Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music; as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisations draw not only from the traditions of jazz, but from other genres as well, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.
Jarrett, who is of Hungarian and Scottish extraction, grew up in suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania, with significant early exposure to music. He possessed absolute pitch, and he displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons just before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program hosted by the swing bandleader Paul Whiteman. The young Jarrett gave his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions. Encouraged especially by his mother, Jarrett took intensive classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute.
In his teens, as a student at Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Jarrett learned jazz and quickly became proficient in it. In his early teens, he developed a strong interest in the contemporary jazz scene; a Dave Brubeck performance was an early inspiration. At one point, he had an offer to study classical composition in Paris with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger—an opportunity that pleased Jarrett's mother but that Jarrett, already leaning toward jazz, decided to turn down.
Following his graduation from Emmaus High School in 1963, Jarrett moved from Allentown to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the Berklee College of Music and played cocktail piano in local clubs. After a year he moved to New York City, where he played at the Village Vanguard.
In New York, Art Blakey hired Jarrett to play with the Jazz Messengers. During a show with that group he was noticed by Jack DeJohnette who (as he recalled years later) immediately realized the talent and the unstoppable flow of ideas of the unknown pianist. DeJohnette talked to Jarrett and soon recommended him to his own band leader, Charles Lloyd. The Charles Lloyd Quartet had formed not long before and were exploring open, improvised forms while building supple grooves; without quite realizing it at first, they were moving into terrain that was also being explored, although from another stylistic background, by some of the psychedelic rock bands of the west coast. Their 1966 album Forest Flower was one of the most successful jazz recordings of the mid-1960s and when they were invited to play the Fillmore in San Francisco, they won over the local hippie audience. Although the band would become plagued by internal instability and (according to Jarrett) siphoning-off of show revenue by Lloyd, its tours across America and Europe, even to Moscow, made Jarrett a widely noticed musician in rock and jazz underground circles. It also laid the foundations of a lasting musical bond with drummer Jack DeJohnette (who also plays the piano). The two would cooperate in many contexts during their later careers.
The Charles Lloyd Quartet with Jarrett, Ron McClure and Jack DeJohnette came to an end in 1968, after the recording of Soundtrack because of disputes over money as well as artistic differences. Jarrett was asked to join the Miles Davis group after Miles heard him in a New York City club (according to another version Jarrett tells, Miles had brought his entire band to see a tour date of Jarrett's own trio in Paris; the Davis band being practically the only audience, an attention that made Jarrett feel embarrassed). During his tenure with Davis, he played both Fender Contempo electronic organ and Fender Rhodes electric piano, alternating with Chick Corea; they can be heard side by side on some 1970 recordings, for instance the August, 1970 Isle of Wight Festival performance preserved in the film Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue and now on Bitches Brew Live After Corea left in 1970, Jarrett often played electric piano and organ simultaneously. Despite his growing dislike of amplified music and electric instruments within jazz, he continued with the group out of respect for Davis and because of his desire to work with Jack DeJohnette. He has often cited Davis as a vital influence, both musical and personal, on his own thinking about music and improvisation.
Jarrett is heard on several Davis albums: Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East, The Cellar Door Sessions (recorded December 16–19, 1970, at the Cellar Door club in Washington, DC), and Live-Evil, which is largely composed of heavily edited Cellar Door recordings. The extended sessions from these recordings can be heard on The Complete Cellar Door Sessions. Jarrett also plays electric organ on Get Up With It; the song he is featured on, "Honky Tonk", is an abridged version of a track available in its entirety on The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. In addition, part of a track called "Konda" (recorded May 21, 1970) was released during Davis's late-1970s retirement on a compilation album called Directions (1980). The track, which features an extended Fender-Rhodes piano introduction by Jarrett, was released in full on 2003's The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions.
The last two albums, both recorded for Impulse!, feature mainly the compositions of the other band members, as opposed to Jarrett's own, which dominated the previous albums.
Jarrett's compositions and the strong musical identities of the group members gave this ensemble a very distinctive sound. The quartet's music is an amalgam of free jazz, straight-ahead post-bop, gospel music, and exotic, Middle-Eastern-sounding improvisations.
In the mid- and late 1970s Jarrett led a "European quartet" concurrently with the American quartet, which was recorded by ECM. This combo consisted of saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Jon Christensen.
This ensemble played in a style similar to that of the American quartet, but with many of the avant-garde and Americana elements replaced by the European folk influences that characterized the work of ECM artists at the time.
Jarrett became involved in a legal wrangle following the release of the album Gaucho in 1980 by the U.S. rock band Steely Dan. The album's title track, credited to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, bore an undeniable resemblance to Jarrett's "Long As You Know You're Living Yours," from the Belonging album. When a Musician magazine interviewer pointed out the similarity, Becker admitted that he loved the Jarrett composition and Fagen said they had been influenced by it. After their comments were published, Jarrett sued, and Becker and Fagen were forced to add his name to the credits and to include him in the royalties.
Jarrett's first album for ECM, Facing You (1971), was a solo piano date recorded in the studio. He has continued to record solo piano albums in the studio intermittently throughout his career, including Staircase (1976), The Moth and the Flame (1981), and The Melody at Night, With You (1999). Book of Ways (1986) is a studio recording of clavichord solos.
The studio albums are modestly successful entries in the Jarrett catalog, but in 1973, Jarrett also began playing totally improvised solo concerts, and it is the popularity of these voluminous concert recordings that has made him one of the best-selling jazz artists in history, not to mention one of the most ambitious and innovative. Albums released from these concerts include The Köln Concert (1975) which became the best selling piano recording in history; and Sun Bear Concerts (1976) - a 10-LP (and later 6-CD) Box Set.
After a hiatus, Jarrett returned to the extended solo improvised concert format with Paris Concert (1990), Vienna Concert (1991), and La Scala (1995), before his career was interrupted by chronic fatigue syndrome. These later concerts tend to be more influenced by classical music than the earlier ones, reflecting his interest in composers such as Bach and Shostakovich, and are mostly less indebted to popular genres such as blues and gospel. The Vienna Concert in particular has been widely hailed as a masterpiece of improvisation, with its huge, arch-like opening movement, with a stunningly dissonant, virtuosic middle section, framed by more lyrical sections; Jarrett himself, in the liner notes to the album, named it his greatest achievement and the fulfillment of everything he was aiming to accomplish.
Jarrett has commented that his best performances have been when he has had only the slightest notion of what he was going to play at the next moment.[citation needed] An apocryphal account of one such performance had Jarrett staring at the piano for several minutes without playing; as the audience grew increasingly uncomfortable, one member shouted to Jarrett, "D sharp!", to which the pianist responded, "Thank you!", and launched into an improvisation.
Jarrett's 100th solo performance in Japan was captured on video at Suntory Hall Tokyo on April 14, 1987, and released the same year. The recording was titled Solo Tribute. This is a set of almost all standard songs.
Another video recording, titled Last Solo, was released in 1987 from a live solo concert at Kan-i Hoken hall, Tokyo, Japan, recorded January 25, 1984.
Both Solo Tribute and Last Solo were reissued on Image Entertainment DVD in 2002.
In the late 1990s, Jarrett was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and was unable to leave his home for long periods of time. It was during this period that he recorded The Melody at Night, With You, a solo piano effort consisting of jazz standards presented with very little of the reinterpretation he usually employs. The album had originally been a Christmas gift to his second wife, Rose Anne.
By 2000, Jarrett had returned to touring, both solo and with the Standards Trio. Two 2002 solo concerts in Japan, Jarrett's first solo piano concerts following his illness, were released on the 2005 CD Radiance (a complete concert in Osaka, and excerpts from one in Tokyo), and the 2006 DVD Tokyo Solo (the entire Tokyo performance). In contrast with previous concerts (which were generally a pair of continuous improvisations 30–40 minutes long), the 2002 concerts consist of a linked series of shorter improvisations (some as short as a minute and a half, a few of fifteen or twenty minutes).
In September 2005 at Carnegie Hall, Jarrett performed his first solo concert in North America in more than ten years, released a year later as a double-CD set (The Carnegie Hall Concert).
On November 26, 2008, he performed solo in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, and a few days later, on December 1, at London's Royal Festival Hall, marking the first time Jarrett had played solo in London in seventeen years. These concerts were released in October 2009 on the album Paris / London: Testament.
The trio has recorded numerous live and studio albums consisting primarily of jazz repertory material. The trio members each cite Ahmad Jamal as a major influence in their musical development for his use of both melodic and multi-tonal lines.[citation needed].
The Jarrett-Peacock-DeJohnette trio also produced recordings that consist largely of challenging original material, most notably 1987's Changeless. (These recordings are noted above.) Several of the standards albums contain an original track or two, some attributed to Jarrett but mostly group improvisations. The live recordings Inside Out and Always Let Me Go (both released in 2001) marked a renewed interest by the trio in wholly improvised free jazz. By this point in their history, the musical communication among these three men had become nothing short of telepathic, and their group improvisations frequently take on a complexity that sounds almost composed. The Standards Trio undertakes frequent world tours of recital halls (the only venues in which Jarrett, a notorious stickler for acoustics, will play these days) and is one of the few truly successful jazz groups to play both straight-ahead (as opposed to smooth) and free jazz.
A related recording, At the Deer Head Inn (1992), is a live album of standards recorded with Paul Motian replacing DeJohnette, at the venue in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, 40 miles from Jarrett's hometown, where he had his first job as a jazz pianist. It was the first time Jarrett and Motian had played together since the demise of the American quartet sixteen years earlier.
Since the early 1970s, Jarrett's success as a jazz musician has enabled him to maintain a parallel career as a classical composer and pianist, recording almost exclusively for ECM Records.
In The Light, an album made in 1973, consists of short pieces for solo piano, strings, and various chamber ensembles, including a string quartet and a brass quintet, and a piece for cellos and trombones. This collection demonstrates a young composer's affinity for a variety of classical styles, with varying degrees of success.
Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena (1975) both combine composed pieces for strings with improvising jazz musicians, including Jan Garbarek and Charlie Haden. The strings here have a moody, contemplative feel that is characteristic of the "ECM sound" of the 1970s, and is also particularly well-suited to Garbarek's keening saxophone improvisations. From an academic standpoint, these compositions are dismissed by many classical music aficionados as lightweight, but Jarrett appeared to be working more towards a synthesis between composed and improvised music at this time, rather than the production of formal classical works. From this point on, however, his classical work would adhere to more conventional disciplines.
Ritual (1977) is a composed solo piano piece recorded by Dennis Russell Davies that is somewhat reminiscent of Jarrett's own solo piano recordings.
Bridge of Light (1993) is the last recording of classical compositions to appear under Jarrett's name. The album contains three pieces written for a soloist with orchestra, and one for violin and piano. The pieces date from 1984 and 1990.
In 1988 New World Records released the CD Lou Harrison: Piano Concerto and Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra, featuring Jarrett on piano, with Naoto Otomo conducting the piano concerto with the New Japan Philharmonic. Robert Hughes conducted the Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra. In 1992 came the release of Jarrett's performance of Peggy Glanville-Hicks's Etruscan Concerto, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This was released on Music Masters Classics, with pieces by Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. In 1995 the record label Music Masters Jazz released a CD on which one track featured Jarrett performing the exquisite solo piano part in Lousadzak, a 17-minute piano concerto by American composer Alan Hovhaness. The conductor again was Dennis Russell Davies. Most of Jarrett's classical recordings are of older repertoire, but Jarrett may have been introduced to this modern work by his one-time manager George Avakian, who was a friend of the composer. Jarrett has also recorded classical works for ECM by composers such as Bach, Handel, Shostakovich, and Arvo Pärt.
In 2004, Jarrett was awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. The prestigious award usually associated with classical musicians and composers has only previously been given to one other jazz musician—Miles Davis. The first person to receive the award was Igor Stravinsky, in 1959.
Jarrett also plays harpsichord, clavichord, organ, soprano saxophone, drums, and many other instruments. He often played saxophone and various forms of percussion in the American quartet, though his recordings since the breakup of that group have rarely featured these instruments. On the majority of his recordings in the last twenty years, he has played acoustic piano only. He has spoken with some regret of his decision to give up playing the saxophone, in particular.
On April 15, 1978, Jarrett was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. His music has also been used on many television shows, including The Sopranos on HBO. The 2001 German film Bella Martha (English title: Mostly Martha), whose music consultant was ECM founder and head Manfred Eicher, features Jarrett's "Country," from the European quartet album My Song.
One of Jarrett's trademarks is his frequent, loud vocalizations (grunting, squealing, and tuneless singing), similar to that of Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Ralph Sutton, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Paul Asaro, and Cecil Taylor. Jarrett is also physically active while playing, writhing, gyrating, and almost dancing on the piano bench. These behaviors occur in his jazz and improvised solo performances, but are for the most part absent whenever he plays classical repertory. Jarrett has noted his vocalizations are based on involvement, not content, and are more of an interaction than a reaction, ultimately enhancing the quality of the music.
However, Jarrett is notoriously intolerant of audience noise, including coughing and other involuntary sounds, especially during solo improvised performances. He feels that extraneous noise affects his musical inspiration, and distracts from the purity of the sound. As a result, cough drops are routinely supplied to Jarrett's audiences in cold weather, and he has even been known to stop playing and lead the crowd in a group cough. This intolerance was made clear during a concert on October 31, 2006, at the restored Salle Pleyel in Paris. After making an impassioned plea to the audience to stop coughing, Jarrett walked out of the concert during the first half, refusing at first to continue, although he did subsequently return to the stage to finish the first half, and also the second. A further solo concert three days later went undisturbed, following an official announcement beforehand urging the audience to minimize extraneous noise. In 2008, during the first half of another Paris concert, Jarrett complained to the audience about the quality of the piano that he had been given, walking off between solos and remonstrating with staff at the venue. Following an extended interval, the piano was replaced. In 2007, in concert in Perugia during the Umbria Jazz Festival, angered by photographers Jarrett implored the audience: "I do not speak Italian, so someone who speaks English can tell all these assholes with cameras to turn them fucking off right now. Right now! No more photographs, including that red light right there. If we see any more lights, I reserve the right (and I think the privilege is yours to hear us), but I reserve the right and Jack and Gary reserve the right to stop playing and leave the goddamn city!" This caused the organizers of the Festival to declare that they will never invite him again.[14] In a performance at Carnegie Hall on 16 January 2011, he stopped in the middle of a quiet improvisation in an apparent reaction to an audience member's persistent coughing. After a moment's silence, he remarked, "Where's the coughing now?" and continued playing. He subsequently said, "Since I'm the only person in this hall who can't leave, I have just one solution to deal with this coughing--play loud! Is that what you want?". Before he went back to playing another quiet tune, he said, "Maybe I should draw a circle with a line through it and issue a warning--Soft Song.
Jarrett has been known for many years to be strongly opposed to electronic instruments and equipment. His liner notes for the 1973 album Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne states: "I am, and have been, carrying on an anti-electric-music crusade of which this is an exhibit for the prosecution. Electricity goes through all of us and is not to be relegated to wires." He has largely eschewed electric or electronic instruments since his time with Miles Davis.
For many years he has been a follower of the teachings of metaphysician and mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. In 1980 he recorded an album of Gurdjieff's compositions, called Sacred Hymns, for ECM.
Jarrett lives in an 18th-century farmhouse in Oxford Township, New Jersey, in rural Warren County. He uses a converted barn on his property as a recording studio and practice facility.
Jarrett's first marriage, to Margot Erney, ended in divorce. He and his second wife Rose Anne (née Colavito) divorced in 2010 after a thirty-year marriage. Jarrett has four brothers, all younger, two of whom are involved in music. Chris Jarrett is also a pianist, and Scott Jarrett is a producer and songwriter. Noah Jarrett, one of two sons from Jarrett's first marriage, is a bassist and composer.
Keith Jarrett (Allentown, Pennsylvania, Estados Unidos, 8 de mayo de 1945), pianista y músico de jazz estadounidense.
Se trata de uno de los maestros del jazz de vanguardia, cuya producción más sobresaliente es una serie de piezas improvisadas grabadas en directo en Colonia, París, Milán, Viena, Tokio y otras ciudades.
También interpreta piezas para piano clásico, clavicordio, clavecín y órgano. Ha grabado varios discos de música clásica, interpretando obras de Johann Sebastian Bach, Händel, Mozart y Shostakovich, entre otros.
Jarrett tiene la reputación de ser un perfeccionista excéntrico y, mientras toca, suele vocalizar de forma expresiva. Su agente musical es Steven Cloud.
Empezó a estudiar piano a los tres años de edad, demostrando inmediatamente grandes aptitudes, en 1952 debuta profesionalmente en un concierto público, al tiempo que estudiaba batería, vibráfono y saxo soprano.
Estudió en Berklee College of Music de Boston durante un año, donde forma un trío. Posteriormente se traslada a Nueva York, donde graba su primer disco con la orquesta de Don Jacoby. Luego colabora con Roland Kirk, Tony Scott y Art Blakey. Desde 1965 forma parte del cuarteto de Charles Lloyd, realizando ese año seis giras por Europa y Unión Soviética. Ese mismo año forma un trío con Charlie Haden en contrabajo y Paul Motian en batería.
A partir de 1971 trabaja junto a Miles Davis tocando en teclado electrónico, siendo ésta la última vez que utiliza dicho instrumento. Luego colabora con Gary Burton, Jack Dejohnette, y añade a su trío a Dewey Redman en saxo tenor.
En 1974, después de trabajar con Gus Nement, Jean François Jenny-Clark y Aldo Romano, crea un nuevo cuarteto en Europa con Jan Garbarek en saxofón, Palle Danielson en contrabajo y Jon Christensen en batería. ese mismo año graba junto a Südfunk Symphony Orchestra una sesión de instrumentos de cuerda.
En 1976 graba como organista en la abadía benedictina de Ottobeuren
En el año 2003 recibió el Polar Music Prize, un premio concedido por la Real Academia de Suecia de Música.
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