Get Lost in a Meditative Solo Keith Jarrett Set from 1973

About 18 months before sitting down at a famously subpar Steinway in Cologne, Germany for his lauded solo album The Köln Concert, Keith Jarrett embarked on his second solo European tour after first going it alone on the circuit the year before. Europe, long obsessed with jazz, had fallen hard for Jarrett, who had become so immersed in his improvisations that he seemed to turn into another creature. He once called his primary instrument “like an extension of my body,” explaining, “When I sit down to play, I’m not thinking about technique or theory. It’s just about letting the music flow through me.”

Or, as one commenter on YouTube offered, “Keith’s brain was a like a radio antenna to the cosmic tone library.”

In August, 1973, Jarrett was booked at the Molde Jazz Festival, one of the oldest and most prestigious jazz festivals in Europe. The roster that year featured stellar lineup that included Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, who at the time was helping to establish the young label ECM as a name in the global jazz scene. Jarrett would go on to release The Köln Concert on ECM.
The festival was set against the stunning backdrop of Molde, a coastal town known for its breathtaking fjord views and mountainous scenery. It was the perfect backdrop for Jarrett’s mesmerizing set, one so steeped with graceful in-the-moment expression that it belies whatever superlatives you toss its way.

Jarrett recalled during one interview a conversation he had with the influential Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. “He was asking me why my solo concerts were slowing down and stopping, and he said something about, ‘Is it because you don’t want to possess the music anymore?’ And that was precisely right. The only reason I bring this up is because I don’t feel like a composer at this moment at all. And I talk to people about stopping the solo concerts, and they say, ‘Oh my god,’ or ‘Well maybe you’ll be writing something soon.’”

Despite the threat of stopping solo concerts, Jarrett leaned into them, although over the decades his approach changed. In a 2009 interview with Jarrett expert Ethan Iverson, the pianist described his 1970s concerts as following a basic template — on that yielded profound results: “It starts in a harmonically okay place and it sort of builds slowly into melodies and motifs.” In later years, before he suffered a series of debilitating strokes in 2018, Jarrett had been creating more concise, shorter improvised pieces in concert, which at times sounded like Erik Satie’s so-called “furniture music.”

Unlike writing or composing music, Jarrett’s solo live work was meditative musical exercise, he said, describing his strategy as “being completely present, responding to the moment. In solo performance, there’s no script, no plan. The music is born and dies in that same moment.”

He added, “When I’m playing solo, it’s a dialogue with myself. The music is happening in the moment, and there’s no separation between the performer and the instrument. It’s an act of discovery.” In other interviews he’s called solo gigs as “like walking on a tightrope without a net. There is nothing to fall back on, no band to support you. It’s just you and the piano, and that can be both terrifying and exhilarating.”

At his best, Jarrett is the most profoundly expressive solo pianist of his, or any generation. If you don’t have The Koln Concert, grab it. And note for those who have CD players and are on a budget: The 1999 ECM remaster sounds fantastic, and can be had for $5. But, then, the LP sold millions of copies, which means that you can easily track down the two-LP set for about the same price.