I’d seen him in concert on numerous occasions, and been put off not only by what I then saw as the unthinking adulation of his followers (many of them – horrors! – not Proper Jazz Fans At All), but also by the grimacing and grunting that I considered disfigured his performances. I must confess to having some sympathy with the latter view, having held a somewhat less vitriolically dismissive, but none the less negative opinion of his work until relatively recently.

One only has to glance at the comment section of Sebastian Scotney’s recent reviewto see just how violently Jarrett still divides opinion: admirers see him as a uniquely inspired (and inspirational) figure detractors think him grossly overrated, even going so far as to say he is ‘to the music world what Jack Vettriano is to the art world’. All these avenues of enquiry are intelligently (and surprisingly readably) explored by Elsdon, and the book as a whole is a thought-provoking, tightly focused and scholarly piece of work, of considerable interest not only to Jarrett aficionados, but also to anyone fascinated by the processes involved in playing, listening to and marketing music.Įach reader will no doubt seize on one of said avenues as of particular interest to him or her my own preference is for the speculation concerning the music’s popularity. Peter Elsdon, a jazz pianist who lectures on music at the University of Hull, attempts to anatomise this phenomenon in a number of ways: contextualising the concert (both widely, in terms of jazz’s 1970s reception in Europe, and more narrowly, in terms of Jarrett’s other dates on the same tour, as well as by looking at other contemporary solo piano recordings) examining the fundamental nature of improvisation speculating about the reasons behind the music’s rapturous reception, both on the night and subsequently on record philosophising about recordings as artefacts and ‘texts’ and scrupulously examining the music itself courtesy of the authorised 1991 transcription by Yukiko Kishinami and Kuniko Yamashita.

Yet, as Carr goes on to point out, ‘within this narrow confine, he achieves the usual state of grace – the inspired state’, and such is the enduring power of the recording of the night’s music that the ECM albums (first a double LP, then a single CD) have now sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The Köln Concert was recorded in distinctly unpromising circumstances: Keith Jarrett was utterly exhausted (he had not slept for over 24 hours before the performance), had just bolted down an Italian meal in an overheated restaurant, and was so unhappy with the state of the instrument he’d been given that he later compared it with ‘a harpsichord or a piano with tacks in it’, and consequently played much of his solo concert, as biographer Ian Carr points out, in ‘the lower middle area of the piano a lot of repetitive rhythms – because it is that such rhythms “speak” and sound best’. Peter Elsdon – Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert

Keith jarrett sleeper transcription