Keith Jarrett: Solo-Concerts Bremen Lausanne

Here, in all its 2023 audiophile detail, and cut from the original analogue masters, is the 3xLP set which launched the extraordinary tale of Keith Jarrett's in-the-moment- improvised, in-concert solo albums. Arguably the most momentous of all the reissues in ECM's estimable Luminessence series, the Bremen and Lausanne concerts were recorded in March and July 1973 and released as a set in November that year, a synchronous fifty years precisely before this edition.

The 2xLP The Köln Concert, recorded and released in 1975, was the album which bankrolled ECM, then a small independent label with no apparent prospects of longevity other than the ears of its founder, Manfred Eicher. But it was Solo-Concerts Bremen Lausanne which prepared the ground for the label's breakthrough. The performances were part of an audacious eighteen-city European concert tour during which Jarrett performed entirely without any predetermined starting points or set lists. There was no precedent, unless one counts Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness authorship of On The Road. But unlike Kerouac, Jarrett did not embark on the venture with a stash of amphetamines big enough to change the outcome of the Super Bowl. He relied completely on the music laying latent inside him.

The tour came with substantial artistic and monetary risks, but it was something Jarrett was determined to do. He had left Miles Davis at the end of 1971, after three years during which he had grown increasingly averse to electrification. He stayed with Davis as long as he did, he said later, only because of his respect for the trumpeter. In his liner notes for the Bremen and Lausanne recordings, Jarrett wrote: "I am, and have been, carrying on an anti-electric-music crusade of which this is an exhibit for the prosecution. Electricity goes through all of us and is not to be relegated to wires."

After the plugged-in magic which Jarrett had brought to such Davis albums as Live-Evil (Columbia, 1971)—and which some observers regard as among the more compelling elements of that and other Davisian curate's eggs of the period—Jarrett's solo tour was intended to wave a flag for unscripted acoustic jazz. The performances would be unplanned, unplugged and uncommercial. But as history relates, Jarrett's outpouring of Chopinesque romanticism, gospel intensity and driving grooves was a box office hit as well as an artistic triumph.

We have become so familiar with Jarrett's solo performances that we do, perhaps, forget what courage it takes to step on to a stage and play for over an hour without any set list, either of standards or originals, and without any bandmates to offer moral and practical support. Jarrett, however, has never lacked courage. In 2018, the second of two strokes left him partially paralysed and he is in 2023 only able to play with three fingers of his right hand, picking out melodies with his little finger and, as he puts it, suggesting harmonies with two others. In the few interviews he has given since 2018, Jarrett appears stoic and uncrushed. Meanwhile his recorded music continues to be a joy in its many settings, and not least in solo concerts such as these.

The 2xCD edition of Solo-Concerts Bremen Lausanne has also been reissued as part of Luminessence.

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