About Inside Out
Inside Out marks a departure for the group often referred to as the "Standards Trio", or perhaps less a departure than a continuation of a process and a methodology that have always been important to the three players individually. One can say that Inside Out picks up where Changeless (ECM 1392) left off thirteen years earlier. Recorded at two revelatory concerts at London's Royal Festival Hall in July 2000, it finds the Standards Trio leaving standards behind. True, they arrive at a reading of "When I Fall In Love" to close the proceedings but the route they take is the indirect one. Inside Out, for most of its duration, is a re-immersion in the swirling waters of free playing.
Reviewing the Festival Hall concert in The Guardian, John Fordham wrote, "The Standards Trio certainly played differently - although there was plenty of hushed rumination, there was also plenty of flat out jamming and animated, one-touch conversation... The Trio, though historically dedicated to the jazz-standards repertoire, has thrown away the maps and flown by the seat of its pants before, and this was just such a performance of startling fluency, of movement between orthodox and free improvising, familiar tunes sometimes appearing like wraiths at the edge of rich ensemble tapestries painted entirely on the fly... A brilliant motivic improviser, Jarrett develops his solos out of his encyclopaedically-informed love of melody, the secret of his success however freely he plays."
Keith Jarrett, from his liner notes: "The trio, thus far, has concentrated mostly on already existing material to use as a vehicle for improvising. But I've always been interested in turning things inside out, so I mentioned to Jack and Gary, during a tour in Europe, that perhaps we would scrap the format - the whole idea of having to use any material... Those of us who experimented a lot with so-called "free" playing in the 60s have years of experience to bring to it again..." Jarrett feels, rightly, that free playing is "an amazingly important part of the true jazz history", though it is an aspect of the music often glossed over by its chroniclers. Pulling the music out of the air makes its special demands: "We need to be even more in tune with each other to play this way, without material; and even more attentive. Every possibility is available if you take away the tunes, but only some are valid under the circumstances. It is only sensitivity to the flux that determines whether the music succeeds or fails."
Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have a great deal of experience in free playing. Peacock worked all the parameters of the free jazz revolution in New York of the 1960s, from the glorious exaltations of Albert Ayler's Bells and Ghosts to the Paul Bley trio's brow-furrowed exploration of the free ballad. He ventures frequently into the free zone today, in the company of Marilyn Crispell.
While Peacock was overturning jazz orthodoxy on the East Coast, Jack DeJohnette was involved in parallel activities on Chicago's South Side. In 1963 he was a member of Muhal Richard Abrams' pioneering Experimental Band, whose line-up including fledgeling Art Ensemble of Chicago firebrands Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. In 1966 in New York, DeJohnette played with John Coltrane, bridging the gap between the Coltrane groups with Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali. In Miles's electric group he brought a different touch to open-form improvising, sometimes alongside Keith Jarrett (Live/Evil, Miles At Fillmore etc). Currently his primary context for improvising without tunes is his duo with British reedman John Surman.
For Keith Jarrett, free playing has meant many things, including what might happen in between the signposts or the exit signs that served as fixed materials in his historically important group with Paul Motian, Charlie Haden and Dewey Redman. His solo concerts have always been free, too, as have, in entirely different ways such projects as Spirits or Book of Ways or the experimental baroque organ recordings Hymns/Spheres and Incantations - some of which have very little to do with "jazz". The free playing at the Royal Festival Hall, however, pays plenty of attention to jazz's roots.
Keith Jarrett: "It should be obvious when listening to this CD how important the blues are here. We somehow couldn't avoid blues language in London, even in the context of free playing; the blues are so pervasive and true. Sometimes we live the blues even when we're free of the blues."
About Whisper Not
There have been many exceptional recordings by the "Standards Trio" since the group was launched in 1983. This one, however, has particular significance for Keith Jarrett's vast audience. It is the first recording issued following the pianist's triumphant return to the concert platform after a three years absence. In that time, in the grip of a debilitating illness, he had been able only to complete the home-recorded and bare-boned "The Melody At Night, With You", a recording that turned adversity to advantage by focussing intently - as few jazz players ever had - on the melodic structure of American standards and folk songs. Paradoxically, this album, virtually stripped of improvisational content, turned out to be one of the great improviser's most successful albums.
Jarrett says that recording "The Melody At Night" transformed his approach to playing ballads. As he explained to England's The Guardian recently: "What I do is transform energy into music. So the quality of energy changed and I transformed what was left of that energy into something I wished I had been able to find before. When you have a lot of energy you tend to want to do a lot of things. I had only enough energy to do one thing, which made it more Zen-like -play the melody, but really play the melody.... I learnt something about playing the piano. The heart determines where the music comes from, and there was more heart in that recording than there was virtuosity, but what I had as a pianist I put into the heart place, and that can translate into other contexts." Keith Jarrett also took up this theme in an interview with American magazine Jazziz. "When the trio has been playing recently, the way we play ballads has changed. For me that's partly because of 'The Melody At Night, With You'. I'd had the need to play, but had an inability to be my old self. I had to reinvent how to play and get at least what I was used to getting from playing, and then I discovered I was actually getting more from less. In theory, I always knew that could be true, that it could be all about the melody."
And so it is that the ballads on the present set, recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience at Paris's Palais des Congrès have a special luminescence. Benny Golson's "Whisper Not", Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge", Monk's "Round Midnight", Heyman/Young's "When I Fall In Love" (still associated with, above all, the Bill Evans Trio"), and "All My Tomorrows" the Sammy Cahn/Jimmy van Heusen song that Shirley Horn has made her own - all of these are honored as compositions, firstly, rather than as springboards for improvisation. Jarrett says "I've wanted to stick to the melody if I could get enough out of the melody. One of the things about jazz players who are mediocre is they wish the melody would go away: 'Let's play the melody, and then let's play.' It's a test of the player to be able to get something from the actual vehicle."
Uptempo tunes though - and particularly those created, in the first instance, to propel a bop soloist to heights of invention - are another matter. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette soar on Bud Powell's "Bouncin' With Bud" and "Hallucinations", Dizzy Gillespie's "Groovin' High", and Clifford Brown's "Sandu"; this is bebop played at the highest level. Jarrett: "With bebop the phrasing is more like a voice phrasing, because most of the bebop players were horn players. I wanted to have a chance to phrase like that..." The goal, in fact, is to transform the idiom of Charlie Parker to the piano, and Jarrett is one of very few pianists with the fluency to achieve this.
About The Melody At Night, With You
The Melody At Night, With You, Keith Jarrett's radiant new solo album, breaks patterns established by its predecessors. Firstly, it is not a concert recording, but was recorded at the pianist's home studio in rural New Jersey. Secondly, it concerns itself not with improvisation as a compositional process in Jarrett's long-running "solo concerts" tradition but with the finely-crafted material at hand - love songs, by some of the outstanding songwriters of the century, including Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, and others, plus interpretations of the traditional songs "My Wild Irish Rose" and "Shenandoah". An album of "standards" played solo, its character is quite unlike that of the ebullient, outgoing "Standards Trio" - and yet Keith has often performed these pieces and recorded some of them previously, including "Blame It On My Youth" and "Don't Ever Leave Me" in his group with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette (see for instance the albums At The Blue Note and The Cure).
On The Melody At Night, With You Jarrett dispenses with the jazz soloist's conventional emphasis on dexterity, the "clever" phrase, the virtuosic sleight-of-hand. Instead he strips these songs to their melodic essence and, gently, lays bare their emotional core. Only on Ellington's "I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good" does he let rip with a cascading solo of glittering elegance. Elsewhere the mood is tender, hushed and affectionate on what may be Jarrett's most intimate recording to date. If The Melody resembles anything else in his performing history, then it is those moments at the conclusion of one of his solo concerts when, case proven, journey completed, he has given an informal reading of "Danny Boy" or "Over The Rainbow" as a parting gift to the audience.
When Jarrett first embarked, back in the early 1980s, upon what has become a meticulous reinvestigation of the American popular songbook he pointed out, "It's the same thing playing Samuel Barber or 'All The Things You Are'. The problem is not that one is easier or harder. To enter is the problem... When a standard tune is well-written it provides the door, but you don't just enter and sit there. You have to keep making the space vital." The variety of means with which Jarrett has vitalized that space has been one of the most fascinating aspects of his reclaiming of the jazz standard. His approach here recalls his now-famous remark on the occasion of his first Bach recordings: "This music doesn't need my help." Again and again he draws our attention to the structure of these songs and shows what melody can mean when persuasively played, while also keeping in focus a sense of the songs' lyrics. He doesn't allow himself to forget what these pieces are about.
Jarrett's work with standard material has often brought him to new ideas of his own, and here Oscar Levant's "Blame It On My Youth", played with more than a hint of regret, leads him to an improvisation that he titles "Meditation", a dark vamp with a pedal point in the bass that tolls ominously, like a church bell at midnight.
Other pieces require little introduction. The traditional folk songs "My Wild Irish Rose" and "Shenandoah" are uncommon choices for a jazz player, although Chick Webb used to play the former and Johnny Smith the latter. "I Loves You Porgy" from the 1935 folk opera Porgy and Bess is played with restraint, Jarrett assiduously avoiding the over-emotional treatment the piece so frequently receives. "Be My Love" was an enormous hit for operatic tenor Mario Lanza in 1951 and later found its way into the repertoires of several jazz players including Phil Woods and Ahmad Jamal.
"The Melody At Night, With You" is dedicated to Jarrett's wife Rose Anne.
