Keith Jarrett, who's suffered chronic fatigue syndrome, wasn't feeling particularly strong as he drove to Carnegie Hall on a rainy September afternoon a year ago. But he was energized once he sat down at the Steinway grand piano before a sold-out audience eagerly awaiting his first North American solo concert in a decade.
That night at America's most venerated concert hall, the rarely satisfied Jarrett felt a special interaction with his audience that he recalls experiencing only once before — in 1975 at an opera house in Germany when he performed what would be released as "The Koln Concert," which sold more than 3 million copies to become the best-selling solo piano recording ever.
"At Carnegie Hall when I walked out on stage, there was no doubt in my mind that these people were ready for whatever happened and that's not true of a lot of places I play," the 61-year-old jazz pianist said. "Carnegie Hall couldn't have happened without the audience. It wasn't like me tossing things out to them and them catching them.
It was both directions all the time. ..
. I wasn't prepared for that kind of interplay ever happening between an audience and the stage. I've had great audiences but this was almost a small miracle.
I've only felt this twice, once was in Koln and once was in New York."
Jarrett's audiences have always helped shape his spontaneously improvised solo concerts, and playing in his own country before 3,000 enthusiastic fans pushed him to create what turned into a musical autobiography, "a wide-angle look at what I do when I play alone."
Jarrett's performance can be heard in its entirety on the new double-CD, "The Carnegie Hall Concert," which is also the first U.
S. solo concert he has ever released on record. The pianist takes his listeners on a musical journey that touches on blues, gospel, foot-stomping boogie-woogie, jazz ballads, dissonant contemporary music, romantic classical and folklike Americana.
Among the five encores, Jarrett revisits two of his classic 1970s compositions, "Paint My Heart Red" and "My Song," and the standard jazz ballad "Time On My Hands."
"This one night I could just be myself," Jarrett said.
Jarrett's Carnegie Hall performance is all the more remarkable because in recent years he has completely revamped his whole approach to solo concerts as he battled to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome which nearly derailed his performing career.
In the early 1970s, just after his last sideman gig with Miles Davis' electronic jazz-fusion band, Jarrett pioneered a whole new solo piano concert format which won him international acclaim through such groundbreaking albums as "Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne" and "The Koln Concert."
Rather than play jazz standards or even his own compositions, Jarrett would start each concert with a blank canvas, with nothing planned beforehand, and fill it in with spontaneous uninterrupted freewheeling improvisations stretching out for up to an hour. (Story Continues On Next Page.
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