Keith Jarrett La Scala

For this live solo concert (recorded at the Teatro alla Scala in Milano, Italy and released in 1997), pianist Keith Jarrett performs two lengthy improvisations simply titled "La Scala, Parts I and II." Most of the music is quite lyrical and romantic. The first part (which lasted nearly 45 minutes) does have a section using a droning rhythm reminiscent of American Indian music before resolving back into a ballad. The second section (a mere 27½ minutes) starts out dissonant, gradually evolves into a peaceful section, and then concludes with the original dissonant ideas. As an encore, Jarrett performs a melodic and very beautiful six-minute rendition of "Over the Rainbow," receiving a well-deserved thunderous ovation at its conclusion. The music overall develops slowly but always holds one's interest, reinforcing one's viewpoint of Keith Jarrett as one of the top pianists of the 1980s and '90s.

Keith Jarrett - La Fenice (2018) {2CD Set ECM 2601~02} (Complete Artwork - Slipcase with 12 pages)
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© 2018 ECM Records | ECM 2601/02 / 676 5853
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Improvisation / Solo Piano

ECM continues the series of Keith Jarrett's live archival recordings with La Fenice. The recital occurred in 2006 at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, some four years after the pianist had resumed performing solo following his recovery from a long illness. Given that these outings are all spontaneously improvised, it stands to reason that no two are alike, from the spacious and lyrical Koln Concert from 1975 through the 1995's transcendent La Scala, through 2017's kaleidoscopic four-disc release of A Multitude of Angels, captured in four cities on a tour of Italy some 20 months after La Scala. Interestingly, the La Fenice show took place some ten months after Jarrett's triumphant July 2005 Carnegie Hall Concert.

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945) is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has also been a group leader and a solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music. In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first recipient of both the contemporary and classical musician prizes, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. His album, The Köln Concert, released in 1975, became the best-selling piano recording in history. In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.

A solo concert from Keith Jarrett - recorded at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall on July 16, 2016, on the last night of a tour - finds the great improvising pianist at a peak of invention. Creating a spontaneous suite of forms in the moment with the intuitive assurance of a master builder interspersing touches of the blues and folksong lyricism between pieces of polyrhythmic and harmonic complexity - he delivers one of his very finest performances. An attentive and appreciative audience hangs on every note, every nuance, and is rewarded with some tender encores including a magical version of “It’s A Lonesome Old Town".

Keith Jarrett - A Multitude Of Angels (2016) {4CD Set ECM Japan UCCE-1161~64}
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© 1996, 2016 ECM Records / Universal Music Japan | UCCE-1161~64
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Improvisation / Modern Creative / Post Bop / Piano Solo

Keith Jarrett's numerous volumes of improvised solo piano recordings are all treasure troves of spontaneous music making. Documented since the 1970s, they reveal the opening of his music as it readily embraces classical and sacred music influences, filters out what is unnecessary in his technique, and encounters the depth and breadth of the jazz tradition and his own unique abilities as a composer. The four discs in A Multitude of Angels were recorded in as many Italian cities during the last week of October 1996 – some 20 months after the concert captured on La Scala.

It's Keith Jarrett's 60th birthday on May 8, and ECM is marking a landmark in the life of an inspirational, fitfully indulgent, awesomely prolific musical giant with this double-disc recorded at two concerts in Japan in 2002. It's the first album of solo piano improvisations that Jarrett has released since La Scala in 1995, a set that just preceded his long withdrawal from the scene through illness. But for a special date in his life, solo improvisation is maybe the appropriate gesture - it was a solo album, the bestselling Köln Concert of 1974, that first brought Jarrett recognition outside of jazz circles.