Sandstone Press

Piano music

Posted by RLD on 27th September 2009

Music is here to heal us. Perhaps it really is just a slave to the selfish gene, but I suspect it emerged with the Big Bang along with gravity, comets that seed the planets with life prompting minerals, and the blackbird’s lovely song. This last is apparently a territorial warning to its own kind although a beautiful thing to us apes, hence subjectivity and interpretation. Seekers after pattern the danger is that we ascribe it meaning when it has none or are sucked through joy into the black hole of melancholy.

First and last is the voice, the wordless tribal hymn to the moon, the rhythm of the seasons matched to those of the body, the march, menstruation, the pulse. Then comes the drum and all instruments that employ a strike mechanism are first of all drums, that means all reed instruments such as bagpipes, saxophones and clarinets, oboes and bassoons. Even the brass instruments send variations in pressure to strike at the anvil of the ear and there, again, is the drum. Amalgam of drum and harp it was the composer William Gilmour who described to me the most sophisticated singer of all, the piano, as a percussion instrument.

Willie is the finest pianist I know, as I learned when we were working on Dunbeath Water. He said something else that astonished me. ‘Good pianists and good singers are ten a penny’. This fairly swept the wally dugs off my mantelpiece. Good pianists are among my gods, household gods when we have instant access to the best through broadcasting and recording. I guess it is the best I have been thinking of, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Alfred Brendal, Mitsuko Uchida. I have a wee shine for Mitsuko, which the reader will not have guessed since I work so hard to keep it hidden.

These days I download it all. This way is cheaper and more accessible, but I miss those little plastic jewel cases in their sleeves and miss still more the booklet inside. It may be a phase we are going through, I hope so. In my lifetime we have had it before when the large sleeve of the long playing record, with its copious notes, gave way to the tape with long foldouts covered in tiny print. It was better than nothing. The compact disc allowed for an elegant and beautiful booklet that could be a work of art in itself. Alternatively it could be a piece of crap.

Too few record companies took it seriously but those who did supplied us with something extra. Everything is better when a story goes with it. Generally though, serious musicians should not be allowed near their own narratives. They should be shown the text and pictures and allowed to nod sagely, but nothing more than that. The sound gift and the word gift rarely go together. Keith Jarrett in particular leaves a legacy of ego blasts and scrambled syntax that adds nothing to the work of my favourite pianist. I hope we never meet (and that is indeed unlikely) because I really do not think we would get on.

Keith came into my life in 2004 during a period of turbulence and difficulty. One day I found the Koln Concert on my turntable and nothing was the same again. Only later did I discover that this is the biggest selling album of solo piano music in history. By no means the first manifestation of his great talent it took his career, and music in a wider sense, in new directions. Although it holds together brilliantly it was improvised, on the spot, from start to finish.

Apparently nothing went right that day. Keith wasn’t feeling well. The wrong piano had been delivered. Keith was for going home, no doubt in a deep huff, but the tickets were sold and the engineers had set up. Result: a big the-hell-with-it moment, Keith entered the zone and from the other side of the Great Yes drew this work of genius.

Keith Jarrett is one of those musicians who passed through the hands of Miles Davis. He appeared on Bitches Brew, as did Chick. Miles, being Miles, mixed the chemicals of different talents and different personalities and, from Kind of Blue on, took them into the studio to make it work by dint of his own uncompromising musicianship.

The musicians would not be the same again. How could they? John Coltrane, Chick Corea and Keith all went on to lead their own bands, to perform solo and (especially Chick) in duets, to have great careers, to alter music history in their turn. Living in a difficult place some were casualties; Coltrane obviously, but perhaps also Keith.

He has been married twice. In the late nineties he endured a lengthy period of ill health, chronic fatigue syndrome apparently, that he might never have emerged from. Fortunately his success had brought financial rewards and, at the bottom of his huge garden in New Jersey he had his own recording studio. Inside he would record song tunes a bit at a time, phrase by phrase, with long periods of rest. The songs were standards, such as he had been playing with Jack De Johnette and Gary Peacock for many years – and is again now.

Slowly he came through and the first result was this album, The Melody At Night, With You. Dedicated to his wife Rose Anne. Who heard the music. Then gave it back to me. Look at those full stops. Give that man any kind of keyboard that doesn’t do words! Full stops or not this is my least favourite of his albums. Keith won’t care what I think, of course, nor should he.

The experience as a whole seems to have altered his direction again. He re-entered performance with Jack and Gary and has been recording with increasing frequency ever since. Most of these albums have been of standards, they are all of incredible sophistication, absolutely wonderful, and I am listening to Whisper Not, recorded in Paris, as I write. Two of the trio’s albums are also of spontaneous improvised music: Inside Out, recorded in London, and Always Let Me Go, recorded in Tokyo.

Japan has been good to Keith, as it has to Chick. There is a tremendously enthusiastic audience for his work there. It was in Osaka and Tokyo that he recorded my favourite of his post-illness albums, Radiance. Pre-illness he would force his way through whatever barriers such a creative artist has to get past to produce what he does, improvising for as long as forty minutes and making it work.

Post-illness he works in shorter time spans, taking his inspiration from something in the previous piece, some start point that could lead anywhere but in such a way that, when the pieces are put together, becomes a progression, a discrete composition. I should say that most of these works have been transcribed by others and can be played not only on piano but also guitar and other instruments.

It must have been in 2006 that I was lying on my settee listening to Radiance, reading Derek Jarman’s Smiling in Slow Motion and asking myself if it was possible to be in the company of two more intelligent voices at the same time. How good can it get? I wondered. How reassuring that anything good can exist beyond the Idiot Vortex.

Not every respected, accomplished musician, in jazz or any other field, goes along with the idea of public improvisation as a valid art form. In the Inside Out notes Keith cites Wynton Marsalis. Who am I to disagree with Wynton, but I would love to be at one of these dangerous Keith performances. Imagine being present at the spontaneous combustion of a work that might live forever?

Incidentally, I am in no way phased if Keith takes the recording into his studio at the bottom of the garden to make it perfect. The recordings can take a long time to appear as commercial properties, sometimes years, and maybe that is why.

If so, he doesn’t clean it all up because Keith is one of those pianists who grunt and sing as they play, obviously transported. Glenn Gould was another, but Keith adds to that repertoire of expression by standing up, squirming about, pulling faces and slapping the woodwork. These sounds, I am glad to say, he leaves in. Coughs he removes as much as possible. Apparently they are the result of a lack of concentration among the audience. They tend to dither until the great man leads them somewhere.

Hell mend them, Keith. If you ever come to Eden Court I will meditate myself into the zone while standing in the queue. Kick off in C minor though, or we’re both in shtook.

Keith is also a classical pianist and composer and properly recognised in both of these fields. He has recorded both books of the Well-tempered Clavier and, as far as is known, Bach is not spinning in his grave. I imagine he listens appreciatively from his seat in the clouds. Keith has also recorded Handel and Mozart. He was the first Western pianist to record Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues. My favourite recording of this is, and always will be, by Vladimir Ashkenazy, but the imagination and daring of the exercise was and remains epoch breaking.

All of this, the standards repertoire, which is in continuous development, and the strict classical music both of the canon and the 20th century, feeds into the improvised solo music, as does the earlier work with Miles. Those who can analyse technically, and I am not one of them, can do so. What I am saying is that the improvised music answers to analysis. This is in the area of mystery that Mozart inhabited, but of our time. In still more time Keith Jarrett will be recognised as part of that pantheon.

Recorded in Paris and London Keith has titled his latest album, with typical lack of verbal nous, Testament. It will be no more testimony than Radiance was a light bulb, but it will be great music. Since he has come out to say that his wife’s leaving him has fed into its creation it should be okay for me to repeat, but whether the music is born of sorrow or acceptance I am dying to listen. I will force myself to wait for the download though, and perhaps a bit longer. Waiting can be an important element of reception because all great art is really great timing and that is as true of its appreciation as its creation.

Among all those liner notes I have, and that I will miss from now on, a tiny nugget gleams among the dross. Of Radiance Keith Jarrett has this to say, ‘Transformative moments are very rare, or they seem so due to our inattention’. It was worth waiting for. I have lived with that statement since first reading it in 2006 when the turbulence was at last subsiding and the vortex slowing.

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Neither Keith nor the trio have their own web sites, but both units record with the European label ECM which does a great job for them. Here is the link to Testimony but the whole site is worth exploring, starting with Keith, Jack and Gary. http://bit.ly/hkIOz

Of all the solo albums my favourite is La Scala, recorded in 1995 and published in 1997. It has the most pretentious liner notes of all but the beauty of the music is beyond words. You can read more here http://bit.ly/GQHyd