Keith Jarrett Solo

Captured live at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, renowned piano virtuoso Keith Jarrett performs some of his most memorable and haunting standards before an enthusiastic crowd. Performed entirely solo, these numbers clearly reveal the breadth and power of his immense musical skills. Recorded live at Suntory Hall, Tokyo on April 14, 1987.

Captured live at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, renowned piano virtuoso Keith Jarrett performs some of his most memorable and haunting standards before an enthusiastic crowd. Performed entirely solo, these numbers clearly reveal the breadth and power of his immense musical skills. Recorded live at Suntory Hall, Tokyo on April 14, 1987.

Keith Jarrett - Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne (1973) {2 CD Set ECM-Polydor Japan, J58J 20100-1, Early Press rel 1986}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 477 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 301 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 209 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1973, 1986 ECM Records / Polydor K.K. Japan | J58J 20100-1
Jazz / Post Bop / Modern Creative / Solo Piano

In his timeless solo concerts, Jarrett displays the uncanny ability to drop himself into a piece of improvised music as if it has been playing invisibly in the ether all along, requiring him only to pick up from whichever measure he encounters and leave the music to continue on after he has left the stage. This album predates Jarrett’s Köln concert by just two years and was the one that really put him on the map before that legendary successor. Yet we cannot simply say that Jarrett is channeling the cosmos and leave it at that, for he inhabits a melodic space that is tangible, his own. Though filed under jazz, this music is something far more than any generic summary could express. Still, I persist in trying.

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.

During the 1970s, solo piano box sets were rare. When Keith Jarrett's monolithic, ten-LP solo box, Sun Bear Concerts, arrived from ECM in 1978, the only comparable collection was The Tatum Solo Masterpieces, a six-disc set of the pianist's '50s sides. Jarrett's five Japanese concerts from November of 1976 in Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Sapporo were completely improvised and gloriously recorded by engineer Okihiro Sugano. Most jazz critics greeted it as a seminal work that set Jarrett apart from his peers.
When he hits a mysterious minor ninth to open the first concert in Kyoto, all bets are off. For nearly 80 minutes he balances tension with release, the pastoral with the cosmopolitan…

During the 1970s, solo piano box sets were rare. When Keith Jarrett's monolithic, ten-LP solo box, Sun Bear Concerts, arrived from ECM in 1978, the only comparable collection was The Tatum Solo Masterpieces, a six-disc set of the pianist's '50s sides. Jarrett's five Japanese concerts from November of 1976 in Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Sapporo were completely improvised and gloriously recorded by engineer Okihiro Sugano. Most jazz critics greeted it as a seminal work that set Jarrett apart from his peers.
When he hits a mysterious minor ninth to open the first concert in Kyoto, all bets are off. For nearly 80 minutes he balances tension with release, the pastoral with the cosmopolitan…

Even before his solo concerts became popular successes, Keith Jarrett was clearly getting a free hand from ECM founder Manfred Eicher, as this ambitious double album of classical compositions proves. In this compendium of eight works for all kinds of ensembles, the then-28-year old Jarrett adamantly refuses to be classified, flitting back and forth through the centuries from the baroque to contemporary dissonance, from exuberant counterpoint for brass quintet to homophonic writing for a string section. Though the content is uneven in quality, Jarrett is clearly sincere and skilled enough to exploit his European roots with only a handful of syncopated references to his jazz work. The strongest, most moving individual pieces are the strange, gong-haunted "In the Cave, In the Light" (the probable source of the title of Jarrett's publishing company, Cavelight)…

ECM celebrates the occasion of pianist Keith Jarrett's 70th birthday with two simultaneous releases. One is a classical date for its New Series on which he performs piano concertos by Béla Bartók and Samuel Barber with two different orchestras. The other is Creation, a solo piano offering. While Jarrett has made dozens of solo records, this is unlike any in his catalog. Rather than document the unfolding of his in-the-moment ideas through a single performance, this set features nine sections compiled from half-a-dozen performances in four cities and five venues (all notated in the sleeve) during 2014. They have been sequenced and produced by Jarrett as a new, episodic, single work. The brief silences between the sections don't mar the flow; instead, they reveal, time and again, a vast dynamic range, where the moment of inspiration meets the precise moment of articulation in improvisation…

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).