The first notes here are from a 25 June concert at the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. Slowly marking out a sombre mood of this eight minute-plus piece there is a spirit of reflection, Jarrett’s nasal vocalisation briefly heightening the atmosphere.
One of two 70th birthday releases (the other a classical affair), an album of freely improvised solo piano music Creation moves through continents from the Americas to Asia and on to Europe with performances drawn from concerts in not only Toronto but Tokyo, Paris, and Rome recorded between 30 April and 11 July 2014.
The tracks are simply signposted by “parts,” nine in all, the shortest running to just under seven minutes; the longest, ‘Part VI,’ from Orchard Hall, Tokyo, at just under nine-and-a-half. Austerely presented with a dark cover featuring an abstract painting by Eberhard Ross, a faintly discernible woven texture with slim green and white horizontal flecks, there is a communion of sorts invoked in the atmosphere of each piece, few fireworks in the first two pieces (actually few overall in terms of bravura grandstanding), more the atmosphere of nocturnes, deeply passionate as on the Salle Pleyel episode, a concert hall where Jarrett produced some of his greatest recent live work and which was featured on the first disc of the epic 2009 release Testament.
‘Part IV’ draws perhaps on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, a nod even to Miles Davis who famously interpreted the Spanish composer’s 1939 great work on Sketches of Spain released a decade before Jarrett performed with Miles at Fillmore. ‘Part V’, the third of the Tokyo pieces, this one from Kioi Hall, where two of the four in the Japanese capital were recorded, begins with a pronounced tremolo effect unfolding to blossom into a beautiful melody gloriously stunning in its simplicity and clarity, a very moving episode and worth buying the album for alone, the piece spiritually uplifting in the best possible sense, the coda you’d swear, almost absentmindedly as a throwaway gesture but so fitting, drawing on ‘Waters of March.’
Part of the process on any Keith Jarrett solo piano album whether you look to Facing You or The Köln Concert is that the ultimate power is built in the more invisible developmental sections. And here I would see ‘Part VI’ as a developmental piece in context, treating this as an album on face value not as a series of individual pieces although these are now compiled here by Jarrett to operate as a “concert” irrespective of origin and how they were first placed. Pieced together like this you might think would result in something that is disjointed but this isn’t the case at all. Listening, as ‘Part VI’ develops, there is always some sort of inner logic to the arc of the improvisation, in this case it is more of a rhapsody than an intimate expression, and perhaps this isn’t quite so effective although there is a grandeur and triumph here that might appeal to some listeners. Personally this aspect leaves me a little cold.
The ‘Part VII’ piece is one of the most introspective pieces, a darker side, hitherto not really explored, the aural vistas vast and intense before Jarrett eventually retreats into a more intimate space. ‘Part VIII’ continues that difficult increasingly opaque level of abstraction. And yet by the end and ‘Part IX’ there is a return to the more song-like side of Jarrett’s art, a melodic hint that sits alongside ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’ veering quickly away from this most oblique of melodic hints to a space and sensibility punctuated by audible sighs and singing in a style that is uniquely Jarrett’s.
There are more than enough moments of sheer joy to merit the highest praise, and as always on a Jarrett solo piano album, we as listeners are embarking on a journey of the imagination into the unknown guided by a player of, let’s just say it and be done with it, supreme genius.
Stephen Graham
Released on 11 May