Keith Jarrett
A pianist who walked onstage with nothing decided in advance and waited in the silence for the first note to come.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Collaborators ⏳🌊
- ColleagueArt Blakey
Spotted Jarrett at a Village Vanguard jam session and brought the young pianist into the Jazz Messengers in 1965.
- ColleagueCharles Lloyd
Their quartet, formed in 1966, first brought Jarrett to a wide audience.
- InfluenceMiles Davis
In 1970–71 Jarrett played electric keyboards in Davis's band, and he honored Davis for the rest of his life.
- SupportManfred Eicher
Founder and producer of ECM, he made Jarrett's recordings for half a century, beginning in 1971.
- ColleagueCharlie Haden
A friend of 40 years, he played alongside Jarrett from the first trio under his own name, through the American Quartet, to the duo recordings of the late years.
- ColleagueGary Peacock
He held down the bass chair in the Standards Trio for more than 30 years, starting in 1983.
I. The Allentown prodigy · 1945–1962 (age 0–17)
(Allentown) He was born in May 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the eldest of five sons of his father, Daniel, and his mother, Irma. His mother's side of the family is said to have been of Slovenian descent. There were no professional musicians in the household, but it was his parents who recognized the boy's gift early and arranged lessons for him. Of his brothers, the younger Chris Jarrett would also later become a pianist. (Perfect pitch) He sat down at the piano before he was three, and he possessed perfect pitch, able to name any note he heard without a reference tone. At seven he gave his first formal recital, and he is said to have slipped small pieces of his own in among the works of the classical repertoire. Throughout his teens he received rigorous classical piano training, a discipline that would resurface decades later when he recorded Bach and Mozart. (Jazz) It was in his mid-teens that jazz drew him in. The tension between the classical world, which faithfully brings to life the notes written on the page, and the world of jazz, which makes up the music on the spot, began around this time and followed his music all his life. As he was finishing high school, he reportedly had the chance to study with the composition teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris, but declined. Instead of the orthodox path of European classical music, he chose the living scene of American jazz, and that choice led him to Boston.
II. From Boston to New York · 1962–1969 (age 17–24)
(Berklee) After finishing high school in 1963 he enrolled at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, but left after little more than a year. He learned more on club stages than in the classroom, sharpening his practical instincts in Boston's small venues. (New York) Around 1964 he moved to New York. An unknown young pianist, he went to the Monday jam sessions at the Village Vanguard to watch for an opening, and there he caught the eye of the drummer Art Blakey. In 1965 he joined Blakey's Jazz Messengers and played with them for a few months. His stay in the strict school of hard bop was brief, but long enough to make his name known on the New York scene. (Lloyd) In 1966 he joined the quartet of the saxophonist Charles Lloyd. With Cecil McBee on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, the band scored a major success that year with “Forest Flower,” recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and played to young audiences in rock halls such as the Fillmore in San Francisco. In 1967 it even took the stage at the Tallinn Jazz Festival in the Soviet Union. Jarrett also drew attention for reaching inside the piano lid to pluck and strike the strings directly. The bond he formed with DeJohnette here would last nearly half a century. (First album as leader) In the same period he formed a trio with the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Paul Motian and recorded his first album as a leader, “Life Between the Exit Signs” (1967). Motian was the drummer who had played as if in conversation with the piano in the Bill Evans Trio, and Haden was the bassist who, alongside Ornette Coleman, had opened the door to free jazz. Evans's lyricism and Coleman's freedom met in the trio of a twenty-two-year-old pianist.
A live recording of the Charles Lloyd Quartet at the Monterey Jazz Festival, this was the record that first introduced the twenty-one-year-old Jarrett to a wide audience. It is also where his rapport with DeJohnette, his partner for the next half century, begins.
- Lloyd's piece runs in two linked parts, “Sunrise” and “Sunset,” alternating bright, bouncing rhythms with slow, lyrical passages.
- Jarrett's solo repeats a short motif, steadily thickening its density, and DeJohnette seems to lift the climax along with him on the cymbals.
- Cecil McBee's bass anchors the beat firmly yet shifts its line to follow the soloist — a fine example of playing in which the three members of the rhythm section listen and respond to one another (interplay).
- Because this is a live outdoor festival recording, the audience's cheers are captured at the end of every piece, and with them you can hear the air of the late 1960s, when jazz was reaching out to the rock generation.
III. Miles Davis's keyboardist · 1970–1971 (age 25–26)
(Miles) In the spring of 1970 he joined Miles Davis's band. With “Bitches Brew,” Miles had already brought electric instruments and rock rhythms into jazz. Jarrett did not care for electric instruments, but he later recalled that because it was a chance to play with Miles, he accepted the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the electric organ. (Corea) For the first few months after he joined, the band had two keyboard players. With Chick Corea on electric piano and Jarrett on organ, they played the Fillmore East in New York that June and the Isle of Wight Festival in England in August. The sound of the two keyboards filling each other's gaps and at times colliding survives on records such as “Miles Davis at Fillmore.” After Corea left the band that fall, Jarrett handled both keyboards alone. (Cellar Door) The live sets at the Cellar Door, a club in Washington, D.C., in December 1970 marked the peak of that period. Over DeJohnette's drums and Michael Henderson's funk bass, Jarrett played a different keyboard with each hand, pouring out distorted, tangled sound. These recordings were edited by the producer Teo Macero and released as “Live-Evil.” (Vow) After leaving the band at the end of 1971, he dismissed electric instruments as toys and kept his distance from them, playing almost exclusively acoustic piano from then on. Miles was one of the few musicians he never stopped revering throughout his life. Paradoxically, the year and a half he spent amid electric noise sent him back to the pure resonance of the acoustic piano.
A record of the period when Jarrett, who disliked electric instruments, played two keyboards at once in Miles's band, at his most ferocious. After this experience he returned to the acoustic piano and never left it again.
- Jarrett plays electric piano and electric organ simultaneously, one with each hand, whipping up the band's maelstrom with distorted, tangled sound.
- Michael Henderson's bass doggedly repeats a short figure (riff), and DeJohnette's drums build a groove close to rock and funk on top of it.
- Miles fits his trumpet with a wah-wah pedal (a device that opens and closes the tone like the shape of a mouth), producing a sound that bends as if speaking.
- Most of the live material comes from the December 1970 recordings at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., and the guitarist John McLaughlin joined only on the final night.
- Because the producer Teo Macero built the pieces by cutting and splicing several nights of live performance, this is music reconstructed through editing rather than the flow of the stage as it happened.
IV. Standing alone on stage · 1971–1977 (age 26–32)
(Eicher) In November 1971, in Oslo, Norway, he recorded his first solo piano album, “Facing You.” It was guided by Manfred Eicher, a producer who had just founded the label ECM in Munich, West Germany. Eicher insisted on a clear, spacious sound, and their collaboration would continue for the next half century. Around this time he moved to an old farmhouse in the countryside of northwestern New Jersey and settled there; it remains his home and studio to this day. (Quartets) In the 1970s he led two bands side by side. The American Quartet featured the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, a former colleague of Ornette Coleman, along with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and released several albums after signing with the larger label Impulse!. The European Quartet, made up of Norway's Jan Garbarek (saxophone), Sweden's Palle Danielsson (bass) and Norway's Jon Christensen (drums), left “Belonging” and “My Song” on ECM. The rough, hot-blooded American band and the cool, singing European band sounded like two temperaments within him. (Cologne) The solo concert at the Cologne Opera House in Cologne, West Germany (today's Germany), on January 24, 1975, changed his life. The promoter was the teenage Vera Brandes, not yet twenty. Instead of the concert grand that had been promised, a small grand in poor condition stood on the stage, and Jarrett, who had not slept properly for days, reportedly wanted to call the concert off. Working around an instrument with weak treble and bass, he built the music in the middle register over a tenacious, repeating left-hand figure. The live album “The Köln Concert” sold millions of copies, becoming one of the best-selling solo piano records ever. (Sun Bear) Success brought financial ease along with the weight of solo performance as a form. His 1976 solo tour of Japan was released as the ten-LP “Sun Bear Concerts.” The principle of walking onstage with nothing prepared became his creed around this time.
Born of the worst of conditions, a sleep-deprived performer at a piano in poor repair, this improvised solo recording made his name around the world and changed the economic footing of his life.
- The first few notes are said to have been taken from the chime the opera house used to call the audience to their seats.
- The long stretch of Part I unfolds over a repeating left-hand figure (ostinato) that rocks back and forth between two chords, while the right-hand melody swells and subsides above it.
- Because the instrument was weak in the treble and bass, Jarrett stayed in the middle register and filled out the sound's power with his left hand — and this constraint, if anything, made the music as simple and persistent as a song.
- Jarrett's groans and foot-stomping during the performance were captured on the recording, so you can hear improvisation passing through the body on its way out.
- The short final section, “Part IIc,” is famous for its songlike melody, and was later published as sheet music and is now widely performed.
This album represents the lyricism of the European Quartet, in contrast to the heat of the American Quartet in the same period. Here the singing side of Jarrett emerges at its gentlest.
- The title track is a melody as simple as a folk song, easy to sing along with, and Jarrett lingers on it at length instead of reaching for dazzling technique.
- Jan Garbarek's saxophone, a long, straight tone that uses almost no vibrato (trembling), adds a grain like the cold air of the Nordic north.
- Jon Christensen's drums never hammer the beat, filling the space instead with the lingering wash of the cymbals, while Palle Danielsson's bass walks through the gaps as if singing.
- Recorded by engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug at Talent Studio in Oslo, it is a textbook case of the so-called ECM sound, clear and generous with reverberation.
V. Classics and standards · 1978–1995 (age 33–50)
(Gurdjieff) He was deeply drawn to the teachings of the spiritual thinker G. I. Gurdjieff. That influence runs through his view of improvisation: that music does not belong to the individual player but flows in from somewhere else. In 1980 he recorded, on piano, sacred hymns composed by Gurdjieff and the composer Thomas de Hartmann. (Bach) In the late 1980s he launched a serious career as a classical performer. He recorded Book 1 of Bach's “The Well-Tempered Clavier” on piano in 1987 and the “Goldberg Variations” on harpsichord in 1989, and he also played works by Handel·Mozart·Shostakovich and the American composer Lou Harrison. Fitting himself to every note of the score was a way back to the classical training of his childhood, and also a practice in emptying himself out as an improviser. (Trio) In January 1983, at the Power Station studio in New York, he recorded with the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. Peacock had also played in the Bill Evans Trio. A single session yielded “Standards Vol. 1”, “Standards Vol. 2” and “Changes”. The trio, in which three equals rebuilt old songs everyone knows, went on for more than thirty years. (Spirits) Around 1985 he passed through a period in which he seemed to have lost his musical bearings. The result was “Spirits”, recorded alone in a small home studio by layering flutes·recorders·percussion and more, and he later recalled that the project brought him back to music. (Vienna) “Vienna Concert”, a live recording of his 1991 solo recital at the Vienna State Opera, is known to be a recording he held especially dear. In place of the fever of Cologne came a quiet, solid architecture.
The first recording of the Peacock·DeJohnette trio, which would last more than thirty years. Jarrett, who had been walking his own path through classical music and solo playing, returned to old songs everyone knows and began a three-way conversation.
- Jarrett first lays out the original melody loosely, then gradually swaps in new chords beneath it (reharmonization), making a familiar song strange.
- In “God Bless the Child” the trio repeats a single rhythm for more than fifteen minutes, driving it into a groove close to gospel and rock.
- Gary Peacock's bass refuses to stay in the accompaniment, conversing melodically with the piano in the high register, while DeJohnette's cymbals split and scatter the beat to make room to breathe.
- This album, along with “Vol. 2” and “Changes”, was recorded in a single session at New York's Power Station in January 1983.
VI. Pause and return · 1996–2014 (age 51–69)
(Hiatus) In 1996, in the middle of an Italian tour, he left the stage in a state of severe exhaustion, and he has said in interviews and documentaries that he was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. For nearly two years he could not perform. (Melody) In December 1997 he began recording a few ballads in his home studio as a Christmas present for his wife. It was playing stripped of flashy improvisation, tracing the melodies of old songs slowly. Released in 1999 as “The Melody at Night, With You”, the album, recorded at home during his illness, is counted the most personal record in his discography. (Return) In late 1998 he returned to the stage with the trio, and their 1999 Paris concert came out as the live trio album “Whisper Not”. On “Inside Out” in 2000 the trio even improvised freely with no set tunes. The form of his solo playing changed as well. In place of the 1970s improvisations that flowed without pause for nearly an hour, “Radiance” (2002) and “The Carnegie Hall Concert” (2005) stitched together short pieces, each with a character of its own. (Haden) In 2007 he invited Charlie Haden, a friend of forty years, to his home, and the two recorded standards as a duo. The recordings came out as “Jasmine” (2010) and “Last Dance” (2014), and Haden died in the summer of 2014, the year “Last Dance” appeared. (Honors) In 2003 he received Sweden's Polar Music Prize, and he was also named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Standards Trio ended its stage career with its 2014 concerts.
A collection of ballads recorded for his wife in his home studio after a long silence. It holds, unaltered, the quiet sound of a time when he could not take the stage.
- Rather than ranging far afield in improvisation, he traces the original melodies slowly and almost as written, drawing the ear to the afterglow of each note.
- The tempos are very slow and the chords widely spaced, so the silence between the notes sounds like part of the performance.
- Recorded in his home studio with the microphones close to the piano, it has an intimate sound, as if heard in a room rather than echoing through a large hall.
- He treats old folk songs such as “My Wild Irish Rose” and “Shenandoah” in the same spirit as the standards, laying bare the simplicity of the songs themselves.
VII. Stillness · 2015–2026 (age 70–81)
(Tour) In the summer of 2016 he set out on a European solo tour, playing in Budapest, Hungary; Bordeaux, France; Vienna, Austria; and Munich, Germany. Past seventy, the pianist still sat down at the piano with nothing decided, weaving blues, hymnlike strains and old standards in among short improvised pieces. His February 2017 solo recital at Carnegie Hall in New York remains, to this day, his last public performance. (Silence) In an October 2020 interview with The New York Times, he revealed that he had suffered two strokes in 2018 and that he would likely never perform again. In September of that same year, Gary Peacock, his bassist of more than thirty years, died. Of the companions who had opened the road with him, Paul Motian had already gone in 2011 and Dewey Redman in 2006. (Record) The stage fell silent, but the music kept coming out into the world. ECM released the recordings of the 2016 tour one by one: “Munich 2016” (2019), “Budapest Concert” (2020) and “Bordeaux Concert” (2022). It was as if Eicher's label, which had recorded him for half a century, were putting his final stages in order. (Legacy) He began as a classical prodigy, passed through hard bop and electric jazz, and turned the improvised solo concert into music that the public of an entire era listened to. And he rewrote the old songs known as standards as a conversation among three. His music, as he lives on in his country house in New Jersey, now survives only on record, but his way of waiting in silence for the first note has become the starting point for many younger pianists.
A single night from his last European solo tour, released in 2020, the year he revealed he could no longer perform. Unlike the long improvisations of the 1970s, it shows the solo form of his late years, built from short pieces.
- It consists of twelve improvised pieces played without preparation at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest in July 2016.
- Each piece has a sharply different character — a jagged piece of blurred tonality gives way to a warm one in the manner of the blues or a hymn.
- In the standards played as encores, “It's a Lonesome Old Town” and “Answer Me”, the weight falls on singing the melody rather than on improvisation.
- Heard alongside the Cologne years, when a single piece could stretch to nearly an hour, it reveals how the same improvised solo was compressed and hardened over half a century.
Lesser-known stories
(Folk rock) In 1968 Jarrett released an album called “Restoration Ruin”. It is a folk-rock record on which the piano is barely audible; he sings himself and plays most of the instruments alone, including guitar·harmonica·soprano saxophone. So far removed from the image of the serious improvising pianist that took shape later, it was long forgotten, yet the habit of layering many instruments by himself resurfaced in 1985 with “Spirits”. (Cellar Door) The full scale of Jarrett's role in the Miles Davis band came to light only in 2005. That year, recordings from several nights at the Cellar Door in December 1970 were released unedited as a six-disc set, and Jarrett's long solos and accompaniment, which Macero's editing had cut short, could at last be heard whole. (Harrison) The American composer Lou Harrison wrote a piano concerto for Jarrett. Jarrett gave its premiere and recorded it live with the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo in January 1986, and the album came out in 1988. A contemporary composer writing a concerto for a jazz pianist shows that his classical work was serious work rather than a sideline, yet jazz biographies usually pass over it in a single line. (Brandes) The story of Vera Brandes, the teenage promoter who made “The Köln Concert” happen, stayed hidden behind the album's legend for decades. How Brandes personally rented the hall and sold the tickets became known later through interviews, and it came into wide view in 2025 when the German film “Köln 75” told the story of that night from the promoter's point of view.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Improvisation
(Meaning) Jeukheung (卽興) means an inspiration (興) that arises on the spot (卽). It refers to doing things as they come to mind in the moment, with nothing written in advance. (In jazz) Instead of playing the notes as written in the score, the player invents the melody right there, in the act of performing. Usually the player keeps to a tune's harmonic framework and builds new melodies on top of it, but sometimes, as in Keith Jarrett's solo concerts, nothing about the piece is decided beforehand and the whole thing is made up from scratch on stage. It is like a storytelling game among friends, in which you take the sentence the person before you tossed out and invent the next part on the spot — with no lines memorized in advance, the story comes out different every time.
Ostinato
(Meaning) In Italian it means stubborn or persistent. The name holds its character: repeating the same thing stubbornly. (In jazz) Playing a short figure or rhythm over and over. Usually the left hand or the bass takes on this repetition, while the right hand or other instruments spin out melodies freely above it. The left-hand repetition rocking between two chords in Part I of “The Köln Concert” is a classic example. It is like long-rope jumping: when the two people turning the rope keep a steady beat, the jumper in the middle can confidently show off all kinds of moves.
Standard
(In jazz) The old songs that many jazz musicians have played again and again. Most are popular songs from American Broadway musicals and films from the 1920s to the '50s, and jazz players use their melodies and harmonies as a foundation for improvisations of their own. It is like a talent show in which classmates each sing a song everyone knows in a different arrangement — the song is the same, but it becomes an entirely different performance depending on who sings it. (Elsewhere) In everyday use it means a norm or benchmark, referring to standard specifications or industry standards.
Rhythm section
(In jazz) The collective name for the instruments in a band that provide the foundation of beat and harmony, usually piano·bass·drums. While solo instruments such as the saxophone or trumpet play the melody up front, the rhythm section keeps the beat underneath and lays down the harmony. It is like soccer, where the forwards can score only if the defenders and midfielders link up the ball and create space. Some bands, like Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio, consist of a rhythm section alone.
Interplay
(Meaning) A word formed from the English inter (mutual, between) and play (to play, to perform), meaning to play together by giving and taking. (In jazz) Playing in which the musicians listen to one another's sound and react and trade ideas on the spot. When one player changes the rhythm, another picks it up and carries it on; the drums answer a single note from the piano. The line between accompanist and soloist blurs, and everyone plays as if in conversation. It resembles volleyball, where the receive, the set and the spike follow one another on the spot with the flow of the ball, in no predetermined order.
Fusion
(Etymology) The English word fusion comes from the Latin fundere (to pour, to melt). It means melting different things together into one. (In jazz) Since the late 1960s, the term has referred to music that blends jazz with the rhythms of rock and funk and with electric instruments such as the electric guitar and electric piano. Miles Davis's “Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil” are counted as its starting points, and it is also called jazz rock. Just as adding cheese to tteokbokki creates a new flavor where Korean and Western food meet, it is music that combines the strengths of two genres. (Elsewhere) In science it means nuclear fusion, in which light atomic nuclei combine; in cooking, it means fusion cuisine, which mixes the foods of different countries.
Free jazz
(In jazz) A jazz begun in the late 1950s by Ornette Coleman and others, in which players break free of frameworks such as set chord progressions or a steady meter and improvise more freely. With no harmonic framework, the musicians listen to one another and decide the direction together as they go. Unlike a game in gym class, with its fixed rules and boundary lines, it resembles the kind of play where friends make up the rules on the spot. Charlie Haden and Dewey Redman, who played with Keith Jarrett, were among the musicians present at the birth of free jazz.