Maybe I was old before my time.I shouldn't have been listening to Keith as a teenager but I've always had a jazz tinged brain. I don't know why. It just fitted. I mean, I was listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra at 14. I think wild music has always felt it went where nothing else did. I loved the ambition and tone. The fearless element and musicianship.
He has the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album. Given I grew up as a rock kid who was obsessed with guitar solos, this is perhaps not the most likely artist to provoke my passions but given one of the early gigs was playing in the Charles Lloyd Quartet in the late 60s and they played at the Fillmore, attracting a hippie audience, their extemporisations being not a million miles from the Grateful Dead’s jamming. When they played in London at the Albert Hall, the Beatles were there.
So he was already a fixture on the ‘scene’ and even played festivals with all the rock bands of the era and that meant I was already listening. He joined Miles Davis. During his tenure with Miles, he played both electronic organ and Rhodes piano, alternating with Chick Corea. The two appear side by side on some 1970 recordings, including the Isle of Wight Festival performance of August 1970 in the film Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue and on Bitches Brew Live. After Corea left in 1970, Jarrett often played electric piano and organ simultaneously and was on several albums
This was always right up my jazz-rock strasse and though he became less enamoured of electric music, he still had what I thought was a rock sensibility. This was important to me as a teenager because it ‘allowed’ me to listen to music that, had it been defined differently to my silly head, I wouldn’t.
So when The Koln Concert double album was released in 1975, which went on to be the best selling solo jazz a;bum ever and the best selling piano record, I bought it in 1976 and took it into school to play, feeling very classy.
Of course it wasn't well received by an audience more used to Deep Purple and Budgie. I must say in full disclosure, I did think it would make me look sophisticated to girls. Such things are important when you’re 15. Of course it didn’t, rather, it made me seem weird, I think though it was never explicitly said.
Even so, I loved it. I’m still not sure what category I thought it lived in. Certainly not classical music but it was not like any jazz I’d heard.The story behind the recording revolves around them not getting the correct piano on the stage and it all being played on an inferior one, Jarrett trying to compensate for its reduced high and low end. And it’s just improvised, that’s the most incredible thing about it. Accessible and played with an internal rhythm that isn’t rock (he’d have hated that) but drives it on for a rock brain like mine.
He’s still with us, having had two strokes, poor lad and suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. A good rock factoid is that he sued Steely Dan. Gaucho's title track, credited to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, bore a resemblance to Jarrett's "Long As You Know You're Living Yours" from Jarrett's 1974 album Belonging. In an interview with Musician magazine, Becker and Fagen were asked about the similarity between the two pieces of music, and Becker told Musician that he loved the Jarrett composition, while Fagen said they had been influenced by it. After their comments were published, Jarrett sued, and Becker and Fagen were legally obliged to add his name to the credits and provide Jarrett with publishing royalties, which they could probably afford and shows how adjacent to rock, Jarrett was at the time.
