Keith Jarrett Budapest : Jazz CD Reviews - 2020 MusicWeb International

CD 1

Part I [14:42]

Part II [6:54]

Part III [8:10]

Part IV [7:35]

CD 2

Part V [5:13)]

Part VI [3:52]

Part VII [5:45]

Part VIII [5:35]

Part IX [2:42]

Part X [8:40]

Part XI (5:54)

Part XII – Blues (4:04)

It’s A Lonesome Old Town (Tobias, Kisco) (8:01)

Answer Me, My Love (Winkler, Rauch) (4:55)

In 1973 Keith Jarrett began giving wholly improvised solo concerts, initially playing long extended improvisations, and later choosing, as here, to create what are effectively piano suites in several movements live in front of an audience. The first recording to come from such concerts was Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne, which presented concerts given in March and July of 1973 and was released in November of that year. Though well received, it did not have anything like the remarkable commercial success of the solo album which succeeded it – The Köln Concert, a concert given in Cologne’s Opera House in January 1975 and released by ECM later in the same year. It sold (and still sells) in huge numbers. It was followed by a whole series of recordings of live solo concerts – includingSun Bear Concerts (recorded 1976: released 1978),Concerts (1981:1982), Dark Intervals (1987:1988),Paris Concert (1988:1990), Vienna Concert (1991:1992),La Scala (1995:1997), Radiance (2002:2005),Paris/London: Testament (2008:2009), and Munich2016 (2016:2019). Now comes Budapest Concert, recorded on the same European tour as Munich 2016.

In listening to and assessing this new CD it is impossible not to be affected by the news which emerged in October 2020; in an interview on October 10^th 2020, in the New York Times, Jarrett made public the news that in 2018 he had suffered two strokes, which have left him partially paralyzed. He is unable to use his left hand and is quoted as saying “My left side is all partially paralyzed … I don’t feel right now like I’m a pianist”. Jarrett acknowledges that his career as a pianist is probably over.

It is a reasonable guess that there are some unreleased recordings which will yet see the light of day, but this news clearly marks some kind of closure. It is good then, to be able to report that Budapest Concert is, fittingly, a powerfully impressive disc.

As with other of Jarrett’s lengthy improvised works, the listener has to be both patient and carefully attentive. Though some who don’t like Jarrett’s approach have dismissed these recordings as self-indulgent doodlings, that is surely far from the truth. If, as here, a man sits at the piano for over 70 minutes and improvises, there will inevitably be some moments where the intensity flags, or the pianist (even if he be, say, Beethoven) repeats himself/herself. But Jarrett, at his best – as on this recording – is able to think not just from one phrase to the next, but also on a larger ‘architectural’ scale. As each Part responds to, grows out of, what has gone before Jarrett constructs a work which has an impressive organic wholeness.

Coleridge famously made a crucial distinction (one which German thinkers had made before him) between two kinds of form: “The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.” Jarrett is one of jazz’s modern masters of organic form; the listener has, as with any worthwhile music, to be active, not just passive, since (s)he has to follow the growth of the music, to discern how “it develops itself from within”.

Each listener has to do that for herself/himself. I can only offer some notes on what I hear, what kind of organic form I discern when I listen to this lengthy improvisation. Part I, almost fifteen minutes long, is characterized by heavy bass notes in the left hand and some skittering runs in the right. It has an intensity and, at times, a near frenzy – so that one feels the absence of any contrasting lightness or relaxation. Part II is slower and profoundly melancholy in its reflectiveness. Part III is dominated by minatory left-hand figures and Part IV is also more than a little bleak in mood. At this point CD1 ends – the break between the two CDs perhaps corresponding to the interval in Budapest. Part V involves a change of atmosphere / emotion. It is hard to decide whether one should describe this piece as a ballad or perhaps even a berceuse? The music certainly speaks of tenderness, and – after some of the portentous music heard earlier – breathes a sense of hope and reassurance. With Part VI one realizes that Part IV has, indeed, effected an important transition. The mood is now far more positive as the tempo increases in a piece full of momentum, driven by boogie-woogie patterns. There is now a joy to the proceedings, a joy blossoming out of the earlier bleakness. For the listener part of that joy comes from one’s sense of Jarrett’s delight in the process/experience of discovery and invention – that last word being used here in its older sense (nowadays marked archaic in the Oxford English Dictionary) of ‘discovering’, rather than ‘making’. Part VII slows things down again in what is, this time, unmistakably a romantic ballad (who might write the lyrics for it?), and of genuine beauty. Things turn – this, at least, is what I hear – more elegiac in Part VIII. I have played Parts VII and VIII to friends who are knowledgeable classical music lovers but have no interest in jazz. The reaction, especially when I added other Parts to the playlist, was that here was a musician who seems to have internalized a huge range of musical idioms, classical, jazz and ‘popular’ so completely, that he can draw successfully on any of them without merely quoting from them, and in doing so creates a kind of coherent music which is sui generis.

Part IX seems – in method – to echo Part I, with similar rapid right hand runs over a forceful left hand. But I think Jarrett makes more of the idea here – gives it more coherence and shape. Yet in its obvious resemblance to how the ‘suite’ began, it gives the listener an indication that Jarrett is preparing to bring this long improvisation to a close. In Part X the heavy left hand is excessively dominant, the right hand figures seeming to offer little by way of balance. Part XI, on the other hand, is a magnificent piece, musically whole and formally perfect, emotionally untroubled, too sublimely calm to indulge in emotional extravagances of either sadness or happiness. Then Jarrett launches into a crowd-stirring, full blooded blues solo, grounded in, but more harmonically sophisticated than, the boogie-woogie tradition. But this finale is far more than merely crowd-pleasing. Though Jarrett is of mixed Hungarian and Scottish ancestry, he has absorbed the blues so thoroughly that a piece like this closing improvisation does what great blues performances do, in a confirmation of words written by the great Afro-American novelist Richard Wright, in a Foreword to an edition (1963) of Paul Oliver’s book The Meaning of the Blues: “the most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and down-heartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exuberant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope.” Wright might almost have been writing about this ‘Blues’ – it is the only one of the 12 Parts to be given a title – which closes Keith Jarrett’s Budapest improvisation.

The concert issued in 2019 as Munich 2016 took place on July 16, 2016, i.e. 13 days after this Budapest concert. On the two CD set of the Munich concert, Jarrett plays a 12-part improvised suite (altogether different from the one he had played in Budapest), plus, as encores, three standards – ‘Answer Me, My Love’ (Winkler, Rauch), ‘It’s A Lonesome Old Town’ (Tobias, Kisco) and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (Arlen, Harburg). On this new set of CDs the improvised suite is followed by just two encores, ‘It’s A Lonesome Old Town’ and ‘‘Answer Me, My Love’. The corresponding performances of the standards are generally similar in conception, though ‘It’s A Lonesome Old Town’ is treated at greater length on the Budapest recording. The order is different, of course, and on Budapest Concert there are two, rather than three, standards. It isn’t clear why there are only two. Did Jarrett choose to play only two in Budapest? Or did he play three, but one was omitted, for some reason, from the recording? These questions don’t, I suppose, really matter. In both cases the encores are very much secondary – pleasant and accomplished as they are on both recordings – to the improvised suites which precede them. It is in the suites that the real musical substance of each concert is to be found. (The encores largely function as a way of bringing both performer and audience back to a state of less demanding intensity). And what impressive music there is in both suites. I am inclined, at present, to think that the suite on Budapest Concert is even better than that on Munich 2016 (but perhaps that preference is, in part, a product of its having entered my mind more recently?).

A truly outstanding album, which grows richer with every hearing. It makes the poignancy of this remarkable pianist’s present state of health even greater.

Glyn Pursglove


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