The CD of his Carnegie Hall Concert of 2005 is released this week.
Chinin of the NYT visited Jarrett and interviewed him. It is worth reading for Jarrett fans. A quote:
Mr. Jarrett is one of the most renowned pianists in the world, a virtuoso equally at home performing Bach or bebop. And though he had been a child prodigy and a member of Miles Davis’s best jazz-rock bands, it was his Herculean solo improvisations — full concerts seemingly conjured out of thin air — that brought him worldwide renown. His 1975 album “The Köln Concert” (ECM) is the all-time best-selling solo piano recording in any genre, with more than three million copies sold.
In a recent conversation at his home in northwest New Jersey, Mr. Jarrett shed some light on the discipline behind his creative process, which his more perceptive audiences valorize as much as his facility at the piano. And he took a rare clinical walk-through, like a coach reviewing game film, of the spontaneous opus that ECM is releasing on Tuesday as “The Carnegie Hall Concert.”
The album documents in its entirety a performance that surpassed even the hopes of the crowd, which clamored for, and got, five encores. “There was so much comfort exuding from his body into the instrument, and out to us in the audience, that you felt like there were no boundaries at all,” said the pianist Jason Moran. “It was a real reminder of what the possibilities of the instrument are, and what the possibilities of a solo concert are.”
The whole piece is here. Image from the NYT article from this past Sunday.
