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NEW YORK (AP) - Keith Jarrett, who suffers from 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, the rarely satisfied Jarrett felt a special interaction with his audience that he recalls experiencing only once before - in'75 at an opera house in Germany when he performed what would be released as "The Koln Concert," which sold more than three 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 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'70s 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.
In the early'70s, just after his last sideman gig with Miles Davis' electronic jazz-fusion band, Jarrett pioneered a 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. But the solo concerts left him physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.
Jarrett fell ill during a'96 solo tour of Italy and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. He spent nearly a year and a half as a virtual shut-in, before performing again with his trio in November'98. In'99, he attempted two solo concerts in Japan, playing a series of short improvisations, but was dissatisfied with the results, expressing doubts at the time that he would return to the solo format because he found it too physically demanding.
Jarrett turned his main focus to the stellar trio he had formed in'83 with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, which moved beyond its repertoire of jazz standards to playing spontaneous free improvisations on such recent albums as "Inside Out" and "Always Let Me Go." Back home, Jarrett worked to regain his stamina with a regimen of medication, nutritional supplements, physical therapy and aerobics. His illness provided him an opportunity to critically analyze tapes of past solo performances which he found to contain a lot of excess, and he began practicing in his studio to develop a new solo concept.
"If I was going to do it again, I realized that I would have to undo everything I had previously done psychologically and emotionally," Jarrett said. Jarrett drew on his experience playing classical music to free up his left hand to do more than just play bass lines or vamps like most jazz pianists. He credits his recordings of Mozart and Shostakovitch with improving his touch at the keyboard.
"I realized that perhaps I should stop and start instead of playing continuously," Jarrett said. "Now they can be long if that's what the material is telling me to do . .
. but if I end up discovering something that causes its own completeness, I've given myself the ability to stop at the very moment it's complete instead of drawing it out." Jarrett tried out his new ideas when he returned to Japan in 2002 for two solo concerts, resulting in last year's CD "Radiance," his first live solo recording since his illness, and a DVD "Tokyo Solo," released earlier this year.
"Radiance" chronicled an Osaka concert divided into- pieces ranging in length from 73 seconds to- 1/2 minutes that he found took on the structure of an improvised suite. Jarrett found his Japanese audience so polite that "Radiance" ended up sounding "more like what I might have done in my studio." That wasn't the case at Carnegie Hall where the audience became an integral part of his performance.
In his capacity as producer, Jarrett decided to leave the extended applause uncut rather than lower the volume or shorten the ovations to preserve the "unique vibe." "I started to realize that the yelling and the pounding ..
. the noises that the audience is making ..
. sound to me like modern music," said Jarrett. "I thought this is not exactly just applause, it has as much passion and colour as a lot of music has.
" For Jarrett, the concert's "crowning moment" comes during the first encore, a completely improvised hymnlike piece that he subsequently titled "The Good America." "In the broadest sense it was longing for the world to not be what it was becoming," Jarrett said. "Every time I listen to that I have tears in my eyes .
. . There is unconsciousness in this country and consciousness and the good America is the awake America that we don't see on the news or very often anywhere.
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