2011 marks the 25th anniversary of legendary pianist Keith Jarrett’s 2-CD set Spirits. The work had a fascinating genesis, well known to many Jarrett fans through Ian Carr’s 1991 biography, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, published by GraftonBooks, and the 2006 documentary, Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation.
After devoting much of his time in the early 80s to painstakingly rehearsing various pieces of classical music and meticulously performing the results, Jarrett had an artistic epiphany, not to mention something close to a nervous breakdown. Carr quotes Jarrett: “It was just as if I was attacked by this reminder that what I was doing was not music. Those concerns were not concerns about music.”
No Labels
To cure himself, he spent a series of days in his studio at his New Jersey home producing many pieces (26 of which appear on the CD) of original and spontaneous music, nearly all with multiple tracks, with Jarrett playing all the strictly acoustic instruments, mainly all various types of drums and wooden flutes, as well as saxophones and piano. The music ranges from beautiful melodies to hypnotic meditations to celebratory chants.
Labels like “primitive,” “folk,” or more specific labels like “Native American” don’t really do justice to the grounded purity of the music. Listening to all the tracks in succession is like coursing through myriad veins back to the heart of the unconscious impetus and the conscious need for art.
Beyond Interpretations
But it’s easy to overburden a work such as Spirits with interpretations. As this point, it’s more interesting to consider it in relation to Jarrett’s whole career.
Firstly, it’s remarkable that, despite the minimal presence of piano, his signature instrument, on the album, Spirits could be considered the quintessential Jarrett album. His solo piano and jazz piano work is “grounded” in improvisation, not the basic tenants of it that any jazz musician embraces, but an all-encompassing embrace that makes everything his fingers coax out of the keys feel like it started from zero. How is he able to consistently touch the bottom of the well? The outpouring of pure music on Spirits seems to provide some kind of answer to that question.
A New Dimension
Secondly, Spirits can be seen as a launching pad into a new and doubly vital dimension of Jarrett’s career. Though the saxophone-heavy second disc of the album is somewhat reminiscent of Jarrett’s work on that instrument in his work his “American” quartet (featuring Charlie Haden, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman) in the 1970s, the music on Spirits seems to have helped hone the purpose and commitment of Jarrett’s now-famous trio with Gary Peacock and Jack Dejohnette.
To take just a few examples, the four live improvisations collected on the 1989 disc Changless, and on the 2001 disc Inside Out, have a concentrated energy and complex “simplicity” that seems born of a newfound sense of the core power of music.
Also, the sublime solo concerts that followed Spirits, The Vienna Concert and La Scala, feel at times like a combination of folk and classical elements, and begin not with the mild pianissimo of his solo piano work in the 1970s, such as The Koln Concert and The Sun Bear Concerts, but with a more deeply felt and more intensified plane of balladry, which seems to float the music off into unexpected directions.
Beyond Career Talk
Then again, it’s important to talk about Sprits not just in terms of Jarrett’s career. Simply put, the CD takes its rightful place among all the artists that keep the roots of music alive, everything from the early music vocal group Stile Antico to the Celtic group Solas.
Also, it should be noted that classical music is still an essential part of Jarrett’s essence as a musician, from his wonderful recordings of Bach, Mozart, Shostakovich, and Lou Harrison, to his own underrated compositions, The Celestial Hawk, and the pieces collected on Bridge of Light. But it does seem clear that the mental break from the classical world in the form of Spirits was integral to the arc of Jarrett’s remarkable career, and perhaps even unthinkable without it.
Douglas Nordfors - Douglas Nordfors grew up in Seattle and graduated from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA). Before going on to ...
