Keith Jarrett Universal

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Name: Keith Jarrett
City/Place: Oxford Township, New Jersey
Country: United States

Life & Work

Bio: Over the past five decades, Keith Jarrett has come to be recognized as one of the most creative musicians of our times - universally acclaimed as an improviser of unsurpassed genius; a master of jazz piano; a classical keyboardist of great depth; and as a composer who has written hundreds of pieces for his various jazz groups, plus extended works for orchestra, soloist, and chamber ensemble.

Born May 8, 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Keith Jarrett began playing the piano at age 3 and undertook classical music studies throughout his youth. He took formal composition studies at age 15, before moving to Boston to briefly study at the Berklee College of Music.

After a tentative period sitting in at various New York jazz spots, Jarrett toured first in 1965/66 with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, then from 1966–68 with the Charles Lloyd Quartet. He soon led his own trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, which in 1972 expanded to a quartet with the addition of tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. From 1970–71 Jarrett also became a featured member in Miles Davis’ electric fusion group, playing electric piano and organ, his last stint as a sideman. Thereafter, Jarrett dedicated himself exclusively to performing acoustic music as a solo artist and as a leader.

In 1971 Jarrett began his recording collaboration with German producer Manfred Eicher and ECM Records (Editions of Contemporary Music). This fruitful collaboration has produced 70 recordings to date, unparalleled in their scope, diversity, and quality.

The foundation of the Jarrett/ECM discography is made up of the landmark solo piano recordings that have helped redefine the role of the piano in contemporary music. The piano improvisations on Facing You, Solo Concerts, The Koln Concert, Staircase, Sun Bear Concerts, Moth and The Flame, Concerts, Paris Concert, Dark Intervals, Vienna Concert, La Scala, Radiance, The Carnegie Hall Concert , and Testament : Paris /London , incorporate a broad spectrum of musical idioms and languages— classical, jazz, ethnic, gospel, folk, blues, and pure sound - producing music both deeply personal, yet universal. The most recent ECM solo piano CD set is RIO , recorded in April 2011 live-in-concert in Brazil and released in November 2012 to worldwide critical acclaim - “ a masterpiece” (Jazzwise magazine - UK).

In 1999, The Melody At Night, With You, a solo piano studio recording of classic melodies was released by ECM , winning many “Best of the Year” awards in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

In May 2010, ECM released Jasmine, an intimate duo recording with Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden, their first musical collaboration in over 30 years. which become one of the most acclaimed and best selling jazz recordings of the past few years.

For the past 29 years, Keith Jarrett’s main context for playing jazz has been in trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette. In January 1983 Jarrett invited Peacock and DeJohnette to New York’s Power Station studio to record “standards” - the rich body of American Broadway show and jazz tunes from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. At the time it was considered passé for top players to concentrate on “standards” instead of original material, but Jarrett thought it was important to show that “music wasn’t about the material, but what the player brings to the material.”

The original 1983 trio session in New York produced the trio’s first three ECM releases: Standards Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and Changes, which features free playing. These seminal trio recordings were re-released by ECM in January 2008 as a special 3-CD box set entitled The New York Sessions, in celebration of the trio’s 25th Anniversary.

Fifteen “live” concert recordings followed on ECM, each recorded in a different international city: Standards Live (Paris, 1985), Still Live (Munich, 1986), Changeless (U.S. Tour, 1987), Tribute (Cologne, 1989), Standards in Norway (Oslo, 1989), The Cure (New York/Town Hall, 1990), Live at The Blue Note (New York, 1994), Tokyo ’96 (Tokyo, 1996), Whisper Not (Paris, 1999), Inside Out (London, 2000), Always Let Me Go (Tokyo, 2001), The Out of Towners (Munich, 2001), My Foolish Heart: Live In Montreux (Montreux, 2001), Up For It (Juan-Les-Pins, 2002) and Yesterdays (Tokyo, 2001). And May 2013, in celebration of the trio’s 30th Anniversary, ECM released Somewhere, recorded live in concert in Luzern, Switzerland in July 2009 featuring extended versions of Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere and Tonight from West Side Story along with other standards.

In 1991, two weeks after the death of Miles Davis, the trio went into the studio in New York for the first time in eight years to record Bye Bye Blackbird, their deeply felt tribute to the jazz giant whom all three had played with in their early years.

There are also five ECM releases by Jarrett’s acclaimed late-1970s Scandinavian quartet featuring Jan Garbarek (saxophone), Palle Danielsson (bass), and Jon Christensen (drums) which include Belonging, My Song, Nude Ants, and Personal Mountains which influenced a whole generation of young jazz players in Europe and the United States. Then in 2012, ECM released Sleeper, a rediscovered live recording originally made of the quartet in 1979 in concert in Tokyo that received worldwide critical review and re-introduced the riveting music of this legendary quartet to the jazz world 33 year after they disbanded.

In the late-1960s and the ‘70s, there were a dozen recordings made by his original “American” quartet with Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, and Dewey Redman for Atlantic, Columbia, Impulse Records, and ECM - The Mourning of a Star, Birth, El Juicio, Expectations, Fort Yawuh, Treasure Island, Death and the Flower, Back Hand, Mysteries, Shades, The Survivor’s Suite, and Eyes of the Heart.

In November 2013, ECM released No End - a double archival album recorded at Jarrett’s home studio back in 1986 that features a rarely heard side of his output as he multi-tracks himself on electric guitars, Fender bass, drums, tablas, percussion, recorder and piano. Jarrett himself has described the results as “just a feeling or a rhythmic idea or a bass line concept or melody. None of this was written down.”
Classical music releases by Keith Jarrett on ECM include the J.S. Back keyboard works: Well-Tempered Clavier Book I (piano) and Book II (harpsichord), Goldberg Variations (harpsichord), French Suites (harpsichord), Sonatas for Viola Da Gamba and Cembalo with Kim Kaskashian (viola), and Jarrett (harpsichord); plus piano recordings of the Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87; and the Handel: Suites for Keyboard; plus two volumes of Jarrett performing selected Mozart Piano Concertos with the Stuttgart Kammer-orchester under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies. Then in September 2013, ECM released a recording of the Bach Sonatas for Violin and Piano with violinist Michelle Makarski which was Keith Jarrett’s first recording of classical repertoire in 17 years.

In May 2006 ECM released its first DVD, Keith Jarrett: Tokyo Solo, a complete concert video filmed in November 2002. In Fall 2008 ECM re-released four live trio concert videos filmed in Tokyo between 1985 and 1996 that include Standards I (1985) and Standards II (1986) in a special 2-DVD set, Live at The Open Air Theater East (1993), and Tokyo ’96 (1996) in a second 2-DVD set.

In May 2005, Euro Arts released on the DVD, Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation, a full length documentary film directed by British filmmaker Mike Dibbs that includes extensive interviews with Keith Jarrett, as well as Chick Corea, Charlie Haden, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, and Manfred Eicher.

Keith Jarrett’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, both Prix du President de la Republique and Grand Prix du Disque awards from the Academie Charles Cros (France), seven Deutscher Schallplattenpries (Germany), and eight Grammy (United States) nominations in both jazz and classical categories. He has received dozens of “Artist” or “Album of the Year” awards from the New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Stereo Review, Downbeat, Billboard, CD Review, and Rolling Stone; and was named “Best Classical Keyboardist” in Keyboard Magazine Reader’s Polls (1991, 1993), “Best Classical CD” in CD Review Editor’s Poll (1992) for the Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87; and dozens of “Critics” and “Best of the Year” awards from the international music press.

In 1989 Keith Jarrett was named Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and then in 2007 Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, two of the highest honors the French Ministry of Culture can bestow on an artist. In 1996 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, joining Duke Ellington as only the second foreign jazz artist to ever be so honored. In 2002 he was elected to be Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, America’s oldest honorary society, founded in 1780. In 2003 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious music awards, presented by the King of Sweden in a special televised ceremony in Stockholm. In July 2004, he was presented the Leonie Sonning Prize in Copenhagen, another of the world’s major music awards. He is only the second jazz artist to receive the Sonning Prize since it’s founding in 1959, Miles Davis being the first in 1985.

In the December 2008, Keith Jarrett was inducted into the Downbeat Magazine Hall of Fame, following his many other annual Downbeat Magazine Poll Awards over the past 40 years.

And on January 2014, he was honored as a recipient of a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award for his lifetime achievement in a ceremony at the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex in New York.