Keith Jarrett - Solo Piano

Solo Piano

Jarrett's first album for ECM, Facing You (1971), was a solo piano date recorded in the studio. He has continued to record solo piano albums in the studio intermittently throughout his career, including Staircase (1976), The Moth and the Flame (1981), and The Melody at Night, With You (1999). Book of Ways (1986) is a studio recording of clavichord solos.

The studio albums are modestly successful entries in the Jarrett catalog, but in 1973, Jarrett also began playing totally improvised solo concerts, and it is the popularity of these voluminous concert recordings that has made him one of the best-selling jazz artists in history. Albums released from these concerts include; the 1973 album Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne which Time Magazine gave its 'Jazz Album of the Year' award. The Köln Concert (1975) which became the best selling piano recording in history; and Sun Bear Concerts (1976) - a 10-LP (and later 6-CD) Box Set.

Another of Jarrett's solo concerts, Dark Intervals (1987, Tokyo), had less of a free-form improvisation feel to it because of the brevity of the pieces. Sounding more like a set of short compositions, these pieces are nonetheless entirely improvised.

After a hiatus, Jarrett returned to the extended solo improvised concert format with Paris Concert (1990), Vienna Concert (1991), and La Scala (1995), before his career was interrupted by chronic fatigue syndrome. These later concerts tend to be more influenced by classical music than the earlier ones, reflecting his interest in composers such as Bach and Shostakovich, and are mostly less indebted to popular genres such as blues and gospel. The Vienna Concert in particular has been widely hailed as a masterpiece of improvisation, with its huge, arch-like opening movement, with a stunningly dissonant, virtuosic middle section, framed by more lyrical sections; Jarrett himself, in the liner notes to the album, named it his greatest achievement and the fulfillment of everything he was aiming to accomplish.

Jarrett has commented that his best performances have been when he has had only the slightest notion of what he was going to play at the next moment. He also said that most people don't know "what he does", which relates to what Miles Davis said to him expressing bewilderment - as to how Jarrett could "play from nothing". What Jarrett did during his most creative solo concerts seems to have been to have put himself into a meditative 'altered state of consciousness' which facilitated the flow of many brilliant and original musical ideas. In the liner notes of the Bremen Lausanne album Jarrett states something to the effect that he is a conduit for the 'Creator', something his mother had apparently discussed with him.

Jarrett's 100th solo performance in Japan was captured on video at Suntory Hall Tokyo on April 14, 1987, and released the same year. The recording was titled Solo Tribute. This is a set of almost all standard songs.

Another video recording, titled Last Solo, was released in 1987 from a live solo concert at Kan-i Hoken hall, Tokyo, Japan, recorded January 25, 1984.

Both Solo Tribute and Last Solo were reissued on Image Entertainment DVD in 2002.

In the late 1990s, Jarrett was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and was unable to leave his home for long periods of time. It was during this period that he recorded The Melody at Night, With You, a solo piano effort consisting of jazz standards presented with very little of the reinterpretation he usually employs. The album had originally been a Christmas gift to his second wife, Rose Anne.

By 2000, Jarrett had returned to touring, both solo and with the Standards Trio. Two 2002 solo concerts in Japan, Jarrett's first solo piano concerts following his illness, were released on the 2005 CD Radiance (a complete concert in Osaka, and excerpts from one in Tokyo), and the 2006 DVD Tokyo Solo (the entire Tokyo performance). In contrast with previous concerts (which were generally a pair of continuous improvisations 30–40 minutes long), the 2002 concerts consist of a linked series of shorter improvisations (some as short as a minute and a half, a few of fifteen or twenty minutes).

In September 2005 at Carnegie Hall, Jarrett performed his first solo concert in North America in more than ten years, released a year later as a double-CD set (The Carnegie Hall Concert).

On November 26, 2008, he performed solo in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, and a few days later, on December 1, at London's Royal Festival Hall, marking the first time Jarrett had played solo in London in seventeen years. These concerts were released in October 2009 on the album Paris / London: Testament.