Send "Keith Jarrett " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Pianist Keith Jarrett is the most brilliant and essential jazz musician of the last 40 years.Okay, that a crazy-bold statement. Jarrett is not the “best” maybe, and certainly not the easiest to enjoy or to fit into a category. But in many ways he encompasses most essentially the turbulent and wonderful history of the music since Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman passed their prime. And his new solo piano recording, Rio, is his best work in a very long time. Which is to say: it is one of the essential recordings of the year. It’s not popular or simple to hold up Jarrett as a paragon. He has done plenty to offend whatever might be called the “jazz establishment”, including being contemptuous of audiences who dare even to cough or sneeze during his concerts. He has made many classical recordings (usually a suspicious move in jazz) and he’s been bold enough to let that sensibility bleed over his jazz playing. He has flirted with fusion, mainly in playing with Miles Davis in the 1970s, which is an offense again purity, but he has also been a Marsalis-esque prude in other moments, eschewing electric instruments and playing a strict diet of older compositions with his “Standards Trio”. But in fact Jarrett has been at the center of jazz’s creative core for decades. He has played fusion, yes, but the very best and most adventurous of that style’s early work. He has also played beautifully and consistently in avant-garde styles, moving easily beyond bebop or post-bop harmonies into “free” territory both with his bands and as a solo player. With Charles Lloyd and then on his own he helped to define jazz as a music that could touch on popular impulses without being merely a finger-snapping gloss on the hit parade. His classical playing has been assured and fine (particularly his recordings of music by Bach, Handel, and Shostakovich), and that work has informed all his playing in subtle and substantive ways. He has challenged himself by working with great musicians of his generation from both the U.S. and Europe....full text |
| Guardian |
| It takes a while to get over the shock of seeing an ECM Records sleeve as a riot of blazing yellows and reds rather than the usual mysterious monochrome. Then you listen to this solo-piano double album, recorded live only six months ago in Rio, and the outburst makes sense. The story goes that Jarrett was on the phone to ECM boss Manfred Eicher barely before the applause had died down, convinced this was his best gig in years – and he's right. Warmer and less abstract than his still-remarkable 2006 Carnegie Hall solo show, a constantly changing (and totally improvised) soundscape of rocking African and Latin vamps, fragile love songs, guitar-like blues and sparingly deployed free jazz, Rio represents Jarrett at his most exuberant. Though the spurted, staccato figures and stamping chords of Part 1 suggest an edgy set, the romantic harmonies and gentle trills of Part 2 and its churning, funky successor take the music to more open ground. Wistful ballads give way to township-jazz stomps like early Abdullah Ibrahim, Latin groovers to Cecil Tayloresque free jazz, rocking rural blues, love songs full of internal conversations. For old Jarrett fans and prospective new ones, it's a must....full text |
| Independent. |
| The latest of Jarrett's solo concerts opens with an urgent hesitancy, as if the pianist is eager to set some-thing down, not sure it's going in the right direction, but never uncertain about its drive. Not that he should worry: these 15 pieces sketch an entire world of music, coloured by the locale, and shifting between the smoothly lyrical and the propulsively rhythmic, with Jarrett's familiar, pulsing left-hand figures providing a stolid foundation anchoring the serpentine runs of his right hand. The results range from the blues-boogie of "Part XII" and the Latin spice of "Part VIII" to the flamenco-flavoured "Part VI", punctuated with his characteristic grunts and moans, and the babbling-brook torrent of notes tumbling through "Part X". But perhaps most effective is "Part V", where the throbbing rhythm gradually resolves into an exultant, lyrical conclusion....full text |
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