rowohlt.berlin verlag keith jarrett jarrett...rowohlt.berlin verlag keith jarrett please contact:...

Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag Keith Jarrett Please contact:

Ms. Gertje Berger-Maaß Associate Rights Director Phone: +49 40 72 72 - 222 Fax: +49 40 72 72 - 319 E-Mail: [email protected]

Wolfgang Sandner

Keith Jarrett. Biography Rowohlt • Berlin non-fiction March 2015 368 pages

Keith Jarrett is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, a jazz visionary and outstanding interpreter of the classical canon, and a master of improvisation. His legendary Köln Concert from 1975 is still the biggest selling solo jazz album of all times. Wolfgang Sandner has known Jarrett for many years. Having been a guest at his house, he had the rare opportunity to get to know the man behind the music through many long conversations. Little has been known about Jarrett’s biography until now. In this remarkably well researched, astute yet sensitive book, Sandner picks up the threads from Jarrett’s childhood when he was hailed as a wunderkind, relates how he found himself musically while playing with greats like Chet Baker, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis, and how he developed his outstanding talent. Sandner reveals what formed and inspired Jarrett’s life and musical works – and which demons Jarrett has had to battle during his long and glittering career.

Wolfgang Sandner, born in 1942, studied Music and Modern History. He was Executive Producer of the record label Wergo, before moving to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1981, where he worked as a music editor for almost three decades. He is Professor at the University of Marburg and penned portraits of such varied artists as Richard Wagner, Frank Zappa and Keith Jarrett.

“A must for all Jazzfans!” (Spiegel Online)

“In fact, there are not many authors who can write in German like Sandner: analytical clever and at the same time in places poetical. He enfolds a transatlantic panorama of the second part of the 20th century and shows Jarrett – born on the historically symbolic 8th of May 1945 – as a wanderer between American Jazz and European classic.“ (Rolling Stone)

Rights sold to: Spain, The Art of Dying (Malpaso Ediciones S.L.)

Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett. Biography by Wolfgang Sandner Copyright © 2015 by Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin

English sample translation: Copyright © 2017 by Chris Jarrett

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Wolfgang Sandner Keith Jarrett. A Biography © English translation: Chris Jarrett Foreword The world is not blessed with friendly artists. They do exist though – those patient geniuses who are willing to bow down to us and reward our banal questions with intelligent answers, to illuminate their craft and art, to allow us an inside view into their creative processes, and even to describe hours of struggle in which no Muse had kissed them and self-doubt was near. More numerous are the skeptical artists. They mistrust all who mistake life for art and who are less concerned with the work and the artistic result itself than with the outside characteristics of life as a creative artist, focusing strongly on these aspects and circulating rumors in stories and tales. The pianist Alfred Brendel once said one must be armed to the teeth against anecdotes in Art. Understanding the essence of something through anecdotes is equal to an astronomer understanding Saturn by studying its rings. Then there are the angry artists. They repudiate all interpretations because they suspect nothing but intellectual thievery in them. Many of these are to be found in jazz. The trumpeter Freddy Keppard was a key figure in this defensive attitude that has marked the genre and its representatives until today. In 1916, he refused an offer to record his music which would have made him the first jazz musician ever to produce a record - he wanted no one to be playing and replaying his music where it could be easily studied and copied. For a black musician in the white society of his time, duplication was just a nicer word for exploitation. It was only one year later that the first jazz record came out – with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an ensemble made up entirely of white musicians. And, at last, there are the radical artists. They are convinced that music, the most hermetic of the Arts, is immune against illustrative description. Even open-minded contemporaries may tend to believe that musical processes can be better understood through an emotional approach than through an intellectual one. „May all failing words be still; let him now speak to us solely through his works.“ Albert Schweitzer's line concerning the music of J.S. Bach is like a basso continuo in many of the commentaries of artists, listeners and, of course, writers who discovered the limits of language in critical discussions about music. If we ask ourselves why so little has been written about Keith Jarrett, we will find the answer in such an attitude. One of the most influential and original pianists of the present has become a radical withholder of words. He reflects Paul Hindemith's description of Bach: „he is of an austere silence. “ Anyone making comments about Jarrett's music is basically doing it against his will. If Keith Jarrett had himself been able to decide, this book would probably never have come into being.




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On the 14th of January, 2014 in New York City's Lincoln Center, Keith Jarrett was welcomed into the circle of „Jazz Masters,“ - the highest official honor for jazz musicians in the United States - along with the saxophonist Anthony Braxton, the bassist Richard Davis and the pedagogue Jamey Aebersbold. In his short speech of thanks, Jarrett said that music cannot be described in words; music is nothing but music. What may sound tautological or like some mystical thought-system, is actually an idea based upon a skeptical view of material-analysis, which is, at its best, able to explain how the music was created, but not what it is. I first ran into Keith Jarrett's music in the 60s, when he was a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet. Later, I got to know him personally through the producer Manfred Eicher and conversed with him in his house in Oxford, New Jersey. My intention to write a biography about him met his interest and favor until a public event after one of his solo concerts took place, at which occasion we had a curious dispute about his „Köln Concert.“. The fact that I described this concert as one of his greatest successes awakened his energetic disfavor and brought our dialogue to an abrupt end. Here a certain consistency may be found, something prototypical of jazz musicians. They fear nothing as much as the tag „commercial. “ The suspicion of having bought aesthetic compromise is somehow connected to every numerable success. As much as these artists long for public acknowledgement, they nonetheless react allergically when it reveals itself in such a way as to feed this suspicion. With the „Köln Concert“ of 1975, (with which he stepped out of a smaller circle of jazz fans into a broader musical public), Keith Jarrett found himself in a personal dilemma. This recording reached higher circulation than any other solo recording in the history of jazz, but it was made under unfavorable conditions with a piano that was out of question and strongly reduced the musical potential of the player. This is something that a maximalist like Keith Jarrett can never see as a success, even if collective resonance contradicts him. But the end of a dialogue opens up new possibilities. Inevitably, one returns to the music itself and is less likely to be subject to the suggestions of the artist, since, as we should know, neither direct nor indirect self-portrayals can really be objective. This biography is not meant to counteract Keith Jarrett's verbal iconoclasm. It can, however, be seen as the attempt to mobilize all the possibilities language offers to “make new discoveries with the use of words,” as T.S. Eliot writes. This, in order to bring us closer to a music which belongs to the most fascinating artistic expressions of our times and is worthy of the intangible UNESCO World Cultural Heritage. Most of all, though, this music should be heard.




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Chapter 1 The 8th of May, 1945 – Transatlantic In exile in New York, Alfred Kantorowicz confides to his diary in German: „Es ist gut allein zu sein“ - „It is good to be alone.“ The date today is the 8th of May, 1945. The author notes further: „It is behind us. Already 12 years, in which the crimes of a thousand years have accumulated. I try to imagine how things look over there, but I know that every picture in my mind must capitulate against millions of realities. I am afraid to think further. Someone is broadcasting Beethoven's fifth. The hymn of victory?! There is no victory. Only defeated are to be found after this war..“ Years later, another writer, in a Europe that no longer appeared to be the same old continent, used „millions of realities over there“ to build his own monumental literary mosaic out of shredded memories and descriptions gathered from historical witnesses, made up of dry protocols and lonely confessions, torturous realizations and official explanations, or of off-side observances and hasty notes, written shortly before falling silent. Walter Kempowski's „Echolot“, is a grandiose document of the collected atmosphere of a historical moment in time - thousands of pages that are deeply embedded in the souls of the survivors. The black clouds had not yet blown away on this 8th of May, 1945, but, that an old concept of the world was dissolving and that a new epoch was dawning, was to be felt in many, perhaps in all gestures and statements of the time. At this moment, it must have finally become clear to the proud European powers that there could be no new start without America - no cultural start either. It was on this day that the hegemony of Europe came to an end. Paul Valéry found drastic words for this: „Europe is at the end of its career.“ American culture – hadn't it existed for quite a while already? Hadn't jazz, decades before, made its claim to be the entertainment music of the century and even to be something like the classical music of the New World, with a force field for a weary Europe. Hadn't ragtime pianists incorporated countless syncopations into their music and, with that, sharpened consciousness for the epoch at the turn of the century? They wanted to make their times stumble, instead of just step forward unobtrusively: ragtime – torn apart times. These rhythms represented the first Afro-American rebellion against the European sense of time – they functioned like a club thrown between marching legs. The syncopations mixed everything up – soon, it seemed no one wanted to play music the straight way anymore. Virtuoso zig-zagging around the cornerstones of bourgeois thoughts and sentiments had become a lush fashion. Many European artists, plagued with anemia, hoped for healing through an aesthetic blood transfusion. Not only music, but the entire realm of Art during the first half of the century and long after, was full of salutary addresses to the diversionists of a straight 4/4 meter. Debussy was the trendsetter with his stylized plantation dance – then came Ravel with his French blues and Milhaud with his own creation story. In the visual arts, it was Matisse with a cycle of silhouettes and Mondrian with his „Broadway Boogie Woogie,“ then the universalist Picabia with two cubistic „Chansons nègres,“ and the social critic Dix with his topically contemporary „Großstadt-Triptychon.“ Cocteau, Satie, Grosz, Marcel Carné, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Boris Vian, Julio Cortazar, Peter Rühmkorf - these were all artists with a feeling for rhythm that came from jazz. When Stravinsky published his „Ragtime“ in 1918 with an illustrated first edition cover by Pablo Picasso and later to be choreographed by Leonid Massine, cultural critics exclaimed that jazz had now finally become accepted as an art. But Europe did not only welcome the new sound because of its bizarre rhythms or the attractive eccentricity of its representatives. Europe was




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fascinated because this music, as the historian Eric Hobsbawn laconically stated, was thoroughly American. Jazz was, par excellence, the synonym of modernity, and the chrome-shining bands came from the same country as did Henry Ford’s automobiles. Europe knew about jazz. In the days after the caesura of the 8th of May 1945, however, these sounds became loud enough to drown everything else out. In spite of the cheap propaganda of the recent past, what Germany and Europe now got to hear didn't resemble the wall-crumbling trumpets of Jericho. These sounds were the torches and fire-signals of a new beginning. Dave Brubeck, who was stationed near Nürnberg at the end of the war and played in a military band, sensed why everybody there wanted to hear jazz. The old continent perceived a total intellectual unshackling in the new music. More so than in demolished Germany, or in other European countries, this was observable in France. Europe had been liberated by the Americans, but the city on the Seine acted as if it was its inhabitants who had conquered National Socialism with its barbaric ideology and cultural ignorance - for themselves and for the rest of the world. The city that never sleeps (for other reasons than New York) claimed for itself the status of being the center of the New - or, in other words, of being the center of emancipated thinking, feeling, seeing, tasting, smelling, and of course, hearing. Jazz was also accepted as a leading form of 20th Century music in the rest of Europe, but by adding the ingredients of French Existentialism, Paris created an exciting „parfum spécial“ for this era, out of American jazz. Their claim that theirs was the capital of a reenergized after-war Europe was laid rightly. On the 8th of May, 1945, which other country in Europe would have been able to propagate a completely new sense of life? The sounds of Claude Luter's clarinet, later Bill Coleman's trumpet and James Moody's saxophone rang out of the cellars of the Rue de la Huchette and the Rue des Carmes, as well as the clubs and concert halls of the Rue Saint-Benoit and the Rue du Fauburg Saint-Honoré. Discussions with Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus were to be heard emanating from the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots on the Boulevard Saint -Germain. The „thinkers singer“ and per se the sensual figure of the philosophy of Existentialism, Juliette Gréco, performed for an audience that included a Jean Cocteau, a Raymond Queneau and a Camille Bryen. Jacques Prévert's chanson „Les feuilles mortes,“ when sung through the fiery-red lips of Juliette Gréco came over like a belated promise, and had become, according to François Mauriac, „the consummate expression of the after-war period.“ Americans were quite able to understand the European fascination for their music, even though they themselves had no need to rearrange their ears. It was, after all, their sound culture which had fought along with the troops and won with them. Perhaps it was the brass sections of Duke Ellington's and Count Basie's orchestras which had become the American patriotic music of the days just after the 8th of May, 1945. The spirit of V-day was so naturally characterized by the gestures of jazz, that it was not even necessary to take note of it. The U.S. was too involved in other matters to notice Charlie Parker's diminished fifths or the intricate riffs played by the winds in Woody Herman’s big band. People were lost in dance and swept into a collective frenzy. For the observant playwright Arthur Miller, the after-war period was equal to bracing oneself against a steel door which had suddenly been opened from the inside. Suddenly, there was a feeling of gliding in some space capsule without gravity - any feeling of the above or the below, right or left, had become meaningless. Soon, old securities reappeared in the Motherland of unlimited optimism, but for a short historical moment, there was no compass: „It was such an exciting, such an elementary situation in which we found ourselves – we were like animals with pointed




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ears and our noses toward the wind.“ Keith Jarrett was born at this global „zero point“ on the 8th of May, 1945 in the small, industrial town of Allentown, Pennsylvania. As opposed to Louis Armstrong, the stated dates are not fictional – Satchmo adopted the attractive date of 4th of July, 1900 as his birthday, in order to bring his first moves on the planet into an effective context with American Independence Day. His real birthday was actually the 4th of August, 1901. It would hardly have occurred to a Keith Jarrett to decorate his course of life with an invented, spectacular kickoff. And, at the same time, the remarkable date of his birth has something compelling - almost as if he wanted his career to justify the highly symbolic day on which he came into the world. The end of the Second World War, this historical borderline between the old order and a new world order, between a U.S.A. that was returning to Europe, and a Europe that was lost without the New World – this Euro-American hinge is easy to recognize in the life and work of Keith Jarrett. There are not many artists like him who are at home on both continents, as representatives of both viewpoints and both cultures - listening and reacting acutely to the differences between manners of behavior in Europe and the U.S.A. In Allentown, 80 kilometers north of Philadelphia and 140 kilometers west of New York City, he was born into a family which noticeably carried the old continent within themselves. His grandparents on one side were European immigrants and still sometimes communicated in the languages of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. Keith, the first-born of five brothers, showed his talent at an early age, and when he started, at three, to play the piano, he received (like later some of his younger brothers) a classical musical education. His first solo-recital took place when he was seven at the Woman's Club of Allentown on the 12th of April, 1953 at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and was made up of piano music ranging from Baroque to Classical-Romantic idioms including a panorama of European art-music spanning 2 centuries. Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Grieg, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Moszkowski and Mussorgski as well as a few of his own childishly sassy program-music compositions were on the program. Jazz was not yet on the agenda. The future of this pianistic „Wunderkind“ was to be found in the past – in classical music. And yet, the astonishment was great when, in 1988, this celebrated jazz-pianist, the pioneer of a free improvisation undisturbed by pre-considerations, submitted the first part of the complete recording of Bach's „Well-Tempered Clavier“ to the public. The pianist's jazz career had completely overshadowed his classical beginnings. The very fact that Jarrett had always been concerned with classical music along with jazz, and that he had never lost sight of music by composers from Bach to the moderns, was almost a secret in wide circles of musical criticism. From the very beginning of his career, Keith Jarrett was an artist with a decisively European perspective – he remains so till today. His family background or his personal inclination towards European classical music, however, would not alone have been reason enough for him, the successful jazz musician, to hold so watchful an eye on developments in the Old World and search for his roots there. It was Europe's own development that had this effect and made it easier for him to take a step across the Atlantic. After the 8th of May, 1945, U.S. culture was intensely over flooding the apparently so dried-out European continent. But in the next 20 years after the Second World War, Europeans had adopted the new culture so thoroughly – amalgamating it with their own aesthetic standards - which they were almost able to level out the differences between themselves and the motherland of jazz. Even for Keith Jarrett, without the emancipation of European jazz and its expansion within the continent, it wouldn't have been so easy to include Europe into the topography of his artistic expression or musical presence.




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A large portion of Jarrett's gigantic recorded repertoire is dedicated to classical European music. He has long had a „European Quartet“ along with his „American Quartet,“ and from 1971 until today, his most important recordings were released by ECM in Munich, Germany. Apparently, he also feels at home in Europe and certainly seems to enjoy Southern France, where he often resides. Jarrett is also capable of thinking in a European fashion. Ian Carr, his only serious biographer until now, is from England. The only book about jazz that an overly critical Jarrett finds acceptable, was written by an Englishman – Geoff Dyers wonderful mixture of fiction and reality: „But Beautiful.“ This all follows a certain logic and Keith Jarrett can be described as an American with a large number of kindred by choice living in Europe. But Keith Jarrett could only take notice of Europe on his own aesthetic eye level. Just a few praiseworthy compositions with discrete adaptations of Afro-American sound-gestures, a few saxophonists transcribing phrases by Charlie Parker, a Max Beckmann with his „Self-Portrait with Saxophone“ or a few well-meant Dixieland bands at summer festivals from Italy to Sweden, are not enough. In order for the exchange of ideas between European and American jazz musicians to function as a two-way street, great artists like Jan Garbarek, Albert Mangelsdorff, Dave Holland, John McLaughlin, Kenny Wheeler or Tomasz Stańko had to perform on stage, festivals such as those in Berlin, Den Haag, Montreux and Antibes had to be established, prestigious avant-garde meetings like Donaueschingen had to open their gates to jazz, labels like MPS, ECM,or FMP had to be founded, producers on the scale of a Manfred Eicher and technicians like Erik Kongshaug had to appear, research centers in Graz and Darmstadt and educational centers for jazz in Dutch cities from Arnheim to Amsterdam had to be opened. This was all necessary if artists like Keith Jarrett, Lee Konitz, Herb Geller, Jiggs Whigham, Charlie Mariano, Don Cherry or Jimmy Woode should feel a connection to this part of the world, or if American jazz musicians were to find Europe welcoming for, at least, some period of time. Besides this, there is the point that the baritone saxophonist Ekkehard Jost bluntly made in his diagnosis of socio-cultural differences: „America has the music, but Europe has the ears to hear it.“ Many Americans were impressed by the habit of Europeans to really listen to the music and not to degrade it to a dinner side-dish. Cecil Taylor, who was on welfare for many years because his music stood contrary to the standards of American Entertainment, could explain a thing or two about how, for instance, concerts in clubs – even in the most traditional ones – were actually taken care of by the waiters. The length of an improvisation was supposed to match the time needed to have a drink at the bar, the dynamics of the music were expected to fit the ragout fin served at the restaurant. The ruthless intensity, the cluster-like chords Cecil Taylor would hammer out and the unbelievable density of his structures were by no means good qualifications for this kind of arrangement. One of Taylor's bass players Buell Neidlinger had often experienced some club-owner's resistance and described how they sometimes tried to stop the avant-gardist Taylor from continuing the concert: „We often got a sign to stop – the old radio signal: palm of the hand across the throat Cut, stop, end it now! But you can't. If Igor Stravinsky was sitting there writing, you can't just get up and say, ‘Stop it, Igor, we wanna sell a few whiskeys!’ And that goes for us, too.“ Cecil Taylor thought out the music while he was playing – like all those jazz musicians whose improvisations are equal to an act of ad-hoc composition. In all objectivity, however, such a harsh judgement shouldn't cover up the other side of the story. There has always been a great willingness to greet pioneering efforts with good will in the States. The continent of permanent immigration also has a long tradition of openness towards the new in artistic matters. It is possible to trace this tradition back to the middle of the 18th Century, at which time that universal genius of politics, Benjamin Franklin had already composed something like the musical Declaration of Independence – a string quartet for open strings. There are good




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reasons why so many prototypical American artists have been called „Mavericks“ a word too often interpreted to mean „oddballs.“ „Unbranded stray cattle,“ „motherless calf, “lost loner,“ „outsider“ – these synonyms are hints which reveal something about the surroundings and the spirit of the period in which the term „maverick“ first appeared. These were the days in which the American newcomers were transforming wild nature into something like home, and in which the border to the West was „open.“ Though the restless pioneers worked hard to keep their herds together, they may, at the same time have felt some sense of respect for their runaway cattle, recognizing their own unlimited desire for freedom in them. The spirit that was considered „primitive“ or „naive“ right up through the 19th Century in the music of a Charles Ives or a Carl Ruggles, was later reinterpreted as a self-assured musical philosophy which could be described as complex music dressed in shirt-sleeves. Some years ago, the enterprising chief director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, hosted a festival titled „American Mavericks,“ dedicated to just these „oddballs.“ On stage, an older man with a white beard could be seen and heard as he peeked out from behind his glasses, creating the most wonderful atmospheric moods that sounded like landscape paintings by Grandma Moses, fitted to the separate movements of Charles Ives' „Holidays Symphony.“ It was Lou Harrison, a pioneer who Gertrude Stein could have had in mind when she came up with the bizarre bonmot that America is the oldest country of the 20th Century. There is room for speculation here, but perhaps Gertrude Stein was trying to say that America, this comparatively young country, could already look back upon a longer tradition of artistic experimentation and aesthetic outsiderdom than European states - America as a place where individualism could thrive. Musicians from John Cage to La Monte Young and from Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Meredith Monk to Conlon Nancarrow represent a rustic phalanx which has often irritated Europeans, because they saw these artists as tinkerers instead of composers, discoverers and not developers, and visionaries without the backpack of tradition. It is certainly no accident, that Keith Jarrett has shown sympathy for these musical rebels and has studied the works of many artistic loners who scorn dogmas and patriarchal scholarship in music. These figures may not at all times have gone beyond the simple discovery of scurrilities, but they are notoriously nonconformist, historically unpredictable, go generously beyond the borders of their genre, are roughly hewn and, in the end, belong to the most surprising innovators of the music of the 20th Century. In their quest for freedom, they have often gone beyond the study of music and worked in other fields as philosophers, and theoreticians, authors, unorthodox teachers, librettists, comedians, iconoclasts and scientific experimentalists. In Stuttgart, Germany at the beginning of the 80s, Keith Jarrett interpreted works by Lou Harrison and Alan Hovhaness as well as a composition by the Australian Peggy Glanville-Hicks, in a concert which included European first performances. Later, the LP recording of Harrison's Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra and his Piano Concerto were released. But, just because he championed a few of these outsiders and found some affinity with them, doesn't mean that he, despite his indisputable penchant for the eccentric, could join up with the colorful phalanx of American „mavericks.“ Keith Jarrett is too well-educated in the traditional sense, too musically self-conscious, too organized, perhaps too conservative in the best sense of the word, and, most of all, too well-trained technically, to pass for an outright maverick. In a likeable way, these mavericks somehow do, after all, always represent the American cultural backwoods. But Keith is one thing for certain, without this quality he wouldn't have gained the reputation of being one of the greatest living jazz musicians: he is, like all important jazz musicians before him and at present, an individualist – and one of the most original ones. This kind of music lives through individualists. In order to be noticed in improvised jazz, you




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must be equipped with an identifiable physiognomy. The elegant virtuoso Stan Getz can be recognized immediately by his swinging saxophone phrases, we think of Miles Davis when hearing that stuffed trumpet sound, and we can assume it is Eroll Garner at the keyboard if his right hand casually jingles behind his left. Even big bands, with their fourteen to eighteen individuals playing together, have identifiable qualities that a listener can distinguish. Unorthodox instrumentation was typical for Stan Kenton's orchestra, the „four-brothers-sound“ modelled Woody Herman's various „herds, “and from the start, Count Basie's band was known for its skimpy piano introductions. Keith Jarrett possesses a long list of such qualities that determine his personal style, shape his music and single it out from the anonymity of the pianistically average. These signs and gestures are not necessarily readily audible. Really great jazz musicians must master their own version of squaring the circle by developing an individual style, and remaining original and surprising at the same time. Keith Jarrett's most recognizable qualities are the extravagance of his borderless self-inspirational capacities and his fascinating virtuosity, never leaving us with the feeling that some notes would have been better off left unplayed. His attack offers a wide variety of colors, and he possesses an unerring ear for his fellow performers who inspire him as he does them. He can hammer like a percussionist or summon up overtones like Claude Debussy. Like Thelonious Monk, he is able to coax out timbres no one would expect to find in the keyboard or in the body of the instrument. There is that constant element of surprise about how a piece will begin, how it will develop and if he will let the music just scurry forward as an impression or engrave it as a structural cornerstone into our memory. Every attempt to characterize Keith Jarrett must deal directly with his music and with nothing else. He is no theoretician, leader of a school of thought, author of musical wisdoms, agitator or essayist, but an active, performing musician. His concentration on the essential, the music, is absolute. This corresponds to his restraint concerning his radius of privacy, which appears so opposite to his felt global presence. It may sound far-fetched, but, in this way, one can compare him to a Giacomo Puccini or a Giuseppe Verdi. While the music of Puccini and Verdi was conquering the world, they themselves remained true to the stretch of land and the area in which they were born. For Verdi, this was the Emiglia Romagna between Roncole, Busseto and Sant'Agata and for Puccini, it was the graceful province of Toscana in a triangle between Lucca, Torre del lago and Viareggio. Keith Jarrett is just as surprisingly grounded in his local geography. Since 1972, he has been living in a house in New Jersey, which was half the age of the United States when he moved in, and is situated only a few miles away from Allentown, where he was born and spent his childhood. New York City had certainly appealed to him, but today he would hardly come up with the idea of permanently living in a city defined by grueling struggles for survival and breathless, non-stop energy. It is easy to imagine that the self-protective and introverted Keith Jarrett would well understand what John Steinbeck so impressively described in his „Birth of a New Yorker“. New York doesn't get into your clothes; it gets into your pores. Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough. This means giving up a part of one's identity to the city itself. There is another characteristic in which Jarrett's scrupulous restraint and his ability to concentrate on the essential is revealed. Even though he can look back at a more than fifty year old career, one needs no exceptional memory to list the musicians with whom he has worked on stage or in recording studios. Compared to the number of fellow players someone like Miles Davis could present within a similar time span, Keith Jarrett can only present a short list. Before he began producing records with his own groups, he had actually only been a member of three different




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bands. These were Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, and Miles Davis' open ensemble. But what milestones on the path to self-discovery they were! It would be easy to make a representative lexicon of jazz out of the list of musicians who had played with Art Blakey: Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, Benny Golson, Freddie Hubbard, Chuck Mangione, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Wayne Shorter, Johnny Griffin, and then, of course, Keith Jarrett. Most of them, and probably two hundred more musicians, will have kept a close eye on the drummer Art Blakey and learned more by doing so than in any Academy of Music. Charles Lloyd was cut from a different cloth, but equally important to Keith Jarrett because he was „hip.“ He was the first jazz musician to be accepted by younger audiences which were tending more and more towards rock music. He had a big name in the flower power scene of the sixties and performed successfully with his band at pop music festivals and in rock music venues. Finally, Miles Davis was one of the most inspirational figures in the history of jazz and kept his bands open for talented young musicians. The bassist Dave Holland, who had worked with Miles at a crucial phase in his career during the early development of rock-jazz, felt that his music was always leaning towards the next generation. Whether he was a pioneer or a musical revolutionary is not easy to agree upon. Even as concerns the development of the expressive be-bop style into the more intellectual cool-jazz style, others (Gil Evans, for instance) have played an equally important role. There are also others who can be seen as trailblazers in modal playing as well as in rock-jazz, but, except for in free jazz, (which he just let whizz by like a bad dream) Miles had put up signposts and left his mark on all the various styles of jazz since 1945. As soon as a new style was born, he was there to make an important contribution to it. He was a notorious early jazz master, whose recording of the masterpiece „Kind of Blue“ inspired composers like György Ligeti to find it worthy of a place next to the late Beethoven string quartets or to Bach's „Art of the Fugue.“ Miles Davis' bands have been called seminars in an imaginary jazz university. But what was taught and what was learned there? It is hardly possible to find great stylistic similarities between the many pianists who have worked with Miles. The guitarist Mike Stern's once remarked that the most difficult part of playing the guitar is breath-technique, that is, allowing the music to breathe. This statement can help us find an answer, since this is exactly what he learned with Miles Davis. Many other musicians have reported the same – Miles Davis was not a teacher, but a catalyzer who helped other musicians to develop in their own way. Once a few tips and a few agreements were made, the musicians were left on their own. Miles Davis' own somnambulistic self-assuredness, his personal presence, and his confidence in the musical competence of his performers, were more effective than nailed-down musical concepts and crisis-proof arrangements could have been. When listening to the early recordings of Keith Jarrett with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd or Miles Davis, one can only come to the conclusion that he was already giving back as much to those bandleaders as he received from them. One doesn't really get the impression that, compared to later recordings with his own musicians, he was more secure of style or more accomplished by working with these jazz giants. Instead, it seems he was acquiring a needed routine in performance and in listening to the others. Keith Jarrett had already reached a high level of artistic prowess at an early stage, which, however, in no way means he that didn't continue to develop - he simply trusted his own judgement above that of others. When playing with other musicians, he exercises continual care in terms of concentration, economy of means and aesthetic values. Till today, the circle of musicians he has often worked with only contains a handful of names. The same players appear over and over: for some thirty years he has




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performed with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock in trio formation, while Charlie Haden and Paul Motian have appeared in his group line-ups again and again. From 1947 till his death in 1991, the trumpeter Miles Davis had engaged more than forty-five pianists in his various bands, sometimes with three of them at the same time in one combo. In the same stretch of time, the pianist Keith Jarrett had, at the most, only stood on stage with around a dozen wind instrument players. As a jazz musician and outside of solo performance, Jarrett prefers the smaller formations: duo, trio, and quartet. It is hard to imagine him playing in a big band, and the only recording of this kind dates back to a performance with the College All-Stars under Don Jacoby, with the sixteen-year-old playing the role of pianistic representative of the Berklee School of Music. It wouldn't be false to see Keith Jarrett as a kind of hermit, who, from time to time, leaves his retreat to exhibit his not so hermit-like art on the international stage. This lends the aura of the messianic to him. With his shy and even dismissive style, however, he was never predestined to become a guru with a large crowd of followers. His repertoire, as well, circles around the three same areas: standards, (filling them, as only he can, with new life), his own compositions, and free solo improvisations. Then there is also the classical repertoire from Bach to the music of our times. Keith Jarrett's approach to art is remarkably consistent, and he can be critical to the point of self-renunciation. It was in Lausanne during a solo performance, that he walked to the edge of the stage and asked if there was someone in the audience who would like to go on playing for him – his inspiration had deserted him and he could come up with nothing more. That would have been fitting for a Glenn Gould or a Piotr Anderszewski, who – in Leeds, in the only piano competition he ever took part in, and as the most promising candidate for the finals - simply got up after the second movement of Webern's cryptic „Variationen, Op. 27,“ and left the podium not to be seen again. He later sarcastically commented that some of the jury members weren't even aware that he hadn't finished playing the piece. Fact is that Anderszewski had stopped of his own accord because he wasn't satisfied with his own interpretation. Keith Jarrett once said that he had been playing the drums all his life, and that drums were his first instrument. Even if this is factually true, it remains an exaggeration. Keith Jarrett's talent suffices to enable him to learn any instrument, as long as his interest in it is strong enough. Just by taking a look into his imposing discography, we find a whole arsenal of different sound tools which he has used since the beginning of his career: drums, various percussion instruments, flutes, gong, tabla, saxophone, electric guitar, electric bass, chimes, harmonica, banjo, cello and other keyboard instruments such as pipe-organ, e-piano, Hammond organ, celesta, harpsichord and clavichord. He will not, however, be found in the annals of music as a wind player or a drummer – he already has a permanent place there as one of the greatest jazz pianists in history and as a classical pianist of the highest rank. Jazz piano and classical piano – these terms stand for two different musical philosophies. No jazz musician will speak of the piano as if it were an omnipotent instrument. In jazz, the piano has often felt its limitations. It was too far away from the body of the player and too neutral. It remained – even if this contradicts pianistic terminology – literally a kind of „untouchable.“ It was basically incapable of satisfying the concepts of timbre and nuances that play such an important role in Afro-American music. Whoever asks himself why Keith Jarrett can't sit straight on his bench, screws his arms into the piano keys so strongly that we fear for the instrument or acts like a berserker when he plays jazz, can find an answer here: he wants to get to grips with the instrument and ravage it until it starts to moan like a blues guitar. No piano will begin producing blue notes on its own – you have to squeeze them out of it, even if it means becoming a part of the instrument like a centaur - half human, half piano. Keith Jarrett has earned fame for such metamorphoses, but they shouldn't be mystified – they are feats of the mind, and feats mean




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hard work. This one reason why the shrewd journalist and jazz author Peter Rüedi called Keith Jarrett a genius. And that is what this book is about: the work of a genius.




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Chapter 2 Growing up in Allentown Allentown, located on the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the state of Pennsylvania, is not a place one really visits by accident – you have to do so on purpose. But who wants to go there? It is an industrial town with some hundred-and-twenty-thousand inhabitants. In a statistic-hungry American society, we find it listed as the 224th largest city, and on an unofficial list of the most conservative communities, it holds twelfth place. Before Billy Joel set the city a musical monument on his album The Nylon Curtain in 1982, the politically aware singer must have had Bertolt Brecht in mind, who posed the question: „Are songs also sung in bad times?“ Brecht's own answer? „Yes, in bad times songs are sung – about bad times.“ In the sunset of Pennsylvania's epoch of heavy industry toward the end of the 20th Century, Billy Joel at first wanted – as he himself admitted – to write a text about Levittown, near which small city he had grown up. Later, it was Bethlehem, Allentown's smaller neighboring community, (which actually suffered even more through the humiliating disappearance of steel mills and coal mines during the recession and in the early 80s of the last century), that he had in mind. But the names Levittown and Bethlehem were less sing able or harder to fit into a rhyme, so the singer used Allentown for his stomping work song which calls upon the wealthy of the land to remember the working and under-privileged classes. In this economical hymn of despair, Allentown itself does not specifically play the major role: Billy Joel said Allentown was just a symbol for the situation of so many American cities in times of industrial demise: „Allentown is a metaphor for America. It sounds like Jimmytown, Bobbyburgh, Anytown. It just sounds real American. It's a symbol of a town that's having financial difficulties.“ After the song came out and became popular, the mayor of Allentown granted Billy Joel honorary citizenship during a ceremony in which the symbolic key to the city was handed over – and he knew why he did so. Even if some citizens were not pleased by the image their city had acquired and the way it was reconfirmed and blazoned out in Joel's text, Allentown had, in fact, profited from the uncouth song. All over the world, and even long after the song came out, whenever Allentonians referred to their hometown, they would be greeted by those who knew something about pop music (basically everybody) with words like, „Oh, from ALLENTOWN – didn't Billy Joel write a song about you?“ In the U.S., they call this „putting the place on the map.“ This example reveals the omnipresence and, in a way, the omnipotence of pop music. Did Keith Jarrett ever receive honorary citizenship from his town of birth? Did the greatest musician ever to come from the place, put Allentown on the map? Even if he had written a Jazz-Suite for piano and large orchestra with the title „Allentown,“ he wouldn't have been able to increase his hometowns fame. To achieve widespread attention, you need someone like Billy Joel to roll up his sleeves and face the audience – not to mention other singers like Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli or Tony Bennett, who, however, no one would have taken seriously if they had, (instead of Chicago, New York or San Francisco), sung „Allentown, my Allentown, “or „I Left my Heart in Allentown.“ Allentown is located in the middle of the once very prosperous Manufacturing Belt – one of the largest industrial regions of the world. This „belt“ stretches almost all the way from Wisconsin to New Jersey, but from the 70s of the last century onward, at which time the relocation of heavy industry into low-cost developing countries, cheaper imports and the migration of workers from the crisis area affected the economy, it has become better known under the sad name of the




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„Rust Belt.“ Like the „Ruhrgebiet“ in Germany, this „rust belt“ is structurally difficult, time-consuming, and has, till today, not satisfactorily developed into a region with well-functioning business services. The city of Detroit can serve as an example of how economic crises continue to affect this region up until our own times. Detroit - once a booming center of the automobile industry, with around one and a half million inhabitants in the 1950s – now has a population of about half of that, from which 85 percent consist of Afro-Americans with extremely discouraging employment opportunities. Detroit, with its eighty-five thousand empty or run-down houses and closed schools, has reached a state resembling that of a ghost-town. In July, 2013 it became the first bigger American city to declare bankruptcy and is considered extremely dangerous today – like all other hopeless places on the planet. Keith Jarrett comes from Allentown and, aside from his short residence in Boston during his soon discontinued studies at the Berklee School of Music and the New York period at the start of his career, he has remained loyal to the region. Since 1972, he has been residing in Oxford in the neighboring state of New Jersey, just a stone's throw away from his place of birth. At the time of his birth, of course, the Allentown district and the whole Lehigh Valley between Eastern Pennsylvania and bordering Western New Jersey was a much different place. Hard coal, iron and steel, oil production as well as tool and mechanical production were large scale industries then and there was employment, modest prosperity and a feeling of hope for young families. Keith Jarrett cannot have developed much love for Allentown – his testimony about his early years there, especially as concerns cultural aspects, is devastating: „Allentown is musically one of the most pathetic cities in the United States. There is nothing in that city: no food, no music, no life. It's a dead town.“ Here, the radical artist is speaking – someone who can only either withstand being in the center of the music world or breathing freely in the contemplative back woods. Allentown was, however, also known as „band city,“ because it is home to the oldest „Concert Band“ in the United States, comparable to the many amateur brass bands in Germany and other European countries. This band and other local ensembles performed regularly in the city's band shell in West Park. Besides, the city provided a yearly forum called the „Drum Corps Eastern Classic,“ for the most talented young marching bands and dance groups („Drums and Bugle Corps“) of the world. Charles Ives, for instance, found much inspiration for his highly original orchestral music in just such open air events and folksy-popular bands. In 1896, as well, a market hall was built which was redesigned three years later to house all sorts of cultural events. As of 1959, it has become the residence of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1951. This building, now named „Miller Symphony Hall“ has presented a long line of illustrious artists from Sarah Bernhardt at the beginning of the 20th Century to the Marx Brothers (who practiced their later so successful Broadway musical show „I'll Say She Is,“ here), to popular singers such as Bing Crosby and great jazz musicians like Benny Goodman, who included Allentown in their tours. None of this counted very much for Keith Jarrett during his childhood in Allentown and certainly not for the established artist, who, when looking back to his years of growth and self-discovery, remembers a family shaken with difficulties. Keith Jarrett's parents met before the outbreak of the Second World War and married in 1942. His father's background can be traced back to Irish-Scottish and French immigrants of the 18th Century. The family roots of his grandmother on his mother's side are to be found in the Austrian-Hungarian double monarchy. His grandmother was born in 1896 as Anna Temlin in the village of Sögersdorf, a small community in Southeastern Styria, which, through newly laid borders, became a part of Yugoslavia, and is now called Segovci in Slovenia. Around 1910, Anna emigrated from this turbulent part of Europe to join two older sisters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who had already




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come to the U.S. some years before. In Bethlehem, Anna became acquainted with Joseph Kuzma, a Slovene from the historical region of Prekmurje in the utmost Northeastern vicinity of Slovenia, situated in the four-country-point between Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. When Anna was twenty, she married Joseph Kuzma and they moved to Cleveland, Ohio where two children were born: Rudolph, who died when he was hit by a car at five years of age, and Irma, the future mother of Keith Jarrett. During Anna's pregnancy with her third child, her husband deserted her and she went back to Pennsylvania, where Joseph, her second son, was born. Four years later, Anna fell ill with tuberculosis, and Irma and her brother were placed in an orphanage. Anna was only 30 years old when she was taken out of the sanatorium and transferred to the Lehigh County Home hospice, convinced that there was nothing more to be done for her. There, a notable meeting with a member of the „Christian Science Church“ took place – with large-scale consequences. The conversations which developed between Anna Kuzma and the church member apparently brought about a kind of miracle healing. After a short time, she began to feel better and was released from the hospice completely healed and with an x-ray examination in which even traces of a past illness were no longer discovered. Anna Kuzma moved to Allentown, where her two children went to school until, shortly before graduation from high school, Joseph, skating on a frozen river, fell through the ice and drowned. After finishing school, Irma Jarrett worked as a secretary for the real estate agent Roscoe Q. Jarrett, whose son she later married. It should not be left unmentioned that, shortly after her complete recovery, Anna Kuzma joined the Christian Science Church together with her daughter Irma. As concerns the ethnic origins of the mother's family, Ian Carr's Jarrett biography has spread some confusion. He mentioned that Anna Kuzma spoke several languages including Hungarian, German, English and Windish, the latter supposedly a „Hungarian gypsy dialect.“ Apparently, Irma had been misled and held the life-long belief that she descended from Hungarian gypsies. But Windish is no gypsy dialect nor does the name Kuzma betray Magyar origins. In the multiethnic and multilingual state of Austria-Hungary, Windish was the sometimes derogatory term for Slovenian. The name Kuzma appears in almost all Slavic languages – in the Ukraine, Slovakia, Russia, Poland, Serbia and Croatia, but especially often in just that northeastern corner of Slovenia where Anna Temlin and Joseph Kuzma were born. There is even a village in the Prekmurje district called Kuzma. Members of Keith Jarrett's family from the Slovenian side still live in Prekmurje and Styria today and there is no evidence that either any Hungarian or ethnically Roma-related roots ever existed. Apparently, as was often the case with immigrants at that time - especially if they were trying to identify themselves with their new homeland - only a few family members seriously set out to document their origins in Southeastern Central Europe. In later interviews and even against better judgement, Keith Jarrett himself has perpetuated the myth of his partial ancestry from Hungarian gypsies – perhaps in order to make it appear as if his affinity to the music of Béla Bartók was somehow a gift of nature. Keith Jarrett's parents were not rich, but they did have a decent income due to his father's work as a real estate agent. Grandmother Anna Kuzma lived with the family and took care of the children. There were five sons: Keith, born in 1945, was the oldest, and Chris, born eleven years later, the youngest. In the families of both lines of descent, there were examples of musical talent, albeit nothing particularly outstanding. Keith's mother not only held more liberal beliefs than his more conservative father, but was apparently also the artistically more sophisticated of the two. She played trumpet, trombone and drums in the Harrison-Morton Junior High School in Allentown and must have had a very beautiful singing voice. Keith's high intelligence, lightning-quick thinking and outstanding musicality, his perfect sense of pitch, ability to replay what he had heard, and even improvise on, or better, play around with it, were, (especially for his mother),




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such obvious signs of talent that Keith was given a regular pianistic education when he was only three years old. These classical lessons fell on highly fruitful ground – already at the age of five, Keith performed at the „TV Teens Club“ led by the former bandleader Paul Whiteman in Philadelphia, and won a prize for his contribution. In the following years, he also gave public recitals on various occasions, such as concerts at the private „Wright School,“ which he attended and where he had already skipped two grades. In one performance there, he accompanied his three-and-a-half year younger violinist brother Eric on the piano in a violin concerto arrangement. Later, more solo piano recitals took place, presenting his great talent to amazed audiences in an auditorium in Atlanta for the Lion's Club, in Madison Square Garden in New York City and at other events. Apparently, Keith Jarrett's parents not only recognized and supported his talent very early, but also avoided all of the mistakes that parents of gifted children often make. One must only read through the memoires of some artists, to get an idea of some of the human tragedies often hidden behind these glittering careers. A 1934 evaluation by Samarij Savsinskij, a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory, of his three year old student Lazar Berman, reads as if it were a paraphrase of an assessment by Keith Jarrett's own teacher: „The boy has perfect pitch, can read music, finds his way through the keyboard with great facility, and picks up different works with impressive familiarity and ease; sometimes even full of emotion. Here, I would like to make particular reference to a Bach Menuett.“ Three weeks later, a city-wide competition was held at the State Conservatory, in which Berman took part. Anna Vlasova's protocoll states that the jury should file application to „bestow him with the greatest possible support, and place a pedologue at his side to have his development accompanied by a specialist.“ The results of this state support combined with the ambitions of his parents, could be experienced at marvelous concert evenings all over the world right up to Berman's death in 2005. In the pianist's own memoires, however, we discover a counterpoint to the story and learn more about the price he had to pay: „My life went by without happiness. I had the feeling no one cared for me. I was just a machine they had to make practice. I was already put on display as a child.“ Keith had good luck with his mother. For example, when she discovered that her son's second teacher, a certain Dr. Debodo, was advising his student to stay away from other children because of his superiority, she immediately canceled lessons. Possibly, it was her religious outlook as a member of the Church of Christ Scientists that led her to place moral and ethical principles above material success. But this simple example shows how important it was to these parents that their sons, including the highly gifted Keith, should experience quite a normal childhood. This included an interest, awakened by the father, in sports of all kinds. In Keith's case, these sports included basketball, table tennis, American football, chess and even wrestling. He won't have been aware of it at the time, but in the run of his musical career, the athletic endurance he acquired in his childhood was very beneficial to him. Keith Jarrett's four brothers Eric, Scott, Grant and Chris have worked as musicians, whereas, for the three youngest, Keith's unusual talent may have functioned as an inspiration and as an intimidation at once. His brother Grant, eight years younger, gigged with modest success, through clubs and hotel bars on the East Coast playing drums and piano, but in his second career as an author, unabashedly accuses Keith (in publications like the prologue and epilogue of his autobiographical book, „More Towels“ (2002)) of not supporting him in his musical career. Eric must have been an excellent violinist and like his three and a half year older brother, something of a prodigy. Scott, taking the middle place amongst the brothers, was born in 1952, and is a guitarist, singer and composer of pop-songs. Keith has also played on a few of his recordings and the two apparently get along well. Chris, the youngest brother, born in 1956, has come closest to following the ingenious footsteps of his brother, and has, after long years of travel, set




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forth with a remarkable career as a composer and pianist, especially in Germany. There, he continued his studies (he had withdrawn from Oberlin Conservatory near Cleveland due to lack of funds) at the University of Oldenburg, where he was soon hired as a teacher, and remained in this position for several years. Today, he resides in Germany, in the Southwestern Palatinate near the French border. A much greater influence upon the four younger brothers than Keith's hyper talent, however, must have been the separation of their parents, beginning around 1956. Through this, the secure existence of a stable home turned into a personal nightmare for the mother and her five under-aged children – the smallest one still a baby and the oldest, 12 or 13 years of age. Ian Carr quoted Irma Jarrett as she described what this human and economical catastrophe meant to her: „The struggle from there on was very difficult. There were five little kids... I went through a breakdown, I thought I would die and I looked at those faces and I knew... I mean I had to sell everything because I couldn't pay bills. It was a mess! I had enough time just trying to support them...there were times when we didn't eat or we didn't have rent money... I constantly worked two or three jobs to try to support them and I don't regret it.“ Worse still, the separation did not take place in friendship. Daniel Jarrett supported the family financially, but the parents never spoke to one another and the children had no contact with their father for more than 10 years. It was much later, in Keith's adulthood, that a relationship between Daniel Jarrett and his sons re-began – first with the eldest, and then with the younger brothers. It is easy to envision the devastating effects this separation must have had on these five children during their formative years. The effect on the eight year old Eric was disastrous – after the divorce, he lost orientation and gave up the violin permanently. Keith, on the other hand, seems to have spun himself into the cocoon of his music at this phase of his personal development, finding protection there from the unfriendly turn in his family environment. On the other hand, consciously or sub-consciously, his musical orientation had changed as of this period. Classical music receded into the background – at fifteen, his piano lessons were called off - and he turned more and more towards styles related to his father's musical sphere: those of high-quality entertainment and jazz. In this precarious situation, however, his intensified concentration on music wasn't really a path towards achieving more household harmony. The family had been forced to move from place to place, and there were increasingly cramped conditions to be dealt with: two sons trying to practice at the same time, for instance, or Keith trying to immerse himself in his music while his mother and brothers were active in other matters, and, even when they tried, were not fully able to reduce the noise, due to the dog wagging about the piano. The Jarrett home sometimes seemed like an powder keg, where not much was needed to light the fuse and start an explosion. Without wanting to psychologize here very much, one can certainly risk the subtle guess that such experiences echo in Keith Jarrett's almost neurotic reactions to noise at his solo concerts. It was around this time that Keith Jarrett started to work with other young musicians, playing in bars and clubs in the Allentown area. Keith Jarrett's „dead town,“ however, apparently didn't offer an ample amount of decent performance opportunities. At least there was a certain Matt Gillespie with whose capable big band; Keith Jarrett was able to collect some first experiences at performances at school parties and local celebrations. Soon he was to have his first meeting with one of the real greats in jazz history: with Dave Brubeck, whom he had seen in concert. Keith studied Brubeck's piano transcriptions carefully and was able to conclude from them that a concentrated musical concept could attain acceptable results even without overflowing virtuosity. This conclusion also seems to have left a mark on Jarrett's aesthetic horizon.




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Another event that prompted him to aim, more and more, towards the career of a genuine jazz musician, was the Stan Kenton Summer Camp at Michigan State University. He became aware of the camp while reading „Down Beat“ magazine, (the central organ of jazz aficionados worldwide) and took part in it for one week. Here, young musicians were given the opportunity to play in smaller groups under the direction of members of the Stan Kenton big band and professors from the North Texas State Band, and to write music for the university big band. Keith Jarrett wrote and arranged his composition „Carbon Deposit“ for the North Texas State Band – a composition which was so successful that a band leader from Minnesota who was present, offered, (albeit unsuccessfully), to buy it for his own orchestra. Keith Jarrett never published the work. Soon after, he visited a „Jazz Clinic“ in Indiana, and there encountered some of the same musicians he had already met from Stan Kenton's band. The impression Keith made on Kenton must have been strong: he was immediately invited to perform in two concerts with the Kenton band in Atlantic City and in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It is hard to imagine a higher honor for a sixteen-year-old musician. This is an impressive demonstration of how high the musical level reached by Keith Jarrett in such a short period of time, really was. Keith received his diploma at the Emaus High School when he was sixteen and had the opportunity to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Instead, he preferred to remain in Allentown for a few months, taking an office job and collecting more experience as a jazz musician in small clubs. He was then invited to the Dear Head Inn in the Pocono Mountains, some miles outside of Allentown, to perform in a trio for several weeks as a substitute for a pianist who was taken ill. It was his first serious job as a pianist. Later, he played in this club again and again, and once even performed there on the guitar. The tenor saxophonist Stan Getz was, by chance, sitting in the audience during this concert, and Keith Jarrett later explained - not without some soft irony - how he actually offered him a job as a guitarist. Exactly 30 years after his first performance at the Dear Head's Inn, on the 16th of September, 1992, and now considered one of the greatest jazz musicians of our times; Jarrett gave a trio concert there again – this time with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. With this performance, he paid his respects to this long-standing club and its owner for his acknowledgement of „good music.“ Back to the year 1962: At that time, a local jazz figure, Fred Waring, had heard Keith and offered him a job in his own club as member of a Dixieland Band as soon as he was finished with his engagement at the Dear Head's. Later, Waring also gave him the opportunity to perform with „Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians“ on tour. Just a short time later, Jarrett also performed with Johnny Coates, the very pianist for whom he had sat in for shortly before. Without much apparent effort, Keith was able to change roles - leaving the piano behind and taking up the drums instead. Shortly after this, still in the spring of 1962, Jarrett received his first opportunity to make an official recording. The Decca label had made a contract with the big band leader Don Jacoby to release one recording a year with a College All Star Band made up of alternating students from different universities. When Keith Jarrett was invited, (under Fred Waring's mediation), by Don Jacoby to participate in the project, he listed himself as a student, but was not yet registered as such. On the LP, which was released in the same year, he was labelled as the youngest member and the only student of Berklee School of Music in Boston in the orchestra. In his liner notes to the album, Charles Suber, then still editor of Down Beat magazine, described Jarrett's versatile playing as „interesting and typical,“ - whatever that may have meant. Then he wrote something a bit more mysterious, which could only have made sense if Keith Jarrett had not yet begun his studies at the Berklee School, but had already gotten through his audition: „Accompanied by his




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mother (not Jacoby), he auditioned for Berklee by brilliantly executing concerti by Brahms and Gershwin, and finishing with several of his original jazz compositions.“ Reading through the eighteen names making up the ensemble, no one, outside of Keith Jarrett and Don Jacoby (who had performed with Benny Goodman and Les Brown and must have been a remarkable teacher), can be discovered who one might reencounter in the Pantheon of jazz. Keith Jarrett had never been in a recording studio before and didn't know his fellow musicians, but he felt that, outside of some Count Basie chords; the piano arrangement was basically empty. He was allowed to present some embellishments in the ballads – but the music still does fit his description. It is made up of typical arrangements of be-bop compositions like Charlie Parker's „Lover Man,“ and Dizzy Gillespie's intricate up-tempo piece „Groovin' High,“ some swing compositions in medium tempo, and a few jazzy tear-jerkers like „Anema e core,“ but, except for some trumpet choruses for the band leader himself, there is hardly much room for improvisation. Keith Jarrett did what a clever pianist usually does in such ensembles: he holds back, plays a few, well-timed chords at the right spots between the brass sections and stays decently in the background; in the ballads, perhaps adding some melodic counterpoint, or ornamentations. But in the introductions to two of the ballads, („Young Man with the Blues,“ and „Just for a Thrill“) we can already hear that remarkable style one can observe in later performances. He echoes the standing chords in the winds with melodic phrases, played with an extremely delicate touch. Every note is performed with laid back but crystal clear articulation, and if the winds play some characteristic motives, he utilizes his melodic common sense and follows suit. Perhaps this is nothing sensational, but experienced musicians would already be picking up their ears and jotting down the name of the man at the piano, just in case they might be looking for a new pianist for their own band in a year or two. Fred Waring was not only a musician – he was active as a TV moderator, publisher and impresario. Through him and on tour with him, Jarrett got to know the Bill Evans Trio, which, at the time, included the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Paul Motian, both of whom Keith was later to work with in his own bands – Paul Motian in his first and Gary Peacock in his second trio. It was the first time he had heard Bill Evans live - a pianist, who, like no other at the time, was a role model for other pianists and played on one of Miles Davis' pioneering recordings: „Kind of Blue.“ It was typical of Fred Waring's musical farsightedness, that he suggested to Keith to embark on a trip to Paris and study with Nadia Boulanger, an artist working between the continents and a muse for a long list of American and European composers of all shades – including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass. Teaching in Paris and occasionally in the U.S., Boulanger's universality and high demands as a pianist, organist, composer, pedagogue and theoretician, would have been a great challenge for Keith Jarrett, who, however, still shied away from such a big step. Who knows what kind of relationship would have been the result of this set-up, if it had ever been put into practice. The freedom-loving Keith Jarrett, who, like many other geniuses, was suspicious of learning and teaching situations right from the start of his career, would not necessarily have been responsive to systematic pedagogy. The world is full of artists who were never accepted into an academy and have nonetheless had greater significance for Art than conservatory graduates. Some of these conservatories rightly bear the names of these artists, but within their doors, they remain institutions of preservation without any seminars for budding revolutionaries. There is evidence that an affiliation with Nadia Boulanger would not have been a success story. The „master classes“ with Stan Kenton's orchestra paved the way for a scholarship, which Keith Jarrett received in 1963, for the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Until today, the Berklee College of Music, as it is now called, is one of the most renowned training facilities for




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jazz musicians internationally – comparable to the Julliard School in New York, where Miles Davis studied, but soon left, realizing that for his concept of music, there was nothing there to learn. Here already Miles Davis seems to have been a kind of role model for Keith Jarrett and, after a more or less frustrating year as student at Berklee, he quit - and the institution itself actually participated in making him do so. Some of the courses, (especially counterpoint), seemed quite alright; but in others, he was faced with a situation similar to what Dave Brubeck had experienced during his short period as a student of Arnold Schoenberg in California. On occasion, Brubeck was asked by Schoenberg why he had used such and such a note in such and such a composition - Brubeck replied that he thought it sounded well. Schoenberg made it clear that this wasn't enough for him: you should always know and be able to explain why exactly the chosen note and no other had been placed where it was. That was Brubeck's last lesson with Arnold Schoenberg. It was especially at seminars with Robert Share that Keith Jarrett had similar experiences. Share would mark parts of his compositions red, and explain that it was impossible to modulate from given harmony to the next – this, in works which had already been successfully performed at school concerts. Jarrett himself still thinks that he was cast out of Berklee because they may have feared an anti-Berklee campaign, which Keith could have initiated with members of a trio with which he was playing in Boston. The two other trio members were Berklee drop-outs. The straw that broke the camel's back, though, was an incident during a jam session on the school's premises: Jarrett was creating sounds from the inside of the piano by plucking the strings, until one of the school administrators cried, „Out! Out!“ and sent him out of the room. Keith retorted, „Thanks a lot,“ and left. Jarrett somewhat smugly reported later, that, after a concert with Gary Burton at the Newport Jazz Festival, this man had told him how much he was sorry about the incident. To this Jarrett replied: „Don't you realize, I've built my whole reputation on your kicking me out of your school!“ In his speech at the „Jazz Masters“ award presentation, in January of 2014, one can still discern his pride of the „drop-out trio.“ Pride, however, was not a very good advisor or breadwinner in 1964. Keith Jarrett had to leave the school and remain in Boston for a few months without exactly swimming in concerts with his „drop-out trio.“ To survive in the „most conservative of all American cities“ as Keith called it, he was forced, for the first time, and perhaps for the last, to make musical compromises and accepted cocktail bar and background music gigs. In these not so rosy times, he met Margot Ann Erney, his one year younger girlfriend from high school days, who was beginning her studies at the New England School of Design. They renewed their friendship and married in the same year. Keith Jarrett stated that it was insecurity and the distance from home that brought them together. Now, becoming more and more known amongst connoisseurs but not by the wider public the musician's economic situation hadn't much improved. He tried, again and again, to establish himself with his trio in a Boston musical “scene,” which was very limited for someone with his qualifications and aesthetic rigor. This went on until he and his young wife made up their minds to go where jazz was always at home, even if no one was waiting for you there: to New York.

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