As Keith Jarrett described in our October issue, The Carnegie Hall Concert took him into regions that amazed him. Given that it was his first solo performance in the U.S. in a decade and his first at Carnegie Hall in over 30 years, expectations were high. Performer and listener alike rose to the occasion, resulting in a level of interaction that Keith had rarely experienced. As an audience member and longtime fan, I felt it was, quite simply, his best concert ever.
A lot happened in the decade prior to that performance that helped and hindered his progress towards it, and ultimately made it possible. Here, then, is the rest of the story of how Keith Jarrett got to Carnegie Hall.
The False Voice
In the 1960s, Keith worked as a sideman with a number of artists, including Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. He had his own trio with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Charlie Haden, which performed in the U.S. “I also had a trio in Europe with [drummer] Aldo Romano and [the late bassist] Jean-François [J.F] Jenny-Clark,” Keith recalled, “because I couldn’t pay Charlie and Paul enough so they could do it. Charlie was with Ornette Coleman and he had more gigs, so he couldn’t do it anyway.
“So we’re playing in this little club out in the woods in Belgium,” Keith continued. “Up to that moment, I was under the impression that a jazz musician was supposed to find his voice. Step One is you learn your instrument. Step Two is you understand the historical realities of what you’re doing and what other players have played. Step Three might be to learn how to phrase. And Step Four is learning how to find your own voice. One would expect, and I expected up to that point in my life, that that was more or less where you wanted to be. You find your voice, then you just exercise that voice.
“But as I went onstage between sets, I realized I was wrong all this time. Now, what I really needed to do, having already found my voice, was to drop it. Leave it. I did that job already. And everything I would play, then, would automatically be me. I didn’t have to hold on possessively to this voice. And I was completely changed. I had not talked to anybody about this. I didn’t know what was going through my head, but it was like a flash. And everything was different. From then on, I could just play the piano.
“Now, if there’s any reason for my work since the ’60s having any value to the music world, it’s that realization. Because most musicians, improvising musicians included, since they’re asked to be expressing themselves, seem to take it to finding your voice, period. And not the next step.
“The next step is ‘drop it.’ You then find out that you can actually just play the piano. That’s the very first time you learn you can actually play your instrument, and like it. Not while you’re still busy making sure you don’t play an inverted chord that you think sounds too much like another pianist.
“I want to be me, so I have to be playing my way of playing. But that becomes musical greed. Your greed is that the audience always knows who you are, through this vehicle of you having found a certain small, clever way of playing differently than everybody else.
“So from that time until recently, if I had had students, I’d tell them to make sure to not think of the last step as finding your voice. That’s actually pretty easy. What isn’t easy is to be yourself and not care whether people recognize your playing or not. Care only whether the content of what you play is important enough, and be your own most merciless critic of it. And to hell whether it sounds like you or not, because it has to sound like you, if you’re the one playing the piano.”
The Misnamed Disease
From the ’60s and the ’90s, Keith Jarrett’s career was on fast forward. His recording and performing schedule had him on the go almost non-stop. In 1996, he became debilitated by an ailment that was eventually diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He was unable to perform or record, and ultimately, to play the piano at all.
“It should really be called Death While You’re Alive,” said Keith. “It’s not exactly Transylvanian, but it’s close. Everything was dimmed down to the lowest setting, like on a dimmer switch. I would ask my doctor, ‘Why can’t I practice? Why do I get dizzy when I play? Why can’t I walk past my garage? Why can’t I even turn the pages of a book? He said, ‘It’s physical activity. When you’re practicing, normally you’re getting more oxygen through your system. You’re using your muscles. And guess what your parasites thrive on? Oxygen. So every time you move, they love it. You’re going to have to go through a period of “Humming Bird Syndrome,” feeling worse for four to six months, before you get better.’ I asked, ‘What’s “Humming Bird Syndrome?”’ He said, ‘That’s when you do nothing but sit and watch the humming birds.’
“I couldn’t even listen to music, because if I liked it, I’d get emotionally involved. And if I got emotionally involved, I’d have a relapse. I couldn’t practice because I’d be delivering oxygen to the bad guys, and they’d replicate, and that would make me sick. Everything I did would cause a relapse.”
The Melody at Night with Recovery
Serendipity seems to always play a role in Keith’s music and life. And in the case of facilitating his musical recovery, technology had a part to play as well. He has two Steinways in his studio, one a Hamburg and one an American. On the advice of his long-time tuner Chris Solliday, Keith had his Hamburg Steinway regulated according to David Stanwood’s touch weight system (www.stanwoodpiano.com). “Stanwood and my tuner transformed my instrument so that each key has the same exact tension from top to bottom, as you press a key,” Keith said. “It eliminates the inertia starting to press a key, which is called the breakaway. So playing very soft is possible for the first time, while still in total control. You can also get true legato on it, which is great for Mozart.”
Another bit of technical progress led to an extreme case of serendipity. “I called someone to buy a pair of mics,” Keith recalled, “so I could record while I was sick. I knew I couldn’t play, but I wanted to set the mics up in case I could ever play the piano again. All I could do was look at the piano. So my wife and I spent months trying to find the right spot in the room, because it was a very slow process. I didn’t know the guy I bought them from real well, but he asked me how I’m doing. For some reason, I told him, ‘I’m not well, and my doctor thinks it’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.’ The guy says, ‘I know who you should call.’ And he referred me to this lady who had it, who referred me to her doctor.”
With the right doctor, Keith began to recover, albeit slowly. Finally in 1998, he was able to contemplate touching the piano again. “I was sitting at the piano, and trying to create a Christmas gift for my wife, Roseanne. I hadn’t played the piano until I started recording. I wasn’t sitting there fooling around. It was literally the first touching of the instrument I could do. I wanted to really keep it simple. I didn’t even know what songs I would play. I had no list. And never in my life have I ever thought of playing ‘Be My Love.’ The way everyone knows it, it’s a horrible song. And then, something just happened.”
Keith recorded those first instances of his playing again, and though he had no intent of recording an album, what was in the can was so remarkable that he decided to release it as The Melody at Night, With You. But he wouldn’t have been able to play at all at that point, without the Stanwood system. “When you listen to it, you probably notice that at some point in the disc, it sounds louder,” he reveals. “The level wasn’t boosted, it’s just that I was playing so softly on the first cuts, softer than is possible on an unadjusted instrument. As I got stronger, I was able to play louder. You can hear that on the CD.”
A New Epiphany
Keith recovered enough to begin limited performances and maintain a practice schedule. “I wasn’t happy with [the initial performances], and I came home thinking, ‘I’m not going to do this any more. It’s not worth it.’ But in my typical Taurian way, I was bullying my way back into it, even though my brain told me I shouldn’t be doing this. And a book came out called A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. It was about a new way of looking at the world through digital sampling, and looking at the patterns that using different rules create. What interested me was that if you have simple rules that you’re going on, you see the patterns become repetitive. So they’re not complex. They don’t give you the feeling of randomness. So if you add maybe one little extra rule to it, and the patterns would start looking more complex. That would make sense, right? But there’s a point at which if you make the rules more complex, the pattern becomes stagnant. It doesn’t look like it’s growing, it doesn’t look like it’s random anymore.
“And this one thing was somehow attractive to me. Because while I was practicing in the studio, thinking that I was practicing improvising, I’d play something that I might have liked at some other era in my life, maybe 20 years ago. And I’d find my hands returning to these things. And I suddenly realized that I don’t like this. But I was still playing. Then one day I just stopped. Every time I started to do that but didn’t feel closeness to it, I would just stop. And then I would start again, with some other completely different thing. I used to start sort of slowly, and gradually build a universe. But in my studio, when I realized that I could stop, sometimes when I began again, it did not begin softly or slowly, and then start to build something organically over a period of time. It was sudden. And then I realized that’s how worlds are built, they’re not built slowly.
“So Radiance is the first public recorded exercise of that. And it’s much harder with an audience, because there’s a passion in the room that almost gets in the way. That’s the reason Radiance begins the way it begins, as though I’ve already been playing. As one interviewer put it, ‘It starts like we just got in the hall a little late, and this is where you were.’ That’s because it doesn’t give me any time to formulate something. I don’t want to formulate anything.
“If I know what I’m doing, then how will I do the next thing? Sometimes my hands are doing things I could never ask them to do. ‘Please, now I want you to play three different rhythms at the same time, and be convincingly passionate about it, now go!’ No.
“I had been playing sounds I didn’t like for quite some time. At solo concerts, I’d end up in the middle of these sections, which I still assumed I liked. And that was ignorance on my part. I was ignorant of the fact that it had nothing to do with me anymore. And it took my complete awareness and awakeness while I was playing in my studio to see this, and say, ‘Woah! Stop! Turn off the music! I don’t wanna hear this!’
“So what was happening in the studio when I would let my hands play stuff that I didn’t know what would happen, what I was doing was reducing the rules that I considered necessary — just like that book. I was reducing them to, ‘Let my fingers play,’ ‘I don’t want to get locked into something I don’t like,’ and maybe that’s all. I don’t mind playing something I’ve never heard before. I want to hear things I never heard before. How do I do that? By reducing the rules to allowing my body to do stuff without my intervention.
“Since around the time of Radiance, though, I now realize a new thing. Which is, you don’t just drop your voice and play your instrument and automatically are yourself anyway. You then are still hobbled by all the things you think sound good, versus all the things you think don’t sound good. Your favorite composers versus your not favorite composers. The sounds you choose versus the sounds you don’t choose. What happened for me this century is that I realized that by far there is more interest to me in what I don’t like [laughs], than in things I could point to and say, “Yeah, that’s what I like.” Meaning that in dropping your choices, you find things you could never have found otherwise.
“Radiance has things on it, and I would have never gotten to those things, whether it sounds like they’re connected or not, of course they’re all connected. If I heard another sound before the next thing, there’s some way those two things are connected. And even I can’t tell you how they are. That’s one reason I don’t have students; the first thing they’re going to ask me is, “How the hell are these things connected?” and I’ll have to say, “I don’t know.” “So what’s the secret?” “Well the secret is, you have to be diabolically and ferociously committed to this thing.” Most of what it is, is that.”