Rediscovering Pianist Keith Jarrett
The other night, unable to sleep, I found myself hungering to listen to the music of Keith Jarrett. Out of the blue, it seemed, although our desire for music unheard for months or years is a little like our very occasional craving for a certain food: explicable by the brain yet somehow mysterious. Why Jarrett? Because his 1975 album “The Köln Concert†(ECM) — the all-time best-selling solo piano recording in any genre, with more than three million copies sold — is one of those pieces of music than conjures up an entire era of my life. College, in my case. Listening to it again after so long, I found that it didn’t evoke those long-ago days but evoked only itself. Its sounds, though I have them deep-grooved in my brain, were altogether surprising, especially the middle section of this improvised composition. If you want to know more about the recording, click here. If you want to know more about Jarrett — a child prodigy from Allentown, PA, and a member of Miles Davis’s best jazz-rock band — click here.
