On Keith Jarrett and Improvising

The news that jazz pianist Keith Jarrett is unlikely to play again after suffering two strokes in 2018 gives me a strong motivation to write my first post of substance for a long time. Jarrett influenced me more than almost any other pianist, and it’s hardly an exaggeration to say I was addicted to his records as a student, listening obsessively to anything I could find. Funnily enough, the first thing of his I heard was a dodgy Italian cassette reissue of The Köln Concert which added someone else’s (pretty bad) piano playing to fill up the extra cassette space. That was rather confusing! But I soon came to recognise the unique intensity of Jarrett’s style. If you know Jarrett, you probably know of his completely improvised solo concerts in which he walks onto stage with no idea what even the first note is going to be. As a student, those were my true catnip, following his epic journeys through myriad styles and moods. Listening back now, I hear rather more clearly how long he sometimes takes to find the next idea, but the moments when the magic happens are truly magic. I heard him play a solo concert live in London a few years ago and three quarters of the concert was good; but that final quarter (the first quarter, actually) was so breathtaking that I’ll never forget it. For me, Jarrett is simply one of the greatest pianists there has ever been. There are other jazz musicians with Jarrett’s spontaneity, but none with his supreme control of keyboard sonority. There are classical musicians with Jarrett’s control but without his boundless spontaneity. I think it may be that mix of spontaneity and control which makes the best of Jarrett’s playing so profoundly communicative, and his ability to create meaning out of the tiniest inflections of phrasing or voicing, astonishes me.

There are many things about Jarrett that people have objected to - his notorious hostility to audience noise, his obtrusive vocalisations while he plays, the astounding physical contortions he puts his body through at the piano (how does it still sound so good????), the evident ego…. More significant to me is what can seem like a lack of quality control at times, especially in those endless vamps in the solo concerts while he waits for the next idea. As he expresses it, he’s simply channeling the music he receives from the universe, but I find that too easy an answer. At times I feel there is a self-satisfied quality which perhaps stops him sensing “Ah, it really is time to move on now”. It makes me think of a concert I attended where a fan shouted “Keith, you are the greatest!”. He replied, “There is ONE greater”. (Maybe it was a joke? It didn’t sound like it). One could be frustrated that he hasn’t found a better way of keeping such limitations out of the music, but perhaps there’s simply no other way with an artist as profoundly open and exploratory - you get the whole person, warts and all. Perhaps that in itself is a lesson, that the audience might be better served by a truly authentic experience of the performer rather than the sanitised version that I suspect most of us feel the need to present. But that requires a great deal of courage.

Those solo concerts really fired me up as a student. At that time I was experimenting with improvisation a lot, and finally, inspired by Jarrett’s example, I bit the bullet and programmed an (unplanned, short) improvisation in a local concert, much to my teacher’s dismay. But that experience of creating music in the moment, sensing how it has its own logic and desires which one can follow if one is sensitive, was revelatory to me. At the time I was very religious and I framed it in terms of divine inspiration, but now it seems much simpler - a tapping into the deep wells of creativity that we so easily forget are there under the surface of our lives.

Though I continued this practice in concerts for many years, I don’t improvise very often these days. However, my view of classical music has been deeply affected by my improvising experiences: they helped me feel viscerally how much the mainstream classical repertoire comes out of improvisatory traditions. I found that when I opened up to the process of improvising I suddenly kept seeing implicit spontaneity in the composed pieces I was playing, and that in turn helped me find a much deeper sense of drama, of shape, and of freedom. It all started by listening to Keith Jarrett; that feels like a wonderful gift. But the greater gift still is the transcendent beauty of his playing.