An American Tune

Yet nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to hear. Even the most die-hard Keith Jarrett fans — those who internalized every note of The Köln Concert, listened to every set of Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note, and expected only the unexpected — knew this evening was different, from the first notes he played. By the end of the night, after they brought him back for five encores, they knew they’d witnessed history.

Keith knew it, too. And no one was more surprised than he was, or more awed. “There was a vibe in the room that I doubt I’ve seen before at any concert,” he told us, gazing out the window of his study in pastoral western New Jersey recently. “Obviously there have been great audiences and many of them have been in New York. But there was something that night that was . . . If you could reserve words like ‘mind-boggling’ instead of using them up before you actually get to them, I would be able to call it that. Everything clicked into place. It was like if you had been playing pinball with 2,000 balls and they all went to exactly the right place simultaneously. And the points racked up.”

Keith Jarrett calling one of his own concerts “mind-boggling”? For years, his iconoclastic comments have been fodder for controversy within the pages of Keyboard. His criticisms seemed to spare no musician or audience, and least of all, himself. Having been fully engaged with improvisation since he was a child, totally concerned with the process of music creation, rather than the objectifying of its artifacts, since he was a young teen, and completely committed to the acoustic piano since leaving the Miles Davis band in 1971, Keith’s deep experience and intense focus give him an extremely rare perspective on music in general and the piano in particular. With such incredibly high standards and goals, how could any one concert top his list?

As Keith told us, for every question, fortunately there is a story. In his case, the answer is more of a saga, an internal journey that spans the philosophical and physical, the emotions and intellect, the micro and macro. For Keith to get to Carnegie Hall in this instance, it required more than mere practice. It required reevaluation and revolution, each revelation building on the previous one — an inspiring tale that Keith related to us over the course of a very pleasant afternoon. We’ll start with the story immediately surrounding the performance and subsequent release of The Carnegie Hall Concert. Next month, in the second part of this article, we’ll go further in depth with Keith about his recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the personalities of his pianos, the making of The Melody at Night, With You and Radiance, and his most recent epiphanies about improvisation.

Audience Participation

If anyone had a misconception that the experience of improvised modern piano music is too challenging, Keith Jarrett’s performance at Carnegie Hall should have altered his or her tune. Being in the audience that night simply didn’t feel like work. On the contrary, Keith seemed to deliver pieces of music that were perfectly conceived and executed. The forms were varied yet architectural in their logic. Even the mind-bending pan-tonal, multi-part canonic and polyrhythmic event that opened the performance was as inviting and easy to hear as some of the more lyrical, tonal, swinging, or grooving improvisations that followed. His technique was astonishing, his phrasing perfect, his harmonic language exquisite, and above all, his ideas were completely fresh; these were sounds no one had heard before. We all had the impression that it was Keith doing all the hard work. But in his view, we were equal partners.

“It felt like every one was there for the same reason,” he told us. “The audience had no preconception of what was going to happen. Of course, I somehow schooled them in that, to not expect the same thing, ever. They just gave me all the rights. And then plus, they listened so well. I could tell that they’d heard when something was better, even if it was a minimal ‘better.’ When something was more important and stronger and more correct, for that split second, I could feel that from the stage. I’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but that particular night was something I can’t say I’ve ever experienced.”

Keith’s relationship with his audience has indeed been a hot topic over the years. On more than one occasion, he has stopped playing to address some audience members who were disruptive for one reason or another. Keith’s taken some heat in the music press about it, and some writers love to perpetuate the notion that he’s a difficult artist. “So much depends on the room, the people in the audience, and the way they are listening,” he explained. “They control this thing so highly. It’s one of the reasons that my talking to the audience is so misunderstood. They don’t realize how much in control of the situation they are. They don’t realize they didn’t just buy a ticket and then can sit and freely do whatever it is that occurs to them. If they really wanted to get what I do, they actually have to help me by remaining aware in their seats.

“There are only two concerts where I walked onstage and immediately felt that all the planets were in alignment. To tell you the truth I was quite worried on my way driving in to the city, and for the weeks and months before, that it was the right thing to do. I didn’t trust my energy. Of course that’s something you should never trust; you have to over-train in a funny way, like an athlete, without breaking anything. But I have no feedback to use when I prepare. I can’t synthetically produce a concert in my studio. I can’t say, ‘Okay, let’s see if I can do this.’

“The only other concert that I’ve played that I could relate a portion of this to would be Köln. There were different reasons for that. There, I hadn’t slept for two nights, I had terrible food just before I was supposed to go on, and they had rented the wrong piano. Everything was wrong.

“With New York, I was 30 years older, and I had a physical condition that I couldn’t trust. But they were equal in that the odds seemed against me. What happened in both cases is that when I walked onstage, I realized it was the one place where no one could screw with me. [Laughs.] It was as if a weight was being lifted.

“I knew the audience’s energy was going to be there. If anything, they were going to wipe me out. [Laughs.] In a funny way, it’s solitaire that I play with the audience, and we almost become the same mental and psychological spirit. Of course, that’s the attempt. But I never heard it succeed like that before. I’ve been doing this since I was six years old, so I’ve heard a lot of audiences. When I heard the sounds they made, they didn’t just make sounds like a typical audience that gets excited.

“I probably will never experience the unanimity of spirit in that hall again.”

The Windup

To perform a concert of music that no one — including the performer — has heard before requires either no preparation or a lifetime of preparation. Keith takes the latter route, but there are specifics he works on as well. “It’s not the length of the concert that’s the problem,” he said. “It’s if you want to let all your guards down. If I have to think of an athlete, I’d think of [tennis legend] Jimmy Connors, who every time he gets the ball, he’s hitting it as hard as he can and taking as many chances as possible of getting as close to the line as he can. It’s about how much you have to go for it all the time, no matter how short the time is. That’s the trick.

“It also involves physical things, like training for a walkathon, doing upper body exercise. It takes all kinds of manias. Like if I go in to practice, I’ll have the same kind of depression after it if I don’t hit high points that I’ve never heard before, the same as I might have felt if I played a poor concert.”

Many of Keith’s live recordings have place names for titles, which is not insignificant. Before he plays solo in a particular country or city, he immerses himself in the culture and in many cases, the language. Then he drops everything he absorbed so as not to have any literal references in his performance. “With the Carnegie Hall concert, I was interested in achieving a concert for America,” he said. “But we hadn’t ever released an American concert. So this was a double cultural antennae thing for me, where I wanted it to be representative of what one can still call the good America — in music, even — forget everything else. I knew I was going to be recorded and I knew I was producing it. That meant I didn’t have a German producer, which meant that everybody didn’t have to be from anywhere else. There didn’t have to be a Germanic tone to anything.

“So what I wanted to do was to fix this image of where I was, being New York, and then let it go. I’m an avid reader, so I’m choosing books very carefully. I wanted to read a really, really New York writer. And I happened upon Nick Tosches. So I was reading him, I was steeping myself in what I consider what is New York, I immersed myself in the studio, and occasionally I thought about who is this audience, and then extending that audience out across America. Then I wanted to throw that focus from the present to some of the past, like some of the encores suggest, and cover the spectrum of activity that underlies what I call, if there is any word for it, the good America. It’s still here. Just because I don’t believe that anybody knows how to vote doesn’t mean it isn’t here.” [Laughs.]

On the double CD set, The Carnegie Hall Concert, Keith’s improvisations are named “Part 1” through “Part 10.” Each of the five encores has a name, the final four of which are familiar. The first encore is called “The Good America.” “I fought myself for that title,” Keith said. “That’s the only encore that was completely improvised. But then I heard all these things in it. I heard part of a hymn that I knew when I was a kid. And there was this overwhelming yearning for goodness in it. And yet there were also snippets of standard tune-type things from the ’40s and ’50s, which was an American creation. And there are little improvised moments, in which you can kind of hear what I meant with the title.”

Crowd Music

The music on The Carnegie Hall Concert is amazing. But there’s an unusual aspect to the production: All the sound from the audience is on the CD, too, in its entirety. And it gets kind of rowdy. “Nobody thinks about the music the audience makes,” Keith explained. “When I was listening to the tapes, I was asked by my engineer whether we could try to take the audience down a dB or half a dB, or make the peaks a little lower. In some ways, they were hotter than anything in the music. But I remembered that being exactly the experience in the room. So I said, ‘Okay, I understand, maybe someone would have to go turn their volume down because they don’t like the sound of the audience.’

“But every attempt at doing this changed the feeling of why I played the next thing. For example, in the encores, if you couldn’t tell how revved up they were, and then I’d start a ballad at a sort of loud dynamic, it wouldn’t sound like me at all. It wouldn’t make sense. People would wonder, ‘Keith likes to play soft and make these lovely sounds; why is he playing a harder than usual?’ All you had to do was take the tiniest bit of the audience down, or shorten their response at all, and I’m talking about just a couple seconds even. Then you return to the hall just before I play, you hear them getting settled. And you think, ‘Why do they have to get settled? They just sit down, right?’ But there are hoots and other sounds, pounding the stage, not just applauding, but yelling. And it was not aggressive sounding: This was like music. It was like, ‘we want more.’ But the effect was like Ligeti’s choral music in 2001: a Space Odyssey. It was some kind of choral music. And when I heard the attempts to reduce it, I couldn’t even remember the concert this way. So I put back the raw mix, and I’d say, “They’re applauding for a long time, but there is some music there.” Finally, there’s music coming from the audience, too.

“Because I produced this myself, I was engaged in what they did as much as I was engaged in what I did. And I realized how well they were listening by that. Between the first and second encores, there was this gradual gathering of intensity; they got even more and more excited. And I understood exactly musically why they heard it that way: It was exactly right. Then there was something in the third encore that was great but they didn’t accept it as being as wonderfully important as the other two. And if you had a way to graph that, it would have mimicked exactly what I considered the value of that particular performance to have been. With the sound of the audience, there’s this architecture that is absolutely pure. If I took anything out of it — including the audience — something would drop, and it would be a completely unbalanced thing, compared to the way it is now.”

A Mutual Trust

We asked Keith what he felt about the music he improvised that night. “I’ll answer that with an anecdote,” he said. “I have an ex-student who shows up almost every time I play in New York, and he always comes backstage. He’s seen and heard me for 30-some years. He doesn’t say anything he doesn’t feel, the way your grandmother would say, ‘Great concert.’ And he said, ‘That’s the most open I’ve ever seen you in performance.’ And that’s what I would say that I hear.

“What is it I wanna hear? I want to hear something new. So I’m my own front-row seat. I want the experience that everyone else in the hall wants. This is why the Carnegie Hall concert is steps up from everything so far. The more you know that, the more you’re giving back what everyone in the room needs. Someone once said, ‘The most universal thing is also the most personal.’ So the closer you get to your own blood flowing in your body, the closer you are to everyone in the hall. The more you’re in concepts, the further you are from half the people.

“I didn’t know I’d be able to let it all hang out quite like that. It was as if the audience let me say, ‘I’m sorry I don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s going to be okay.’ It’s because I don’t know and I accept that I don’t know, that some of this can happen. And when it starts to happen, I will take notice. And to me the miracle was that was noticed at the same instant by the people in hall. I mean, my glasses were falling off, my pants were twisted. I was partly not even there. That was probably part of what my student meant. I was immersed in this environment, which was the music — but it was brought about by everyone in the room. We were sequestered on our own planet.

“That hall is not by any means my favorite hall in the world. And even it went through a metamorphosis. It sort of shrunk. It was like, ‘Whoops! Suddenly we’re in a small room with a lot of people in it!’

“I can’t know everything about what the audience is there for. But the openness that my former student commented on was there in the audience also. It was a trust: They just trusted that in no way would I ever not do my best.”