Paris / London - Testament

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Paris / London - Testament
Keith Jarrett's live album

Publication
(s)

October 6, 2009

admission

November 26th and December 1st, 2008

Label (s) ECM records

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

20th

running time

162: 29

occupation Keith Jarrett

production

Manfred Eicher

Location (s)

Salle Pleyel, Paris and Royal Festival Hall, London

chronology
Yesterdays
(2009) 		Paris / London - Testament Jasmine
(2010)
Keith Jarrett (2003)

Paris / London - Testament is a jazz album by the American pianist Keith Jarrett released on ECM Records in 2009 .

The album

The album contains recordings of two improvisational solo concerts by the pianist, which were recorded on November 26th, 2008 in Salle Pleyel , Paris and on December 1st, 2008 in the Royal Festival Hall , London .

The album was released as a 3-CD set on October 6, 2009, contains a total of twenty tracks, with a total length of 162 minutes and 29 seconds. The first eight tracks (on CD1) come from the concert in Paris, the remaining twelve tracks (6 tracks each on CD2 and CD3) from the concert in London.

What exactly can be heard on the album Paris / London - Testament is well described by Tobias Litterst on Laut.de :

“Jarrett has everything that led him to the championship over the many years of his career. The individual sections ... offer dissonant staccato inventions, large-scale carpets of sound, melodious melodies and boogie excursions with the typical ostinato figures. This broad spectrum is entertaining and presents itself at an extremely high level, but still there is no rapture. This is less due to the lack of surprising innovations; rather, the improvisations often sound more like a hard fight than loose creativity. During numerous long-term runs or romantic chord walks ... especially at the Paris concert, the impression creeps up that Jarrett is desperately looking for a suitable continuation of his acoustic departure into the unknown. Fortunately, during the course of the London appearance, Jarrett appears increasingly inspired. After a melancholy start, boogie and blues soon take over. Their energy is even carried over to the ballads. This is how the final 'Part XII' is created. The grandiose piece once again proves the genius of the pianist. "
The Salle Pleyel in Paris, France

In his solo concerts it is Keith Jarrett's claim to create music "out of nowhere" without any musical consideration and without a plan or, as he put it in the liner notes for Paris / London - Testament , "to start with nothing and a To build the universe. "As early as the 1980s he stated:

“It's always like stepping on stage naked. The most important thing in a solo concert is the first note I play, or the first four notes. If they have enough tension, the rest of the concert will follow naturally. Solo concerts are pretty much the most revealing psychological self-analysis I can imagine. "

For Wolfgang Sandner - the artist's German biographer - Jarrett's solo concerts are “visits to the workshop or the delivery room, open-heart operations in music under public supervision.” In his “work, they form a continuum in which ... the stylistic features always resemble, who mix ideas and techniques in a virtuoso manner. "They are" often without a template or formal draft, created from the moment in which Jarrett belongs in himself, wide awake and sleepwalking, impulsively and neurosurgery, given everything, wrested or even has let through as a medium. "

The Royal Festival Hall in London, UK

As with the last two solo concerts published, Radiance (ECM, 2005) and The Carnegie Hall Concert (ECM, 2006), Paris / London - Testament also uses shorter improvisations, here with a playing time between 4 and 14 minutes. Jarrett - known from the past for his long and sprawling piano improvisations - explained the change in his playing practice in an interview with Down Beat as follows: “If I start playing and after a minute and a half feel that the piece is over, I will stop . It is the freedom to quit when quitting seems right. I got myself into a situation that was a little too complicated, in which the rules that I had made for myself dominated me - instead of having simple rules that lead me to something new. ”And Wolfgang Sandner comments on them over time changed improvisation practice in Keith Jarrett's book as follows:

"Compared to the early, let's say wildly determined recordings, the later recordings seem ... structurally more contoured, even if he piles up the tonal masses with highly virtuoso dexterity and the tone consumption is enormous ... The impression is now much more that of ad hoc composing when Jarrett improvised. That means, where in the past a piece got out of joint, seemed abruptly broken off or sound layers collided that absolutely did not want to be connected, here - despite the speed with which everything happens - a superordinate design becomes noticeable, the will, to put something together that belongs together. "

The concerts in Paris and London were accompanied by special personal circumstances of the artist, which weighed heavily on him. He “had already given four solo concerts in Japan in May 2008” and “then toured Europe and the USA in a trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette.” In late autumn 2008 he “spontaneously agreed to do two more solo concerts again to return to Europe. ”The background to his spontaneous decision for the additional concerts in Paris and London was that his wife had separated from him after 30 years of marriage, as he explains in the liner notes of the album. "I immediately changed my personal plans to stay alive (music had been my life for 60 years) ... I was in an incredibly fragile emotional state." A state that you can hear at the two concerts. For Wolfgang Sandner, Paris / London - testament is “the swan song for an epoch”, “a recording with a mourning ribbon, in which Jarrett makes no secret of his mood, with every note - from bebop mambo to lavish rhapsody and the last jazz Waltz to pop song - like a wistful homage to "his second wife" Rose Anne Colavito appears. And at the same time like a reminiscence of the glory days of the greatest piano improviser of our day. "

After the album Paris / London - Testament , which was released in 2009, it took two years until the next album with Keith Jarrett's solo improvisations, Rio (ECM, 2011), was released.

The contributors

The musician and his instrument

  • Keith Jarrett - piano

The production staff

  • Sascha Kleis - design
  • Martin Pearson - recording technology
  • Juan Hitters - photography
  • Rose Anne Jarrett - Photography
  • Manfred Eicher - producer

The playlist

  • Keith Jarrett: Paris / London - Testament (ECM 2130-32 (270 9585))

CD 1

  1. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part I - 13:48
  2. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part II - 10:36
  3. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part III - 7:05
  4. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part IV - 5:33
  5. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part V - 8:46
  6. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part VI - 6:30
  7. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part VII - 6:59
  8. Salle Pleyel, Paris - Part VIII - 10:11

CD 2

  1. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part I - 11:09
  2. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part II - 8:10
  3. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part III - 6:50
  4. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part IV - 5:58
  5. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part V - 10:34
  6. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part VI - 6:52

CD 3

  1. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part VII - 9:00
  2. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part VIII - 8:01
  3. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part IX - 3:56
  4. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part X - 5:35
  5. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part XI - 8:26
  6. Royal Festival Hall, London - Part XII - 8:30
All compositions are by Keith Jarrett.

The reception

The reception of the album in the German-speaking media is mostly positive:

Manfred Papst writes in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag : “These two concerts… show a Jarrett who is now elegiacally intimate, now hymnically jubilant - and in every moment a man in whom virtuosity and emotional depth correlate. ... Who would not want to be moved and happy to listen to music that, as mystical teachings in East and West suggest, can only be played by someone who has previously become completely empty and then creates something unheard of from the moment. "

Sabine Meinert finds in the Financial Times Deutschland : “The American pianist has recently made himself far too rare. Now he presents us with the recordings of two great solo concerts in London and Paris. ... From the first note, Jarrett casts a spell over the audience ... Jarrett lets his fingers paint emotions - haunting, driving, energetic or rough and hungry, before he conjures up dreamy winter silhouettes with an almost crystalline touch. The pieces seem like well-rounded compositions that have been formed in years of detailed work - and yet they are moments of improvisation. "

For Jazz-Fun it is "a fantastic concert document in brilliant sound quality."

Referring to Jarrett's bad personal condition - due to the separation from his second wife - Roland Spiegel comments for BR-Klassik Online : “The two live recordings… don't show a particularly contrite, but a particularly inspired Jarrett. The moods in which he drifts here grab you immediately with their intensity. Jarrett uses an almost encyclopedic variety of sound languages. ... What Jarrett is passing on to the next generation and posterity is worth keeping. "

But there are also more subdued tones in German-speaking countries:

Laut.de finds: "Keith Jarrett still enriches improvised music - even if the current work does not come close to the ingenuity of the solo concerts from Cologne, Bregenz or Carnegie Hall."

And Culturmag even identifies “a number of tiring places where lukewarm porridge like subcutaneously administered sleeping drink is served. But then individual chords entwine, harmoniously arranged, brisk passages again up to clear heights, where they quickly drift into ecstatic zones. "

The international media also react positively:

In his review for All About Jazz , John Kelman gives 4.5 stars out of 5 and says: " Testament - Paris / London is another top performance by Jarrett and that is even more remarkable when you consider how many solo performances he has already published."

For Andy Gill in The Independent , the concert is "a precious testimony to a feverish musical imagination."

For John Fordham of The Guardian it is "another rich offering from Jarrett for those who do not want to miss a note from the work of the gifted guru."

Stuart Nicholson writes in Jazzwise : "Keith Jarrett is one of the few artists in jazz who testify to sustained artistic growth; he not only refines and improves his piano playing, but also his melodic and harmonic concept."

And Barry Witherden finds in the BBC Music Magazine : “Jarrett sounds equally emotionally engaged, whether with excellent ballads and impressionistic pieces, heavy experimental workouts or edgy neo-boogie. Every concert is varied, committed and masterfully designed. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Paris / London - Testament at ECM Records. Retrieved February 26, 2017 .
  2. ↑ a b See description of the album at Laut.de. Retrieved February 27, 2017 .
  3. ↑ see liner notes of the album: "starting from nothing and building a universe"
  4. ↑ quoted from Peter Rüedi: Keith Jarrett, the eyes of the heart . In: Siegfried Schmidt-Joos , Idole. 5 Only the sky is the limit . Berlin, Ullstein publishing house 1985
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Wolfgang Sandner: Keith Jarrett. A biography . Rowohlt, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-644-11731-0 .
  6. ↑ Keith Jarrett in an interview with Down Beat, quoted from ECM Records. Retrieved February 27, 2017 : “If I start to play and a minute-and-a-half later I feel a piece is over, I'll stop. It's the freedom to stop when stopping seems correct. I had got myself locked into a slightly too complicated situation where the rules I had made for myself had been governing me - instead of making simple rules that could take me somewhere new. "
  7. ↑ a b c See description of the album at Jazzecho.de. Retrieved February 27, 2017 .
  8. ↑ See liner notes of the album: "I quickly scrambled to stay alive (music had been my life for 60 years) ... I was in an incredibly vulnerable emotional state"
  9. ↑ See description of the album at jazz-fun.de. Retrieved February 27, 2017 .
  10. ↑ See description of the album at culturmag.de. Retrieved February 27, 2017 .
  11. ↑ See description of the album at allaboutjazz.com. Retrieved February 27, 2017 : "Testament - Paris / London is yet another high water mark for Jarrett, and all the more remarkable considering how many solo performances he's already released."
  12. ↑ See press reactions to the album at ecmrecords.com. Retrieved February 27, 2017 : "A precious testament to a feverish musical imagination."
  13. ↑ See review of the album at theguardian.com. Retrieved February 27, 2017 : "Another comprehensive offering of fine Jarrett detail for those who don't want to miss a note of the gifted guru's work"
  14. ↑ See press reactions to the album at ecmrecords.com. Retrieved on February 27, 2017 : "Keith Jarrett is one of a handful of artists in jazz who gives evidence of almost continuous artistic growth, refining and improving not only his approach to the piano in terms of touch but to his melodic and harmonic conception as well. "
  15. ↑ See press reactions to the album at ecmrecords.com. Retrieved February 27, 2017 : “Jarrett sounds equally emotionally committed, whether on exquisite ballads and impressionistic pieces, ferocious experimental work-outs or angular neo-boogie. Each recital is varied, engaging and masterfully developed. "