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Keith Jarrett's eternal balancing act / NPR - WBGO

Posted: August 4, 2022

'During a concert, certain things are not nonexistent,' Jarrett shares

"I remember there was a river next to the hotel, or across the street. And I walked along that," Keith Jarrett says of the tour stop captured on Bordeaux Concert. "That's what I remember." Daniela Yohannes/ECM Records

NPR - WBGO's Nat Chinen writes……Almost two years ago, pianist Keith Jarrett shared publicly that he had suffered two strokes in 2018 and would likely never perform again. That revelation, which I reported in a piece for the New York Times, shook Jarrett's worldwide audience, eliciting sympathy and concern along with sorrow over the end of an illustrious concert career.

Jarrett's longtime label, ECM Records, cushioned the devastating news with some extraordinary music: Budapest Concert, recorded at the beginning of his final European tour. The conclusion of that tour had already been chronicled the previous year, on an album titled Munich 2016. Now, in addition to those bookends, ECM is preparing to release Bordeaux Concert. Recorded on July 6, 2016, a few days after Budapest, it's another balancing act of consonance and dissonance from a pianist whose blank-slate solo improvisations have always been valorized.

That legend has continued to grow in Jarrett's absence; there's even a film now in pre-production titled Köln 75, about the circumstances around his best-selling album The Köln Concert. As for the man himself, he's been quietly rehabilitating at home in rural northwest New Jersey. He's an avid reader — among his recent recommendations is Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster — and a conscientious objector to internet culture. "Everybody's looking for the next technological leap," he said this week. "But all I need is two chairs and another person."

I reached Jarrett by telephone to talk about Bordeaux Concert, and in particular the deeply lyrical track "Part III," which ECM has made available prior to the album's release on Sept. 30. We were indeed both in chairs, if not in person, and Jarrett spoke not only about the recording but also his changed (and still-changing) relationship to the piano. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.     PHOTO: Daniela Yohannes

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