331. Keith Jarret - The Koln Concert (1975)














Track Listing

1. Part I
2. Part IIa
3. Part IIb
4. Part IIc

Review

This is a truly impressive album, if you thought that improvisational Jazz can't be beautiful, and not a intellectual kind of beauty but one that pretty much anyone would recognise as beautiful, think again. Keith Jarret sits down at the piano and hammers off some of the most exciting and most accessible sets of improvisational jazz to ever be recorded.

The album is actually quite a bit of fun, because you can hear a master at work, and you don't just hear his piano playing, you also hear his whoops when he does something he is liking for example, it has that beauty that comes with a live album and it is all the more impressive for being live.

The fact that Jarret sticks to the middle keys of the keyboard actually helps the album to sound mellower, there aren't many shrill or deep notes, it all stays there in the midrange sliding in your mind. Jarret's mix of jazz, rock and pop influences is also readily apparent making it an album which is always exciting to listen to.

Track Highlights


1. Part I
2. Part IIa
3. Part IIb
4. Part IIc

(it's the track listing, really)

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Quite a notable part of the sublimity of this concert is Jarrett's ability to produce seemingly limitless improvised material over a vamp of one or two chords for prolonged periods of time. For instance, in Part I, he spends almost 12 minutes vamping over the chords Am7 (A minor 7) to G major, sometimes in a slow, rubato feel, and other times in a bluesy, gospel rock feel. And for about the last 6 minutes of Part I, he vamps over an A major theme. Roughly the first 8 minutes of Part II A is a vamp over a D major groove with a repeated bass vamp in the left hand, and in Part II B, Jarrett improvises over an F# minor vamp for approximately the first 6 minutes.

Since the release of The Köln Concert, Jarrett has been asked by pianists, students, musicologists and others, to publish the music. At first, he resisted such requests since, as he said, the music played was improvised "on a certain night and should go as quickly as it comes." However, this improvisation already existed in recording, and the transcription only represents the music, so he finally came around to publish an authorized edition, but recommended that every pianist who intended to play the concert should use the recording itself as having the final word. A transcription has also been published by Manuel Barrueco for classical guitar.

Part IIc transcribed to vibraphone: