Keith Jarrett, the American pianist and improviser whose solo concerts redefined the boundaries of jazz and may have accidentally given birth to New Age music, was considering not walking onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House on January 24, 1975. It was supposed to be just a man and a Bösendorfer, no music prepared. But the piano wasn’t right. Travel had been hard. His back was in traction. The Italian food he’d eaten earlier wasn’t sitting well. Somehow, he agreed to go on, and despite the obstacles and the drama, the music he recorded that night, released as The Köln Concert, would become the best-selling album of solo piano music of all time. Not just in jazz but in all music.
It turned fifty last year, but Jarrett, by then eighty, didn’t take part. He wasn’t an executive producer on the feature film, dramatizing the backstory; he wasn’t a talking head in the documentary pulling back the curtain on the biggest night in improvised solo-piano history. It was feted in all the ways you’d expect and more. Apparently, there’s even going to be a graphic novel.
Jarrett has always been uneasy about the concert, the music, the way it takes him back to that fraught night and ties him to something that he doesn’t see as part of his mission.
His mission, if it can be defined from the outside looking in, from parsing his sometimes pretentious and cantankerous statements about who he is and what he does, from the mass of music he’s made anywhere other than that one night on a stage in Cologne, might boil down to a single word: forward.
Feeling more ambivalent than usual about commercial anniversaries (in a year where it felt like zero-sum market logic was finally driving humanity off a cliff), I resolved to turn The Köln Concert into the sacred cow it is and kill it, to move forward without knowing how or where to, only that the next thing had to remain unknown. The mysteries in Jarrett’s body of work had always called to me, but something in the fuss over Köln had kept me from going all in. I wanted to truly hear him without the burden of a masterpiece calling me to look back, turning Jarrett’s amazing achievement into a birthday party with an overly sweet cake and chintzy candles. Because anniversaries are a trap. They flatten a singular artist into a single object. And in Jarrett’s case, they encourage us to mistake one dazzling 1975 evening in Cologne for the whole of a restless, uncontainable project. To listen to Köln in the shadow of its birthday and think you’ve “heard” Jarrett is, in a way, to have heard nothing at all.
Even without the anniversary, I’d always been hesitant about Köln, loving it despite—or, horror of all horrors, because of—its easy beauty. Those soaring lines and sweet chords were why it was so popular, such a big seller, why half a century of it existing felt like a big deal. Whatever I thought about it, I couldn’t deny it had a centre of gravity that was hard to pull away from.
To do this, that is, to escape the black hole of the over-marketed masterpiece and join Jarrett in his restless creative mission of pushing deeper into sonic space, I decided to dive into 1976, to listen to everything he recorded the year after Köln, to celebrate an anti-versary of sorts, with one word only in mind: forward.
It seemed simple enough, until I really started to listen to the torrent of music that followed, a deluge so heavy and intense and varied that the only logical conclusion to be drawn from it is that time is a circle. I was listening against the impulse of anniversary, in the past’s future, finding that any moment I could grasp in 1976 would send me swirling though time and Spotify. So maybe not forward, exactly, but whirling my way into mystery.
Around the same time I started listening against Köln, I chanced upon a copy of the 890-page Letters of Wallace Stevens in a used bookstore. Although I’ve been reading Stevens since my teens, I’ve never understood a single one of his poems. Maybe this book, this purchase that I’d probably never read, could help. Another quixotic new year’s project: understand a single poem of Wallace Stevens. It quickly occurred to me that I didn’t really know what a poem was—and then, just as quickly, what a poet is.
I was teetering on the edge of AI-induced unemployment, about to turn forty-two; heavier than I wanted to be, with a collection of short stories no one wanted to publish; my only creative fulfillment was making soups from scratch. Having vowed to walk away from writing altogether—another one of those new year’s projects—it seemed more sensible, even dignified, to devote my energy to defining the vocation of a poet.
He was trying to articulate the mystery of having this thing inside you that screams it has to mean something!
I could have asked my father-in-law, Bill. He was a prolific, unpublished poet, who spent his eighty years turning over a single theme again and again, focused on reducing his language, pruning it into expressing the wonder he felt about the world and our place in it. He was trying to articulate the mystery of being here, of knowing that it all ends and means nothing, and yet having this thing inside you that screams it has to mean something! in as concise a way as possible.
For Bill, a poet was someone who wrote poems. He might have quoted Omar Khayyám in Edward FitzGerald’s version, which is as good a definition as any of the many I sought out in the following year:
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Where poetry came from was a bit of a mystery, too.
Bill and I agreed on that, but not much else. Our relationship—a wine-and-whiskey-sodden probing of that mystery, one of the most contentious and meaningful of my life—was defined by and through two things we disagreed about constantly: poetry and jazz.
He died suddenly in May of last year. The year in which I was going to finally find out what a poet was. In the ICU, when they took him off life support, we played music for him that he had loved. We played Bach. We played Pat Metheny. Finally, we played him The Köln Concert, through the crummy little speakers of an iPhone—a slight indignity to his audiophile sensibility that I choose to believe he would forgive us for. There it was at the end, the only two things we ever wholeheartedly agreed on: the mystery and Keith Jarrett.
The Survivors’ Suite, the first album Jarrett recorded in 1976 with his American Quartet, is the album I returned to again and again in the early months of my year of not listening to The Köln Concert. It’s one of Jarrett’s singular achievements, and one of the best jazz records of the ’70s. This group—with Dewey Redman on reeds, Charlie Haden on bass, and Paul Motian on drums—can sound less like a working band and more like four people arguing about what music can be in real time.
Unlike the solo recordings Jarrett was making at this time, this group’s music ties him to two disparate strains in capital-J Jazz, a broader tradition in which he’s always sat uneasily. Motian played in one of pianist Bill Evans’s most important trios, with Scott LaFaro on bass. The trio extended the palette of jazz with Evans’s use of French-impressionist-drenched chords, delicate voicings, and a melodic touch as brittle, translucent, and information-packed as fibre optic cable.
Haden and Redman came from the world of Ornette Coleman, the Texas firebrand whose free jazz revolution had unravelled the tight-knit progressivism of bebop, weaving the yearning for a formless primal howl and a music free of time into the long thread of the blues.
It’s music of thesis and antithesis struggling to find synthesis.
Irreconcilable opposites. The American Quartet spent its five-year lifespan trying to bring them together through telepathic interplay, joyous multi-instrumental noise making, and Jarrett’s remarkable writing. It’s music of thesis and antithesis struggling to find synthesis. More often than not, the band doesn’t “make it,” but this group’s failures are more interesting than most jazz groups’ unvarnished successes. “If you wanna look around,” Jarrett told Ben Sidran in a 1987 interview, “you have to be on the edge. Everywhere else you are, you’re not going to survey anything. In other words, it’s only the mountain peak.”
The Survivors’ Suite gets there. It’s not a perfect record, but that’s kind of the point of Jarrett’s quest after all. A climber doesn’t go for the mountain top right after they start climbing. And most summits, despite being the apex, are roughly formed.
My father-in-law often worried about my voracious listening. “You’ve heard too much,” he’d warn when I tried to share a glistening piece of late Morton Feldman or a fast break in a qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He thought my restlessness was indulgence without joy, an unease brought on by abundance. There was some truth in that.
He felt the same way about my reading and book buying, another reason why I hadn’t mentioned Stevens’s letters and the question they’d raised. Sampling fatigue was one of the perils of the quest for the sublime. Bill’s listening journey, like his reading and his writing, was a return to the things that console: immediate beauty, uncluttered by searching. Put a little less grandly, he’d heard enough and knew what he liked.
He wanted only the immediacy of the five descending notes in Beethoven that had undone him at sixteen, the delicate lines of a Paul Desmond solo, Keith Jarrett when he wasn’t rooting around in the mud. But reducing the sample size can’t defeat the law of diminishing returns. Each time you come back to those notes, some of the magic of first contact—the tension of not knowing how or even if they’ll resolve—is gone. You can never be sure if it’s the music you’re seeking or the innocence of never having known it: a younger, purer, long-vanished you.
In the last years of our relationship, defined largely by meeting in the middle of music, we both found ourselves not really listening to much new stuff, and not too enthusiastic about what we heard. Despite our differences in taste and approach, we still spent most of our time sitting hushed in front of his hi-fi, often deep in the Jarrett catalogue.
We were, by then, in the streaming age. This radical change in the way we listen had the bitter laugh of a god-answered prayer: You want to hear everything? Here it is. Gone were the hours I’d spent crouched over musty LPs, flicking through the “World Music” CDs, looking for a commodity-mediated path to the sublime, shopping when I should have been listening. The question wasn’t what I wanted to stumble upon or what I wanted to buy and file away. It was: What did I want to hear? Why did I want to hear it? What was I looking for?
These were the very questions Bill urged on me. Rather than looking outward, waiting to find the sound to tell me what I sought, he urged a kind of deep introspection, a defining of terms with a focus as intense as he brought to his monothematic poetry.
But the blinking cursor in the Spotify search box left me blank. When the algorithm asked if I wanted to jump back in, it felt easier than looking for something new. Worse, Spotify was all phone, no restless search. What a cliché, the physical media sentimentalist: I wanted to own something rather than feel like my attention was being owned, blaming modern times for my lack of focus rather than trying to discover its roots. Sometimes I’d set myself a listening project to try and take control back—the Shostakovich symphony cycle, say—only to find myself wandering back into the kitchen to check the simmer on my soup, three symphonies later, overwhelmed by variations on a theme I hadn’t heard.
Listening to everything Jarrett recorded in the year after The Köln Concert as a defiant anti-versary was meant to be one of these projects. After Bill died, it became more than just listening. Everything I heard was shaded by the fact that I’d never hear it with him again.
Jarrett recorded a lot of music in 1976, about twelve hours released across seven albums. There are the final sessions with the American Quartet; his double disc of organ improvisations; a series of piano suites recorded alone in a studio. Finally, there’s the Sun Bear Concerts, the Moby-Dick of improvised solo piano.
The tediously general question of how one listens jerks from the abstract to the particular when it is about a chunk of music like the Sun Bear. Ten LPs, six and a half hours, five concerts, each one clocking in at a little over an hour. I’d listened to a lot of this music with Bill, who thought Sun Bear was Jarrett’s crowning achievement. I wasn’t so sure, feeling like its self-important grandiosity and the heart-on-the-sleeve ardour was just too much. Bill’s Jarrett was the grand romantic figure of the solo concerts; my Jarrett was the messy, noisy, searching, and searing explorer of The Survivors’ Suite.
Sometimes I listened well; sometimes I listened poorly.
In the first five months of listening against Köln, I’d let Jarrett’s 1976 output take me wherever it wanted to go—and it wanted to go everywhere. The organ on Hymns/Spheres sent me to Invocations, another organ improv album, recorded in 1980, and on to Book of Ways, an hour and forty minutes of clavichord improvisations (!), thinking I could understand Jarrett’s piano approach by listening to him on other keyboard instruments.
The overdubbing on The Survivors’ Suite sent me back to the one-man band pop record he’d made in the late ’60s (he sings, he plays guitar!), through to the contentious Spirits. This home recording project from the mid-’80s could be described as generically “ethnic,” omnivorously as “world folk,” and perilously close to pure New Age.
Sometimes I listened well; sometimes I listened poorly.
Listening well meant lying on the floor with headphones, track eight of Book of Ways on repeat until I achieved a mystical union of man and clavichord, as Jarrett played single note after single note for over five minutes. (It sounds tedious, but with the proper attention, it’s a singularity—Jarrett takes you so deep inside this niche-period instrument that eventually you are inside music itself.)
Listening poorly was laptop speakers, sixty-seven open browsing tabs, jumping from the news of the world to asking ChatGPT how I could fix a celery soup made astringent by simmering it with a fresh bay leaf for too long. (Butter, cream, cumin, and maybe a little acid.)
The work of a single year had spiralled me through a galaxy of music. But through all this listening, I had avoided the monumental Sun Bear.
After Bill died, I felt an urge to sit with this music as deeply as he had. Knowing that sitting still and finding deep focus in the house would prove a challenge (there is always a soup that needs fixing), I decided to bring my phone on the daily walk I was taking through Gage Park, just down the street from my home in Hamilton, Ontario, having also resolved—in this year of discovering what a poet was, of walking away from writing, of listening against Köln—to finally lose my lockdown weight.
The walk, timed for a start-to-finish listen of a single concert from Sun Bear, was perfect. My focus was strong and my step count was rising. I spent the early summer months between Bill’s death and his celebration of life imagining that he was listening with me, nodding joyfully as I realized he had been right about Sun Bear all along.
Every reaction to Jarrett is overdetermined by how we understand his very unique process, even if we aren’t aware of it. Saying that he “plays a chordal vamp and noodles” suggests a philosophy of improvisation, as does saying that he makes “something from nothing”; in both of these articulations, the improviser is seen as a conjuror, sometimes touched with mythic powers, sometimes with shabby sleight of hand. My own philosophy of improvisation, particularly in the drama staged in a Jarrett solo concert, is simply that the hands of the musician often know more than the thinking musician does.
There are endless places to hear this drama—between hand, head, and heart—play out in the Sun Bear Concerts. But as I let listening to Jarrett’s 1976 output whirl me all over his discography, I found the strongest example in Paris Concert, recorded at Salle Pleyel in October 1988. It’s a relatively short concert performance by Jarrett standards, coming in at roughly fifty minutes.
The music starts out with Jarrett playing sweet, baroque-sounding phrases that build and thicken until the whole thing collapses about six minutes in.
And there it is, an octave in the bass, two low Fs. It’s a basic rhythm, a te-dum-dum-dum, one of the least promising left-hand figures in all of Jarrett’s work. That simple rhythmic pulse on the octave goes on for the next ten minutes, as Jarrett seems to struggle against this intrusive thought rumbling in the lower register. He runs lines up and down the piano in ever frantic circles, trying to find some way to break the chain his hands have trapped him in. Finally, there’s a break. Jarrett plays an astoundingly beautiful chorale, his voice leading never stronger, the yearning never more intense.
And then those Fs return: te-dum-dum-dum.
That figure, even when it isn’t played, haunts the rest of the music, as if enacting the logic of depression itself. The fight against those intrusive thoughts—that, even in moments of pure light, feel perilously close at hand—is the Herculean struggle being waged in the ever-tightening dialectic of the eighty-eight keys.
Jarrett isn’t a conjuror here; the lines he is throwing up as he tries again and again to break the dark gravity of those Fs have nothing to do with rabbits in hats or scarves in sleeves; his hands have locked his musical heart and mind into a bleak, seemingly blind alley. This is the drama of musician as escape artist.
Despite my best efforts to walk away from writing, I had, by this time, started compulsively jotting down my “deep thoughts” about Jarrett, letting his music drift into a swirl of ideas about the vocation of the poet. This grew to include everything and anything else: a general theory of myth, Sappho’s laments about aging, Gilgamesh’s defiant cries against mortality, Sufi mysticism, American Transcendentalism, Italo Calvino’s thoughts about a book only being finished with the last breath of its author. More than once, I had even found myself invoking Harry Houdini’s philosophy of the escape artist, cluttering the incantatory rite of the Keith Jarrett solo concerts with a rattle bag of half-understood culture.
There was that promiscuous reading Bill had warned me about. Does thinking of Jarrett within the intellectual framework (if we can call it that) of Houdini have anything to do with the emotional content of this music? Why couldn’t I just let the music be music?
Paris Concert had long been a favourite of mine, and it was the last long Keith Jarrett piece Bill and I listened to together. I had a feeling he wouldn’t respond to it as strongly as I did.
I kept hearing his word, his touchstone, in my head: concision.
I was right. He wasn’t taken with the music, waiting impatiently, as he always did, for a concise line of beauty. The struggle, the working through, that I felt so palpably in the riveting drama of the concert (how will he ever escape the clutches of this F minor octave?) wasn’t what Bill listened for. To him, Paris Concert felt like a long prelude to nothing. Had he been around to hear my evolving thoughts that yoked Jarrett to Harry Houdini, he would have looked at me sideways.
As I listened more and more to Keith Jarrett, as I imagined arguing about it and sharing it and crying over it with Bill, as the notes in my “KJ thoughts” doc got thornier and buried deeper in useless cross-reference, I kept hearing his word, his touchstone, in my head: concision.
Say something as briefly as possible; make sure the meaning is clear.
I started trying to organize my thoughts, trying to say something, anything, about Jarrett in the language that Bill loved best: aphorism. If I could say just one concise thing about all this music, would it mean I had heard Keith Jarrett?
When Bill’s celebration of life finally happened in early August, I was asked to put together a playlist. I wanted to find music that was meaningful but could exist as background, that was appropriate to the occasion without being maudlin. And I wanted to find music that we’d enjoyed together.
Despite my ambivalence about everything digital, it does have its advantages. If I couldn’t remember a particularly impressive Ella Fitzgerald recording that we’d sat gobsmacked over, I simply needed to scroll through my “liked songs” in Spotify to find it. The liked songs are arranged chronologically in the order they were added, so “How High the Moon” sits right next to whatever else I happened to listen to that night with Bill. It was, apparently, the Swingle Singers and Jacques Loussier; we must have been in a mood for a little baroque swing.
If finding the Fitzgerald was a simple matter of scrolling, getting Jarrett into the playlist was a problem of a different type. His music is often presented in long, monumental single tracks that contain everything from the Hallmark sympathy-card sweetness of his extemporaneous melodies to the clashing thunder of his dissonant jags. Peak-era solo Jarrett didn’t reduce easily to background music for the celebration of a life. Even shadowed by Bill’s death, those solo concerts would only be a celebration of life itself, with all its beauty and chaos, for this solo listener.
In 2020, Jarrett made public that he’d suffered two strokes—resulting in the loss of his ability to play with his left hand and effectively ending his lifelong dialogue with the piano. Around this time, a recording made during his 2016 European tour (his last, as it turned out) was released. Budapest Concert was said to be, in Jarrett’s own estimation, the gold standard against which all the other solo concerts would be measured.
Along with an encore from the Sun Bear, it was a track from Budapest that ended up in the celebration of life playlist: “Part VII,” a soaring song of great groping beauty. This was music I had been undone by following Jarrett’s retirement, mourning the loss of a living man, trying to make sense of his half-death, trying to find some way to make the unfathomable fathomable—music that Bill and I had listened to as elegy for Jarrett in the wake of the news about his strokes. At the celebration of life, it would be the last solo performance for the two of us together, drowned out in a room full of small talk as I waited for the speeches to start. Since it would have been impolitic to quote Bill’s great theme directly (we’re here, it’s all going to end, it can’t mean nothing, but we know it does), when I got up to say a few words I simply read from Tu Fu, a poet whose work we had both loved, even though, loving it, I was no closer to understanding what a poet was:
Under my feet the moon
Glides along the river.
Near midnight, a gusty lantern
Shines in the heart of night.
Along the sandbars flocks
Of white egrets roost,
Each one clenched like a fist.
In the wake of my barge
The fish leap, cut the water,
And dive and splash.
By mid-October, I finally had something close to a single aphorism about Jarrett, an inversion of a half-remembered Wordsworth definition of the vocation of a poet: A Jarrett solo concert is tranquility recollected in a moment of great stress and turbulent emotions. This didn’t quite do it—I was still trying to paper over the pretty bits in Jarrett, as if I still needed some noise and chaos around the edges. And then I came across Jarrett’s explanation for the title of the Sun Bear Concerts:
On a Japanese tour I saw a sun bear in the zoo, a small bear which really looked friendly […] The next day I asked our Japanese sound engineer about this animal […] and he replied, ‘Yes, it’s beautiful bear but if you get near enough to him he will knock you three blocks down the road.’ I simply liked the idea of an animal that looks as if it would be nice to get near to and which, when you do so, shakes your whole conception of life.
Finally, one true and concise thing about Keith Jarrett, said by the man himself.
I scrolled through the comments under YouTube videos of The Köln Concert, trying to revive some of the antipathy that had determined a year’s worth of conflicted, confused, intensely emotional listening, but it wasn’t there.
Instead, I found myself oddly moved by how many people in this very digital space marked the impact of the music on their lives through physical copies—sharing the number of cassettes, LPs, CDs, SACDs, and digital downloads they’ve owned. I’ve got Bill’s LP version now, filed right next to mine. Even more touching were the people just sharing memories of where and when they had first encountered it: that black and white picture on a record store shelf; on an airplane radio station soaring above the clouds; from a parent’s friend who thought you were “with it” enough to hear this music. And then there was my partner, Jess, who had Bill to initiate her—each of us with our own anniversary of something that changed us. You get older, losses pile up, you have to mark the time anyway you can. Even if music—this quest for the sublime—sometimes feels like it is overwhelmed with marketing, it can’t all be marketing.
A simple trip to the family doctor probably would have saved Bill’s life, so I got myself a GP, had blood work done, had a few irregular moles biopsied. Grown-up stuff. The unseasonably hot October gave way to bracing early November, Ishmael weather. Soon it would be time for toques, and I’d have to put my clunky Bluetooth can headphones away. My walking days for the year of listening against Köln were almost over.
OK, sure, why not?
Because I knew The Köln Concert so well, I decided on a particularly bucolic spot to listen to Jarrett’s defining recording in its anniversary year. I’d walk the Hendrie Valley Trails along the Grindstone Creek, coming back to the suburban sprawl surrounding the Royal Botanical Gardens through Lamb’s Hollow. The accidental poetry of place names.
By the time I got down to the marshes, I realized I’d left the headphones in the car.
Köln would have been perfect—it’s an autumnal sounding record, a poetic match to the turmeric yellows and popping crimsons of the changing leaves. The meadows edging the marsh were tawny and brittle, looking like the pelt of a lion. And there was music—the wind in the trees, the calls of starlings and cedar waxwings and goldfinches, a kind of poetry that was easy just by being there, that I had spent so much recent time resisting or blotting out with noise, even if it was the occasionally treacly melodies of Keith Jarrett.
And then, without headphones on to keep the world away, I heard it: the frantic flapping of the coho salmon, skimming up the creek as they fought their way back to the spawning grounds upstream. I pushed through a tangle of Joe-Pye weed and dead stalks of goldenrod to get a better look at the fish. Their silver flashed as they humped over pebbly shallows and then vanished into deeper pools of water that reflected the clear blue sky above. On the banks, there were dead salmon, the bodies tarnished into a dull earthen colour, their bellies picked at by foxes and crows. The stream was low that year, making the drive upstream perilous—but still they did it. They did it as I stood there staring at the fish they’d left behind on the bank. I could hear them splashing away, heading upstream, pushing against the current, but forward.
Simon Gadke is a writer and filmmaker based in Hamilton, Ontario, whose work has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Maclean’s, and The Hamilton Spectator.
