Joy of Abstraction

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.

Sometimes in improvised music there can be a distance between listener and players, a sense you’re sitting back and admiring their interplay and abstraction – but with Szun Waves’ second album, you’re right in there with them, inside the playing, experiencing the absolute joy the three musicians feel as they circle around each other, exploring the spaces they’ve opened up.

When Leonard Bernstein was asked by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to compose the inaugural work for the opening of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., he wrote: “The Mass is also an extremely dramatic event in itself—it even suggests a theater work.” Premiered on September 8, 1971, with additional words by Stephen Schwartz of Godspell fame, Mass is a remarkable, visionary work with a kaleidoscope of musical styles that touches on themes of political protest, existential crisis and religious faith lost and found.

What ties these dissimilar identical brothers together is their shared concern for the state of love. To that end, they have come together again, after nine years, for their fifth and most important offering to date, True Love.