Keith Jarrett: piano Gary Peacock: double-bass
Jack DeJohnette: drums
ECM 1800/01 (2-CD Set 440 018 786-2)
In his liner notes to the trio's last release Inside Out, Keith Jarrett gave notice that they would be “releasing more of this kind of thing in the near future." Accordingly, Always Let Me Go, taped on two inspired nights in Tokyo last year, features exclusively “free music that was not written, rehearsed or planned in advance of the performances."
It should be said at once though that Jarrett's conception of free music is a very broad-based one. There is an abundance of melody in these spontaneous constructions, and passing allusions to the entire history of jazz, though the music also reaches beyond it. There are cascades of tone-clusters, tremulous lyrical passages, deep grooves, wide-ranging dynamics, silences, and quiet dissonances. ("Think of Webern", Keith Jarrett said, when describing some of the Tokyo music's more introverted passages to German journalist Wolfgang Sandner.) Throughout, the exchange of energies between the players flows with an unerring sense of rightness...
Historically, Japan has been the site of some of Keith Jarrett's most significant recordings - the epochal Sun Bear Concerts solo set, Personal Mountains with the Belonging quartet, Tokyo '96 with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. And now, Always Let Me Go with its organic improvisations and exhilarating interplay.
“I hear Inside Out as a prelude to what we're doing now," Jarrett told Down Beat. “We've gone much further into the head space of free playing - into the ozone immediately. What we're doing now is freer..." But through the two hours and seventeen minutes of Always Let Me Go, Jarrett's sense of structure keeps all the music in focus. “I have instincts about form over large periods of time..." The instincts that served him so well through the decades of the solo concerts are put at the service of the group music here. And it truly is a group music. If playing “standards" often obliged the trio to adhere to roles specific to their instruments, that is not the case here. Roles shift constantly on Always Let Me Go; Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette frequently assume lead voices in the music, their contributions framed and completed by Jarrett's astute choice of notes. “(On the tapes from Tokyo) I feel that our identities become erased in the quality of energy we're working with..."
On the trio: “We are different people, and the alchemy we get comes from our separate natures. We've been together for so long" - the group is now in its 20th year - “and we understand each other's language and trust each other one hundred per cent. When we're playing, we're morphing more and more into what we could have been before, but we didn't know it yet."
In brief, Always Let Me Go sets a new high-water mark for the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette.
This two CD-set is released to coincide with another special event: Keith Jarrett's 150th Japanese concert will take place in Tokyo's Metropolitan Music Hall on October 30th. It will be a solo concert, Jarrett's first since 1999.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
