully to each two bars of the recording following your score closely. Unfortunately, the published score is not without errors, but it's close enough that it won't really matter.

After familiarazation, sit at the piano and play each hand's part along with Jarrett, gradually combining them. Do this 2 bars at a time, no more than that to start, until you can start to string together 2 + 2 + 2 + 2, etc.

In a short while, you'll be able to play fragments, which will be easily strung together. Little by little, it'll live in your head and hands.

One of the best set of choruses on All the Things you Are I've heard to date:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLCGWh-VZhI

Including Oscar, Art, McCoy, and others who have recorded the tune.

I have all of the solo concert releases, including Sun Bear, and many of the trio works and studio albums. Koln is a wonderful concert, but IMHO no Jarrett fan should buy another disc until they own Bremen/Lausanne.

These two concerts were recorded in 1973 and released on 3 vinyl discs the following year (now 2 CDs). Among the publications awarding Bremen/Lausanne their Record of the Year were Down Beat, Stereo Review, Time Magazine, and the New York Times.

More than any other Jarrett work, these two concerts encompass the entire range of his virtuosity - from gospel to free form to romantic and even Bach-like - and also the full range of musical emotion from melancholy to ecstatic.

Check out the Amazon customer reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Solo-Concerts-Lausanne-Keith-Jarrett/dp/B0000261GX/

I thought that this woulkd prove to be an interesting comparison between styles.

Here's Bud Powell's "all the Things":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0VeXdEa5GI&NR=1

Bud plays extremely static lines, which don't often venture out of each key center for a paricular chord sequence. Also, his left hand sound plodding, never really enhancing the drummer's syncopations or setting up a meaningful vertical structure to his right hand stretches.
Bud's sense of time is off as indicated by his struggle to maintain his flow of ideas smoothly at this relatively relaxed tempo.

I thought this an interesting comparison with Jarrett's play as Bud Powell is held by many in such high regard as a master of jazz improvisation.

Although a good jazz pianist, I've always felt that Bud Powell was vastly overrated, probably due to his association with Bird.

Standards Volumes Live and in the studio. After having gone to two of the trio's concerts in the last five years and hearing and seeing them live added much more connection with the music than ever. 300 YEARS from now I doubt he will be remembered for much of anything but you never know. I mean he is a great improviser and has written some nice music but there are many others that really changed the history and direction of music with new styles Like Charlie Parker or Miles Davis,John Coltrane or Lennie Tristano who all had their own styles and schools of thought. Dpvjazz

Tokyo Solo, Part 2d:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=YM2cdtU2qTg

In the last 30 years, since his demise, Lennie's music has actually diminished in exposure, if that's even possible.
It's just too cerebral for most. Many do not have the understanding of his harmonic counterpoint to fully appreciate it's complexity yet purity, logic, and beauty.

At the risk of provoking an argument, here's one of my mentor's renderings, an expansion of a Lennie Tristano improvisation on Melancholy baby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5gnAqgttY

In the days of modern day jazz world of phyrigian modes and pentatonics, lennie's diverse teachings and incredible opus have been all but forgotten except by his students and those that sought to study with them.

The dense harmonics are beyond most and appreciation of music such as this is not for those that do not venture beyond radio or what is current.
I mention before that after being exposed to Lennie,s methods and approach to music it is not for everyone. It does take hard work and much focus practice to accomplish the goals that Lennie has so carefully thought and presented AND after a year study with someone that can teach and play that way I can honestly tell you it was difficult and yet very rewarding. DPVJAZZ

Although I love his most of his solo improv, Standards, and Trio recordings, I really like his version of "Over the Rainbow".

...duh...

It's already quite an emotional song. Jarrett demonstrates a unique ability to convey the song's essence, through simple embellishments using his improvisational sytlings.

At least to me.

l's dad

who is this shadowy figure? Great to watch Lennie's piece played on video, great technique and the voicings are down, great! It's not an expansion, verbatim LT except for a few noodles here and there..why played so fast? If you dig this, listen to the original recording, it's played quiet differently. I grew up in Lennie's living room, it's great to see him mentioned here!

You might like to listen for free to my new solo CD Turning it loose! (Jazzheads) much was inspired by my experiences as a teen with LT.

http://jazzheads.com/music/turning.html

also youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GciUS-Z

Blessings to everyone and keep swingin!

Dave Frank
NYC
www.myspace.com/davefrankjazz

Unfortunately, Virtuosic1 is a taboo subject to directly discuss on the forum and doing so might result in banning, so I'll be brief.

He studied directly with Lennie, and I have studied with him for many years. He plays all of Lennie's music verbatim and variations, most transcribed. He can play them in every key, and believe it or not, forward and backward.

Many of the voicings of his video are expanded from Lennie's. Where Lennie used 8, he used 10 or 11, so the harmonic counterpoint is expanded to be slightly thicker than Lennie. There's also contrary motion used where in the original, there wasn't.

He could have played it faster or slower. At that particular time, that's the speed he heard it at.

Also, the opening 32nd notes are a drastic departure as well as his expansion of Lennie's original 4-note, chromatically alternating, whole-tone motif, the first four notes of the melody of Malancholy Baby played in contrapuntally repropogating contrary motion (retrograde inversion) thereby bolstering that motif that appears to be the main impetus of that particular improvisation.
The end is completely different as well, again expanded upon and greatly augmented in contrary chromatic motion. It's recognizable as Scene and Variation I, but ut's far cry from verbatim. Listen again and directly compare to Lennie's version and you'll hear the dramatic diferences.

Nicely played. Like sitting in on one of Lennie's living room student recitals, but your style and touch remind me more of Sal Mosca or Liz Gorril than Lennie or Connie. Did you study with Sal in Mt. Vernon after Lennie departed?

I transcribed some of Keith's solo piano stuff, and what impressed me was his deliberatre use counterpoint in his playing.. its almost as if every single note of the chords were individual voices moving independent of each of each other, and they just happen to create a chord through the counterpoint. I've read that Keith tends to think things in individual lines than chords.

For me, his recording of "Body and Soul" from the Cure is one my favorite.

Yes. Master improvisors approach counterpoint in this way. Each voice, an interwoven thread, with it's own gravity and contour, vertical aggregates, just that, more the byproduct of "nodes" where individual components of these interwoven lines sound simultaneously, than the byproduct of "chords".
It's more the art of "fugue" than chord and melody.

Welcome to the forum, Dave Frank. And thank you for posting the link to your album. It's extremely impressive! I liked "Snow Falls on 5th Avenue" and "Prayer at St. Patrick's" the best. (I tend to like the dreamy slow kind of jazz the best.)

hi Monica, thanks. Hi B Jones, I took 2 lessons from Sal, but although I respect him highly, his teaching wasn't for me. You really piqued my interest with this Lennie student video, why don't you email me at Dfrankjazz@aol.com and tell me who this is, c'mon..not Lonnie Leibowitz? Is it agent 008?

Dave

Two lessons were quite enough, right? I think that's how many lessons I lasted with Sal!

Sal's teaching methodogy was a carbon copy of Lennie's, but without the same type of insight into the direction of where it was going.
Sal also tended to be very mystical at times answering pragmatic musical questions with parables and metaphors. Asking Sal a question about harmonic counterpoint and you'd get an answer about how you can burn down a 1000 acre forest with one tiny match.

Although Lennie and my teacher were always direct and to the point with musical teaching, it seems as though many of Lennie's students who went on to teach also, adopted this same type of "mystical" approach, as though trying to elevate Lennie's ideas to a metaphysical plane rather than describe and analyze it in musical parameters.

BTW, It's not Lonnie Leibowitz.