Keith Jarrett Bach

Keith Jarrett’s account of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Württemberg Sonatas is a revelation. “I’d heard the sonatas played by harpsichordists, and felt there was room for a piano version,” says Jarrett today. This outstanding recording, made in 1994 and previously unreleased, finds the pianist attuned to the expressive implications of the sonatas in every moment. The younger Bach’s idiosyncrasies: the gentle playfulness of the music, the fondness for subtle and sudden tempo shifts, the extraordinary, rippling invention…all of this is wonderfully delivered. The fluidity of the whole performance has a quality that perhaps could be conveyed only by an artist of great improvisational skills. In Jarrett’s hands, CPE’s exploration of new compositional forms retains the freshness of discovery. Recorded at Keith Jarrett’s Cavelight Studio in May 1994, the album includes liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

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.

Keith Jarrett’s account of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Württemberg Sonatas is a revelation. “I’d heard the sonatas played by harpsichordists, and felt there was room for a piano version,” says Jarrett today. This outstanding recording, made in 1994 and previously unreleased, finds the pianist attuned to the expressive implications of the sonatas in every moment. The younger Bach’s idiosyncrasies: the gentle playfulness of the music, the fondness for subtle and sudden tempo shifts, the extraordinary, rippling invention…all of this is wonderfully delivered. The fluidity of the whole performance has a quality that perhaps could be conveyed only by an artist of great improvisational skills. In Jarrett’s hands, CPE’s exploration of new compositional forms retains the freshness of discovery. Recorded at Keith Jarrett’s Cavelight Studio in May 1994, the album includes liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

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. These were his last concerts before being sidelined for two years from chronic fatigue syndrome. Jarrett is musician, producer, and engineer here…

Keith Jarrett - J.S. Bach, The French Suites (1993) {2CD Set, ECM New Series 1513/14}
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© 1993 ECM Records | ECM New Series ECM 1513/14
Classical / Baroque / Harpsichord

Jarrett plays brilliantly. Personally, I love Jarrett's playing; he is one of the most sensitive and lyrical of contemporary pianists, and his long illness has deprived us of what would surely have been a larger body of baroque music recordings. So make your own mind up. I highly recommend this collection to lovers of Bach, Jarrett and the diabolical harpsichord.

Keith Jarrett - J. S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (1989) {ECM New Series 1395}
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© 1989 ECM Records | ECM New Series ECM 1395
Classical / Baroque / Harpsichord

Keith Jarrett is incredibly gifted both as a painist and as a harpsichordist. That he chose the harpsichord for his rendition of the Golberg Variations suggests that he found it capable of rendering a closer approximation of his ideal interpretation of these works. Hearing it is indeed a great joy!

Keith Jarrett - J.S. Bach - Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Buch I + Buch II (1988, 1991) {4CD Set ECM Records}
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© 1988, 1991 ECM Records | ECM New Series 1362~63 / 1433~34
Classical / Piano / Harpsichord

Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier is performed on the piano while Book Two is performed on the harpsichord. His tempos are very fast, and he has a certain sense of humor that comes through in all his performances, making what might seem academic, warm and accessible. Highly recommended - and check out Jarrett's other classical recordings for other delights just as great.

“These are performances in which tempos, phrasing, articulation and the execution of ornaments are convincing,” wrote Gramophone of Jarrett’s first recorded account of The Well-Tempered Clavier. “Both instrument and performer serve as unobtrusive media through which the music emerges without enhancement.” In this live recording from Troy, New York, made in March 1987, just one month after his studio recording of the work, Keith Jarrett addresses the challenges of Bach’s great set of preludes and fugues once more. Part of the goal is transparency, to bring the listener closer to the composer. As Jarrett explained at the time: “The very direction of the lines, the moving lines of notes, are inherently expressive…When I play Bach, I hear almost the process of thought. Any colouration has nothing to do with this process.“