Keith Jarret Koln

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.

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.

Swod is the recording project of Oliver Doerell and Stephan Wohrmann, two accomplished musicians who met in Berlin sometime in 1991. Oliver plays guitar, bass and all manner of electronics - he is also a long-time family member of City Centre Offices having recorded an album and an EP under the “Dictaphone” moniker in between composing and performing musical pieces for theatre, installations and film over the last few years. Stephan plays piano and drums, arranging an almost neo-classical structure within a recording that already sounds ghostly and cinematic. Translated as "go", "Gehen" (2004) represents a labour of love from two musicians experienced in the art of seductive and evocative music making…