cos Yizhe's put up a little weekly music appreciation series of articles there and i think he's done a damn fine job and you'd be doing yourself a favour if you went over there and started reading from article 1.
Now, to business. This is a bit strange coming from me, because I'm right up there (or down there) in the noise-as-art camp as far as my preferred timbre goes, which means Hendrix over Clapton, Thurston Moore and Ira Kaplan and Kurt Cobain over Slash, and Coltrane's late 60s output over... well, just about anything at all. So it's a bit uncharacteristic to be plugging here somebody who puts out so much... well, pleasant music. His short stint with Miles aside, Jarrett is the sort of sensitive pianist I'd love to hate, and as you could expect I was pretty stunned to find out that I don't. But the Noise-as-art thing is pretty maligned anyway. I don't think just any noise qualifies as just any art. My underlying point (i say presumptuously) has been that I expect a player to play not just the pitches but the sonorities of the instrument at hand. All the great musicians of this century have. Think. Where would jazz be if Louis Armstrong hadn't reached for those ear-splitting high notes? They were great notes, better than if a piano player had merely reached his right arm a little and played the high G, because they strained the timbre of his instrument. In that moment, the urgency and the stress of holding that impossible embouchure became the urgency of the music. What about Monk? Nobody else in the world could make the piano sound like what it really looks like - an impossible, plinky contraption with far too many corners. And the great modern pianist Vijay Iyer says in this interview that each of his voicings was a sound rather than a collection of notes :
A close study of Monk’s playing reveals this spectral quality of his chords, this clear perception of higher harmonics in the sound of the piano. In order to activate these higher partials, he had to play with a little more force than the average pianist, to get the instrument ringing and shaking. In this sense harmony and tone were integrated concepts. This is why I call them “sounds” rather than “chords”; they are not theoretical constructs but vibratory experiences—actual, specific sensations—and they feel good.
And if we reach a little further into the late 60s, saxophonists like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler were establishing something that should've stayed with us to this date but sadly hasn't - the primacy of sound as the first fundamental of music. Taking a historical perspective, it makes sense - before the advent of tuned instruments, we must still have had music. Even in tonal music today, it irks me horribly to see a guitarist playing Bird licks. I mean, they're fine as harmonic studies, sure, but rarely on the stage. They worked for Charlie Parker partly because he was Charlie Parker and he wrote them, but also because he was playing a goddamn alto saxophone. The sort of things that work for an altoist don't work for a guitarist because the instruments are different! This is what Ornette was getting at when he talked for ages about how a Bb on the alto was different from a Bb on the piano.
Anyway, having taken the grand detour through the history of jazz, let's get back to Jarrett, and this clip. 'I loves you, Porgy' (spelt with the s!) is one of my favourite ballads of all time, and this is hands down my favourite version of it. It beats the Bill Evans and the Miles version. And you might be thinking that Keith Jarrett plays it awful straight for someone who's supposed to be a top notch jazz musician, aren't they supposed to make everything weird and substitute all the chords? (Here's Vijay Iyer playing a certain John Lennon song.) He doesn't. What he does do though is play it using the sonorities of the piano. That crystal clear, bell-tone he gets out of his fingers makes the joy of the melody a palpable feeling, like floating on air. And it's a sad song! That's the blues right there, the approach that makes joy out of sadness ... and in one act Jarrett has covered almost every historical aspect of jazz. The joy of listening to Jarrett isn't just the joy of hearing a wonderful tune interpreted well, it's the joy of listening to the sound of a piano. I think we're missing some of that today. In any case, you oughta check him out.
adam
p.s.
Check this out if you want to hear him getting seriously freaky. Nope, he's not all tame at all.
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