In this day’s mail: Keith Jarrett’s 4-CD album “A multitude of angels.” In 1996, weakened and discouraged by a then-undiagnosed ailment, he played four solo improvisatory concerts in Italy over the span of a week: Modena, Ferrara, Torino, Genova. These four concerts would be the last, and he knew it.
The past fortnight has shown me that I needed more of Jarrett’s music. There is much on YouTube, including many of his more famous solo concerts from Vienna, Paris, Tokyo. I hesitated to spend $40, but from what I read of them, I was drawn to this album, not least by the title. I wanted to see what the twenty years since the Köln Concert – the only one of his albums that I know well – had taught him.
“A multitude of angels” was not released in 1996, or any time thereafter – not until last summer, 2016, another twenty years down the road. The best I can tell, Jarrett, unable to play the piano at all in the aftermath of these concerts, could not until fairly recently bring himself to listen to the recordings, which he had made himself on a DAT recorder.
I began with the first CD, the concert at Modena. Immediately it was clear that he had grown quite a lot. The first half, some thirty minutes of continuous music, was a clear descendant of Köln and his other concerts of the 1970’s, but more mature and focused. More classically-oriented, as well, perhaps from all of the Bach and Handel and Mozart he had performed over the intervening years.
But it was the second half, after intermission, that floored me. It begins in a spiky, energetic mode – precisely the sort of thing I sought the other day, taken to a much higher level. Some of the critics probably called it “atonal,” as they do with this style when he plays it; it did not seem so to me in the strict Schoenbergian sense, for it was more pan-diatonic and felt like it related to a key center, but its home was very much in the twentieth/twenty-first century classical music language with only an occasional hint of jazz in the rhythms. Astringent non-triadic lines and sonorities, all at breakneck pace and energy. And he builds it up for fifteen minutes and more. Gradually it becomes a bit more “major-keyish.” And triumphant; it is as if he has fought his way through to something neither he nor the audience could have foreseen. And then it becomes a hymn. There is no other word for it. It ends in peace, on a soft tonic chord repeated several times in the low register.
No wonder he could not go on after something like this! He managed to get himself back on the bench for an encore: a heartfelt and gentle playing of “Danny Boy.”
Even now, writing this the following day, I cannot get over it. I do not think I have heard such ferocious Connection between soul and music anywhere else. I am almost afraid to listen to the Modena CD again, much less the other three. For he went on to Ferrara and somehow found the energy to play again, two days later. He attributes it to the “angels” who were with him.
Yes, it has been done before. I wonder if Liszt’s improvisations were on this order – I think of something like the “Weinen, Klagen” that I played at the organ, ending likewise with a hymn. Or whatever it was that Bruckner improvised in London as a full-length concert at the organ (perhaps along the lines of one of his symphonies), the crowd carrying him from the hall on its shoulders when he finished?
But nobody, including Jarrett himself, is doing this now, not so far as I know. I listened on YouTube to the Carnegie Hall concert, played quite a bit more recently as a solo piano event, but broken into multiple shorter improvisations. It seems to me that the magic is gone.
Perhaps where it can be found for Jarrett now, or so it seems to me, is when he plays with his friends – the album “Jasmine” (2010, recorded in 2007) with his old friend and bassist Charlie Haden, and many concerts and recordings with his trio – the one I have purchased is a live concert “Somewhere” (2013, recorded in 2009). These are all treatments of jazz standards, “American Songbook” pieces, and they are wonderful.
My guess is that among his “angels” were these his musical colleagues. It may have been their support that made it possible for him to figure out how he could once again play the piano. But most of all, it was his wife, who stuck with him through the dark days. He writes in the liner notes:
I swear: the angels were there.It saddened me quite a lot to learn from his Wikipedia biography that they divorced in 2010, after thirty years of marriage.
One reason I know this is because, after waiting twenty years to give these concerts a serious listen again, there is no other reason I can give for the unbelievable experience I re-entered. They took theiur places aside of me and urged me, gently, to go on. After these concerts were over, I couldn’t play at all for two years and, without the support of the one angel in my house, I may never have played again.
I bought the “Multitude of Angels” album plus "Jasmine" and "Somewhere" in hopes of learning from Jarrett. Perhaps they will bear fruit in that way, though the Modena concert is so far beyond me that it is like the Bach pieces I am playing this weekend. As I have written in these pages, I have in my practicing played little “etudes” in imitation of Vaughan Williams and Howells and others, and have learned much from them. But never Bach.
The other day I said in passing that I wish I could play like Jarrett. I must make that more precise; I do not want to be an imitation Jarrett. The thing that I wish for in playing “like” him is to play with his Connection and intelligence and skill, in whatever manner is appropriate for me given my place and time and background.
On my office door are pictures of two musicians: J. S. Bach for obvious reasons, and Anton Bruckner, seated at a piano – partly for love of his music, partly for the example of his perseverance and for his devout Catholic faith which shines through every phrase. This weekend, I have added a third: Keith Jarrett.
I have added him to my daily prayers as well. It is a little thing, for I cannot do any great thing for him. But he is a spiritual man and would perhaps welcome such energies as might come to him through the prayers of others. I hope so.
[Added later:] Not for the first time, I marvel that it is a pianist who blows me away with the quality of his playing and musicianship, and the intensity of his Connection. Not an organist. For that matter, not a classical pianist.
I do not like most of the organ playing I hear (including my own). I can think of some people from a slightly earlier generation for whom my admiration approached what I have here expressed about Mr. Jarrett - David Craighead for one, and Del Disselhorst, my friend, with his playing of Bach. John Ferguson and Paul Manz with their hymn playing. Not many others.
But no one from my generation. And most of the younger players, the ones whose publicity photos grace the American Organist and who play for the conventions, leave me completely cold.
The answer to that is simple: Be that person. Play with such intensity that you become a fully transparent window into the heavenly places.
Jesu, juva.
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