Keith Jarrett Gets Down on His Own

Keith Jarrett’s new album, No End, is a Jam Band of one.

If you’re shocked by any direction that Keith Jarrett takes, then you haven’t been paying attention.  The peripatetic pianist has recorded albums on solo pipe organ (Hymns/Spheres) and clavichord (Book of Ways). He’s recorded classical works from Bach to Mozart, including Bach’s Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano with violinist Michelle Makarski just this past September.  Jarrett was an early exponent of Arvo Pärt (Tabula Rasa) and took on the music of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (Sacred Hymns).  And let’s not forget his second album.  He followed his debut, a trio jazz release with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, with Restoration Ruin, a singer-songwriter outing with Jarrett crooning in a Bob Dylan impersonation complete with harmonica. In a case of foreshadowing, he played every instrument himself.

So when Jarrett decides to create a jam band with him as the only member of the group, you shouldn’t be surprised. No End was recorded in 1986, the year after Spirits, which used a similar technique of Jarrett alone in his studio, using two cassette tape decks to overdub himself, bouncing tracks from one deck to the other.  It’s the anti-Manfred Eicher/ECM Records recording aesthetic.

But No End is the yin to Spirits yang.  Spirits was soft and meditative, with wood flutes, recorders and tablas. While No End is dreamy in its own way, it’s more the dreaming of an after-hours jam in a New Orleans nightclub.  There is a drugged out, heroin suffused mood to this album, with vamps that could go on forever and solos that meander like cigarette smoke, all of which are interesting analogies for a musician who has long eschewed drugs and cigarettes and the culture that surrounds them.

The first track will have you popping the CD out to make sure this is a Keith Jarrett disc you’ve inserted.  It opens to shakers, a snaky, swamp-walk bass line and Jarrett soloing freely and melodically, not on piano, but electric guitar, evoking a backwater storyteller or an African griot.  In fact, there’s a lot of Africa in Jarrett’s guitar playing, with his terse, slightly reverbed tone and cross-picking lines that recall Ali Farka Toure in an especially dreamy mood. Some of these tracks, like the blues-inflected “VI” could’ve been on a Les Baxter/Martin Denny space-age bachelor pad album.  All you need are the jungle animal noises.

Keith Jarrett

Jarrett’s drumming and percussion veer between congo village grooves to Muscle Shoals earthiness.  The bass, a central sound on this album, is sensual, probing and as rubbery as Jim Carrey’s face.  The only recognizably Jarrett signature here is his grunt, which you hear occasionally, but usually his vocalizing is turned into trancy choirs on “XI” or murmuring voices on “III”  On “IV” he gets an “Iko Iko” style chant going ala the Dixie Cups.

No End, like Spirits, was completely improvised and occasionally comes off as casual to the point of off-handedness.  On “XII,” he sounds like he’s tuning up the bass, literally, before it slips into an ostinato groove.

You could see No End as the ultimate form of narcissism. In the liner notes, Jarrett himself says that “the pitfalls of playing music in a band are the ‘differences’ between each player’s musical experiences.”  That’s something a lot of bands would celebrate, but Jarrett eliminated the differences, playing an ensemble music without the ensemble, jamming with himself in what could be perceived as an exercise in total self-gratification. But Jarrett is a multi-dimensional musician and he pulls off these jams as if it were, indeed, a band, reacting and coaxing each other along in his lazy haze of sound.  This is as earthy and funky as Jarrett has ever been.  And if you don’t drift away, he does slip in some piano on “X”.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB SPECIAL

New members of the Echoes CD of the Month Club will get Moby’s Innocents album, our November CD of the Month and a BONUS CD of Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Tales from the Grand Bazaar.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.  You’ll also get the new Echoes CD, Transmissions: The Echoes Living Room Concerts V19, You can do it all right here. You

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Ludovico Einaudi’s 21st Century Classicism-Echoes CD of the Month

Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse
Echoes March CD of the Month

Hear an audio version of this review with music in the Echoes Podcast.

Hear In a Time Lapse featured this weekend 3/8-10/2013 on Echoes.

You could pretty much stop listening to Ludovico Einaudi’s new album In a Time Lapse after the second track and that would be enough for a perfect CD.  The piece is called “Time Lapse” and it’s a perfect sculpture of minimalist ostinatos and Arvo Pärt-like sustains, with ambient electronics hanging off the edges like shimmering specters.  It’s one of those pieces, like Pachelbel’s “Canon,” that builds without ever resolving itself.  And you don’t want it to.

If you do want resolution, go to the next track: “Life.”  This is a surging cinematic foray that harkens back to earlier Einaudi compositions like “Divenire” with its grand crescendo and heroic cadence.  It’s the kind of song that has put Einaudi at the top of the European charts.

Ludovico Einaudi is an artist who treads a delicate line.  His music isn’t classical with a capitol “C” but neither is it classical-lite.  He studied with Italian avant-garde icon, Luciano Berio and came of age during the age of minimalism.  Because of those influences, his themes are emotionally charged without resorting to sentimentality.  And unlike most classical composers, he uses ambience as part of his compositions, whether it’s quirky electronics, or the open spaces between notes.  He actually lists a guy, Alberto Fabris, in the musicians’ credits for playing “reverb.”  On the composition “Walk,” piano, celesta and kalimba glisten like distant stars glowing in a dark sky of viola and cello.

Ludovico Einaudi Live on Echoes

Of all the neo-classical contemplative solo pianists out there, Einaudi has the broadest range, and the most tightly controlled technique.  Listen to the heart breaking pensiveness of “Discovery at Night,” one of two solo tracks, and you’ll realize that you can just toss out almost every other solo piano album you’ve heard lately. While most of them go for the rhapsodic sentiment, Einaudi, in just a few notes, taps right into the soul of emotion.  You’ll find no better example of this than this video of his recent on-line live performance, playing all of In A Time Lapse solo.   It’s 75 minutes long so it takes a minute or so to load.

Einaudi has often been called a minimalist composer, but that never seemed quite accurate.  However, on In a Time Lapse, he employs many minimalist techniques: cyclical themes, loops and grooves lend his works a modal, spiritually introspective repose. Nowhere is that used to better effect than on “Newton’s Cradle.” It’s an epic track with insistent electronic ostinatos, shuddering electronic bass tones and ringing vibes, bells, and percussion creating a mood of tense apprehension.

For In a Time Lapse Ludovico Einaudi has pulled out all the stops, synthesizing a 21^st century classicism that is all-embracing in its musical influences, and all-enveloping in its emotional sweep.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like In A Time Lapse   Club members will get this album 10 days before release.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see what you’ve been missing.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line.  Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album.

Colin Vallon Trios Parlour Room Space Jazz.

Echoes will be recording a session with the Swiss jazz group, The Colin Vallon Trio tonight in Philadelphia at Turtle Studios.   A new group to American shores, they have their own take on the chamber jazz sound favored by their label, ECM records as well as their late countrymen, E.S.T.   I came across a video of the group performing the title track of their ECM debut, Rruga.  I love the setting and the mood.  It’s perfect for an Echoes Living Room Concert.  I hope our performance tonight has this atmosphere

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

The Five Best George Winston CDs

George Winston in Original Echoes Living Room

George Winston Then & Now

George Winston is both loved and reviled. His impressionistic solo piano albums came to define the Windham Hill sound and he’s among the first musicians most people think of when you say, New Age.  Praised with five and four star reviews from Downbeat and Rolling Stone for his debut album,  Autumn,  in 1980, he’s since come to be synonymous with shlock for many critics.  But those critics are missing the point.   Winston took the lyricism and mood that made Keith Jarrett‘s music so popular and refined them into what he called “folk piano” on his first Windham Hill album, Autumn.  It launched a million solo pianists, yet none of them has attained George Winston’s almost transcendent marriage of melody and atmosphere.

Winston is an eclectic artists who cites The Doors and Tangerine Dream, Fats Waller and John Coltrane,  Philip Aaberg and  Steve Reich as influences.  He occasionally goes off and pays tribute to these artists, doing entire albums of Vince Guaraldi compositions, for instance.  With one exception, he’s less successful playing their music, which often reveals his own limitations as a pianist.  Nothing wrong with limitations, everyone’s got them.  But when he plays inside those limitations, George Winston moves outside the box.
As part of Echoes Then & Now series in our 20th Anniversary celebration, we’re featuring the music of George Winston.  You can hear his show tonight, August 14.  All of Winston’s albums have been reissued in recent years with bonus tracks and illuminating liner notes from the artist.

FIVE BEST GEORGE WINSTON CDS.

1 Forest
Forest is the CD that brought me into the Winston fold.  I liked his earlier albums, but on Forest, George Winston went deeper, extending his ringing, open-air, melodic sound, embracing the minimalist influences of Steve Reich on “Tamarack Pines,” the jazz harmonies of the late-organist Larry Young‘s “The Cradle” and the slow ragtime of William Bolcom‘s “Graceful Ghost.  But whether playing the challenging inside-the-piano effects of his “Forbidden Forest” or the inviting themes of “Cloudy This Morning,” George Winston’s gifted lyricism remains true.

2 Autumn
This is the album that started it all, although it’s techically his second album, it was his first on Windham Hill Records.  The opening “Colors/Dance” rings with the open clarity of the Montana plains where Winston grew up.  “Woods,” with its quasi-classical arpeggios, seems to dance in the air.  And so it goes throughout Autumn as the pianist unfolds his melodies in what sounds like spontaneous reverie.

3 Night Divides the Day-The Music of the Doors
I think this may be the least well-received Winston album by his fans, but I thought there were a couple tracks on here that attained true interpretive brilliance and revealed the depth and breadth of George Winston’s vision.  he reimagined   “My Wild Love” from a drunken stomp into a zen piano koan and his take on “Bird of Prey,” based on a Jim Morrison poem aspires to the imagery Morrison wrote.  His shimmering rendition of “Crystal Ship” is magical and serene.   One of the thrills of Echoes was the Living room concert that The Doors’ Ray Manzarek and George Winston played together, facing each other on twin grand pianos.

4 Winter Into Spring
Never a florid player, Winston’s best music emerges from those spaces where the melody finds its own refractions, unimpeded by the pointless ornamentation and quasi-classical flourishes that tarnish so many pianists who followed in his wake.  song.    Winter Into Spring was Winston’s second album for Windham Hill Records and following up on the themes of Autum, it continues down the seasonal road and includes several of Winston’s signature compositions including “January Stars” and the extended ruminations of “Rain.”

5 December
December is a Christmas album that transcends the season.  Mixing traditional carols, a couple of classical works and his own originals, Winston takes you into winter from the cover photo of a snow blanketed field to his final invocation, “Peace.”  Winston’s piano drops notes with icy clarity into a winter silence, rippling through “Carol of Bells” and coaxing dark introspective moods from his own suite, “Night,” which includes Winston playing inside the piano like a harp. Who would’ve thought that the gentle melodies of “Peace” were inspired by the soundtrack to TV’s The Outer Limits?

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000NKL/echoes

B00005NNDO december

George Winston is both loved and reviled. His impressionistic solo piano albums have come to define the Windham Hill sound and he’s among the first musician most people think of when you say, New Age.  Praised with five and four star reviews from Downbeat and Rolling Stone upon his debut album Autumn in 1980, he’s since come to be synonymous with shlock for many critics.
But George Winston, despite his continued popularity, is still an underrated pianist.  He took the lyricism and mood that made Keith Jarrett’s music so popular and refined them into what he called “folk piano” on his first Windham Hill album, Autumn.  It launched a million solo pianists, yet none of them has attained George Winston’s almost transcendent marriage of melody and atmosphere.
Winston is an eclectic artists who cite’s The Doors and Tangerine Dream, Fats Waller and Phillip Aaberg, Steve Reich and Alex De Grassi as influences.  He often goes off and pays tribute to these artists, doing entire albums of Vince Guaraldi compositions.  With one exception, he’s less successful there playing music that often reveals his own limitations as a pianist.  Nothing wrong with limitations, everyone’s got them.  But when he plays inside those limitations, George Winston moves outside the box.
As part of Echoes Then & Now series in our 20th Anniversary celebration, we’re featuring the music of George Winston.  You can hear his show tonite, August 14.  All of Winston’s albums have been reissued in recent years with Bonus tracks and illuminating liner notes from the artist.

Five Best George Winston CDs

GEORGE WINSTON
Forest
Forest is the CD that brought me into the Winston fold.  I liked his earlier albums, but on Forest, George Winston went deeper, extending his ringing, open-air, melodic sound, embracing the minimalist influences of Steve Reich on “Tamarack Pines,” the jazz harmonies of the late organist Larry Young’s “The Cradle” and the slow ragtime of William Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost.  But whether playing the challenging inside-the-piano effects of his “Forbidden Forest” or the inviting themes of “Cloudy This Morning,” George Winston’s gifted lyricism remains true.

Autumn
This is the album that started it all, although it’s techically his second album, it was his first on Windham Hill Records.  The opening “Colors/Dance” rings with the open clarity of the Montana plains where Winston grew up.  “Woods,” with its quasi-classical arpeggios, seems to dance in the air.  And so it goes throughout Autumn as the pianist unfolds his melodies in what sounds like spontaneous reverie.

Night Divides the Day-The Music of the Doors
I think this may be the least well-received Winston albums by his fans, but I thought there were a couple tracks on here that attained true interpretive brilliance and revealed the depth and breadth of George Winston’s vision.  His interpretation of My Wild Love as a zen piano koan is brilliant and his take on Bird of Prey, based on a Jim Morrison poem aspires to the imagery Morrison wrote.  And you can beat his shimmering rendition of “Crystal Ship.”  One of the thrills of Echoes was the Living room concert that Ray Manzarek and George Winston played together, facing each other on twin grand pianos.

WINTER INTO SPRING
Never a florid player, Winston’s best music emerges from those spaces where the melody finds its own refractions, unimpeded by the pointless ornamentation and quasi-classical flourishes that tarnish so many pianists who followed in his wake.  song.    WINTER INTO SPRING was Winston’s second album for Windham Hill Records and following up on the themes of AUTUMN, it continues down the seasonal road and includes several of Winston’s signature compositions including”January Stars” and the extended ruminations of “Rain.”

December
December is a Christmas album that transcends the season.  Mixing traditional carols, a couple of classical works and his own originals, Winston takes you into winter from the cover photo of a snow blanketed field to his final invocation, “Peace.”  Winston’s piano drops notes with icy clarity into a winter silence, rippling through “Carol of Bells” and coaxing dark introspective moods from his own suite, “Night,” which includes Winston playing inside the piano like a harp. Who would’ve thought that the gentle melodies of “Peace” were inspired by the soundtrack to TV’s The Outer Limits?

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))