HOW TO BUY

The great jazz pianist before and after Köln.

By Andrew Male.

Grand designs: Keith Jarrett, Los Angeles, 1975 – his performances are beguiling, pioneering, beautiful and subversive.

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“Jarrett transforms the technically complex into the emotionally resonant.”

TAKE A QUICK glance at the 10 records opposite and one best-seller will be noticeable by its absence. Recorded at the Cologne Opera House on 24 January, 1975, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is the best-selling solo album in jazz histor y with sales now well over 4 million. It’s a record of undeniable hypnotic beauty and the story of its creation, concerning an exhausted and sleep-deprived Jarrett working with an imperfectly tuned Bösendorfer piano, yet summoning glistening meditative melodies and urgent patterns of repetition out of such adversity, only adds to the record’s myth and allure. But what this sui generis recording has arguably never been is a gateway into Jarrett’s back catalogue. You buy The Köln Concert (and statistically speaking, you have bought it) and you stop there. What this How To Buy aims to do is offer a way into the entire oeuvre of this 77-year-old Pennsylvania-born pianist, composer and multi-instrumentalist. The oldest release here is from 1973, the most recent 2013, and in those 40-plus years of releases (the majority of them on Manfred Eicher’s ECM label) are some of the most beguiling, pioneering, beautiful and subversive jazz performances ever committed to tape.

Jarrett was a child prodigy, giving his first classical recital at the age of seven and touring with Art Blakey’s New Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s while still a teenager. That precociousness is a defining quality of his playing and part of the job of this How To Buy has been to wheedle out the more ponderous and hubristic works in favour of those that simply illustrate his many strengths, including an ability to transform the technically complex into the emotionally resonant and, like Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal before him, balance different voices in a chord, emphasising the different melodic lines through the use of space and silence.