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| The Impulse Story |
| Keith Jarrett |
első megjelenés éve: 1976
66 perc |
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| (2006)
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CD |
Kérjen
árajánlatot! |
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| 1. | De Drums
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| 2. | The Rich
And The Poor
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| 3. | Blue Streak
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| 4. | Treasure Island
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| 5. | Introduction And Yaqui Indian Folk Song
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| 6. | Victoria
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| 7. | Everything That Lives Laments
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| 8. | Konya
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| 9. | Bop-Be
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| 10. | Mushi Mushi
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| 11. | Silence
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Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz; Avant-Garde; Modern Creative
Recorded: Feb 24, 1973-Oct 16, 1976
In the Seventies, pianist Keith Jarrett was one of the jazz world's new hopefuls. He had a pedigree that appealed to veteran fans of the scene and new listeners from the rock world: stints as a Jazz Messenger with Art Blakey; in Charles Lloyd's popular quartet; and as an inherent part of Miles Davis's groundbreaking electric lineup in 1970 and 1971. Leading his own bands, he was flexible, playing solo or in a small-group format. His music covered a wide palette of moods and rhythms, from jumpy and jaunty to dreamy and plaintive.
Jarrett was also a one-man wave of eccentricity and profit, taking his solo piano performances into theaters and concert halls for higher fees than almost any other jazz artist before him. He answered interviewers' questions with cryptic answers that bristled at perceived disrespect. Onstage, his behavior could surprise - standing, at times gyrating, at the keys; singing along to his solos; plucking the strings inside; switching to soprano sax or recorder - yet he never lost the melodic flow.
Despite distancing himself from the rest of the fusion-era pack by keeping his bands acoustic and free-form, Jarrett enjoyed the embrace of the rock press like no other pianist of his generation. In 1972, Rolling Stone ran a lengthy review celebrating three recent releases, an all-acoustic mini-wave that ran against the largely electric fusion sounds of his contemporaries. "Jarrett seems to have made the jump," reviewer Robert Palmer wrote, "from ex-Miles pianist to the most important young keyboard stylist in jazz today while nobody was looking."
Jarrett was only twenty-seven when he signed to Impulse, with enough juice to allow his manager, George Avakian, to maneuver a special arrangement. Jarrett could continue to record "special projects" (solo and collaborative sessions for the Munich-based ECM label) while recording with his American-based group for Impulse. That group - including saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Paul Motian, and, intermittently, guitarist Sam Brown, with the odd percussionist added in - was soon dubbed the American Quartet to differentiate it from his work with the Swedish saxophonist Jan Garbarek.
Jarrett's run with Impulse extended from 1973 through 1976 and delivered eight albums. The first four - the live Village Vanguard recording Fort Yawuh and the studio albums Treasure Island, Death and the Flower, and Backhand - were recorded in '73 and '74, and produced by Impulse's Ed Michel.
"Keith is one of the guys who is a pleasure to record," Michel says. "He always knew what he wanted to do [and] it was a working band made up of brilliant players. It was a band where almost any take was good enough!"
Small surprise. By the sum of their experience, the influence of three modern jazz visionaries - Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Bill Evans - was well represented in the quartet. What made the group work so well and helped it progress, according to Jarrett, was a Colemanesque sense of equal opportunity: free, funky, but never follow-the-leader. "I'm not interested in having people who believe exactly what I believe. I only care about how much they hear when they are playing. . . . We all know that we're still changing if we're able to play together."
In Paul Motian's view, the magic lay in how the members were able to mesh musically and personally. "I remember how much fun it was to play with the band - everyone got along, everyone played what they wanted to play. Those live tunes went on and on and on! To play something that long and be consistent and have something grow as a piece of music is great. That was happening every night." And those yelps of delight onstage and on record? "That's Keith," Motian says.
Jarrett's quartet drew praise for its open-ended and riff-driven structures. At will, it drew on a bottomless font of styles - rock and African rhythms, bebop changes, gospel fervor. Tunes like "De Drums" and "Blue Streak" came together as if out of thin air, often driven by a hip, rhythmic groove. Flavors that could be avant-garde (like Redman's "speaking" style of saxophone) or exotic (Jarrett's soloing on soprano saxophone or recorder) further opened the ears of Jarrett's young and denimed audience. Crystalline, flowing melodies wanting only a lyric shared album space with measured, R&B-flavored jams like "The Rich (and the Poor)."
In 1975, veteran jazz producer Esmond Edwards was recruited by the brass at ABC Records to take over Impulse. While steering the label in a funkier, less avant-garde direction, he produced Jarrett's last four albums. Mysteries, Shades, Byablue, and Bop-Be were all drawn from sessions that took place in 1975 and 1976, after Jarrett's quartet had in fact disbanded. "I was trying to fulfill my contract to Impulse," the pianist admitted in an interview with Neil Tesser, "without being embarrassed by it."
Despite Jarrett's dismissive take on the final creative thrust of his output on Impulse, the music holds up incredibly well. His reworking of "Everything That Lives, Laments" - a tune he first recorded with Haden and Motian in 1971 - is a minor masterwork, building from a moody, meditative start to an exultant climax and a prayer-like close.
By the quartet's last studio meeting, Jarrett recalls, a sense of creative democracy was leading the way. "All along, I had wanted to give the guys more of a writing part. . . . One reason this last session sounds so different has to do with my relinquishing control." (The move had begun as early as 1974, with Jarrett's take on Motian's haunting piano piece "Victoria.") Some tunes, like the ethereal, gong-driven mood piece "Konya" and the jumping-and-joyful "Bop-Be," still derived from Jarrett's hand. But Redman's loose, Ornette-like "Mushi Mushi" and Haden's now-classic "Silence" proved that, as with many talent-packed groups of the past, each sideman had attained leadership qualities - and the group would soon splinter as each tackled that role.
To many, Jarrett's eight Impulse albums yielded some of the most consistent and influential exploratory jazz of the Seventies. "The Impulse quartet settings are Jarrett in his prime," declared Stephen Davis in the New York Times in 1975. More than thirty years later, even though Jarrett's subsequent forty-plus albums for ECM include many timeless performances, that claim still holds water.
---Ashley Kahn, February 2006
Keith Jarrett - Piano, Soprano Saxophone, Percussion
Charlie Haden - (1-5, 7-11) Bass
Paul Motian - (1-5, 7-11) Drums
Dewey Redman - (1-3, 5, 7-8, 10, 11) Tenor Saxophone
Danny Johnson - (1-5) Percussion
Guilherme Franco - (2-5, 7) Percussion
Sam Brown - (4) Guitar |
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