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Keith Jarrett, at his peak on Bordeaux Concert / AP

Posted: September 28, 2022

Bordeaux Concert documents a solo performance, the last that Keith Jarrett would give in France, at the Auditorium de l'Opéra National de Bordeaux on July 6, 2016, and finds the pianist at a creative high point.

Each of Jarrett’s 2016 solo piano concerts had its own strikingly distinct character, and in Bordeaux – although the music would progress through many changing moods – the lyrical impulse was to the fore. In the course of this improvised thirteen-part suite, many quiet discoveries are made. There is a touching freshness to the music as a whole, a feeling of intimate communication shared with the 1400 attentive listeners in the hall. This time there is no recourse to standard tunes to round out the performance; the arc of spontaneously composed and often intensely melodic music is satisfyingly complete in itself. In the later concerts part of Jarrett’s achievement as an improviser has been the way in which he has not only channeled the music in its moment-to-moment emergence but implied a sense of larger structure as he balances its episodes and atmospheres.

Reviewing the July 2016 performance, the French press spoke of hints of the Köln Concert and Bremen-Lausanne in the flow of things, and extended sections of BordeauxConcert are beguilingly beautiful. Tender songs are coaxed from the air, “rousing a community of listening at the edge of silence”, as Francis Marmande put it in Le Monde, “an awareness of time out from the noise and weariness of the world.” 

Bordeaux’s community of listeners had long been aware of Jarrett’s music. The Nouvelle-Aquitaine capital was one of the first European cities where Jarrett presented his music, as early as 1970 - with his trio, then, with Gus Nemeth and Aldo Romano. He was back in the early 1990s, with the ‘Standards’ trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. The July 2016 concert, however, was his only solo performance in the city (made possible via the Jazz and Wine Bordeaux Festival and its director, Jean-Jacques Quesada.)

“This composite suite could be considered a concentrated compendium of his talents, of his entire career.” - Jacques Denis, Libération 

“The second half features a few of Mr. Jarrett´s most ravishing on-the-spot compositions. Those ballads, like ‘Part V’ and ‘Part VII’, spark against briskly atonal or boppish pieces, gradually building the case for a mature expression that might not have been possible earlier in his career. A magnificent achievement.” - Nate Chinen, New York Times

AP's STEVEN WINE writes…..When Keith Jarrett gently strikes the final note on the opening piece of “Bordeaux Concert,” 15 seconds pass before concertgoers begin to applaud, taking time to savor what they just heard.

New music from our greatest living jazz pianist, now 77, has always been something to relish, and even more so since he stopped performing in 2017 for health reasons.

“Bordeaux Concert” is the third show from Jarrett’s 2016 solo tour released by record label ECM, and it captures him still in peak form. He fills a summer night in southwest France with an improvised 13-part, 78-minute suite that’s an astounding mix of intensity, introspection and invention.

Structure and pacing are a marvel as Jarrett’s on-the-spot composition swings between gorgeous lyricism and dissonant, distressed chromatic explorations that abandon tempo. Some sections offer a struggle pitting order against chaos, rich ringing chords alternating with agitated rumbles of the piano as a percussive machine.

Jarrett gets a groove on, too. After settling into a New Orleans-style blues boogie, he sings a possible saxophone part as his right hand does delightful knuckle-twisting.

There are nods to Jarrett’s Hungarian roots and Bartók, to Debussy and Gershwin. For long stretches he’s at his most romantic and cinematic, as if he’s working out of a lost page from the Great American Songbook, and the music shimmers with beauty.

One yearning melody unfolds like an invitation to hum, and so Jarrett does. He likes what he’s hearing, and it’s easy to understand why.

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