Byablue Keith Jarrett

• 1 Byablue 07:20
• 2 Konya 03:21
• 3 Rainbow 08:34
• 4 Trieste 09:38
• 5 Fantasm 01:13
• 6 Yahllah 08:29
• 7 Byablue 03:38
• Total Runtime 42:13

Info for Byablue

„Amidst rumored tension within the band, Keith Jarrett's 'American' Quartet met for one last marathon recording date before disbanding, and Impulse made the most of it by spreading the music out over two separate releases. From the evidence of this, the first and slightly superior LP, the band certainly doesn't sound as if it was ready to break up; the interplay has become telepathic, the musical ideas are still fresh and there is a willingness to experiment. 'Rainbow,' credited to Margot Jarrett, is top-flight lyrical Keith, while 'Trieste' evokes the mood and some of the language of spiritual Coltrane Byablue songs. There is adventure, too; with Dewey Redman and Jarrett wailing on tenor and soprano respectively, 'Konya' sounds almost like a muezzin call to prayer, and 'Yahllah' is a rare, brave, moving merger of jazz and the Middle East. Highly recommended.“ (Richard S Byablue, AMG)

Keith Jarrett, piano, soprano saxophone, percussion
Dewey Redman, tenor saxophone, musette
Charlie Haden, bass
Paul Motian, drums, percussion

Recorded October, 1976 at Generation Sound Studios, NYC
Engineered by Tony May
Mixed at The Burbank Studios, Burbank, CA
Mastered at Kendrun Recorders, Burbank, CA
Produced by Esmond Edwards

Digitally remastered

Keith Jarrett
At the end of 2008, Keith Jarrett added two concerts to his schedule at short notice – one at Paris’s Salle Pleyel (November 26), one at London’s Royal Festival Hall (December 1) . The music on “Testament” is from these concerts. Their range is compendious, Jarrett’s improvisational imagination continually uncovering new forms, in a music stirred by powerful emotions. In his liner notes, the pianist is forthright about the personal circumstances promoting a need to lose himself in the work once more.

He also reminds the reader/listener that “it is not natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas and play something that is of lasting value and brand new.” This, however, has been the history and substance of the solo concerts since Jarrett initiated them, almost forty years ago . Over time their connection to ‘jazz’ has often become tenuous, yet Jarrett’s solo concerts, with the foregrounding of melody and the continual building, and relinquishing, of structure, are also removed from “free improvisation” as a genre. Jarrett’s solo work is effectively its own idiom, and has been subject to periodic revisions by the pianist. “In the early part of this decade, I tried to bring the format back: starting from nothing and building a universe.”

Since the “Radiance” album and the “Tokyo Solo” DVD of 2002 Jarrett has been adjusting the flow of the work, more often working with shorter blocks of material. “I continued to find a wealth of music inside this open format, stopping whenever the music told me to.” This approach distinguished “The Carnegie Hall Concert” (2006), and it is most effectively deployed in “Testament” , where the strongly-contrasting elements of the sections of the Paris concert in particular have the logic of a spontaneously-composed suite. The nerves-bared London performance (the first UK solo show in 18 years) is different again: “The concert went on and, though the beginning was a dark, searching, multi-tonal melodic triumph, by the end it somehow became a throbbing, never-to-be-repeated pulsing rock band of a concert (unless it was a church service, in which case, Hallelujah!).”

In the end, the improviser does what must be done. As Keith Jarrett said, a long time ago, “If you’re a rock climber, once you’re halfway up the face of the cliff, you have to keep moving, you have to keep going somewhere. And that’s what I do, I find a way.”

These days, however, Jarrett is rationing the number of ascents: there have been less than thirty solo concerts in the last decade, making “Testament” a special event indeed. Two further solo performances are scheduled for 2009 – at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels on October 9, and at Berlin’s Philharmonie on October 12.

This album contains no booklet.