Gratitude & grief.
Today, news emerged that legendary pianist Keith Jarrett was partially paralyzed by a series of strokes in 2018, and has likely played his last concert.
If you’ve never heard of Keith Jarrett, he’s had an easy claim to being the greatest living piano player. In the late 60s he was sought out by Miles Davis and they toured together for a decade. But Jarrett became best known for his solo piano concerts.
Those solo performances, played to full orchestra halls, were always entirely improvised. Each performance was a new on-the-spot experiment, never played before or ever again.
Jarrett’s 1975 recording — The Köln Concert — became the best-selling piano recording in history. If you listen carefully at the beginning, you can hear some scattered laughter in the audience after Jarrett plays an opening phase on the piano. It’s because he was quoting and elaborating on the melody of the orchestra hall’s bell that had sounded a few moments prior, calling the audience to their seats.
You could argue that no other pianist in history would have been able to pull off this type of performance every night.
Jarrett always been eccentric. Often one of the first-recognized features of Jarrett’s playing are the strange, errant vocalizations he makes, seemingly involuntarily while playing — shrill falsetto shrieks that escape when he’s reaching a musical peak.
He’s also always been know and for his outbursts — too much coughing, a sneeze, or god forbid a camera flash — was known to stop a concert in its tracks. with Jarrett berating the audience or even storming off.
In 2017, I attended what we now know might have been his last performance.
My girlfriend, now wife, was living on 56th Street just across from Carnegie Hall. I had introduced her to Jarrett’s music only a few days before, and by complete coincidence, we stumbled across the concert. She surprised me with tickets — great seats right in the center orchestra. He was phenomenal. His method had evolved. Rather than extended vamping for 30 or more minutes, he broke the concert down into short movements, five or six minutes each — entirely original compositions made on the spot, not revisited. He made two characteristic attacks on noisemakers in the audience, and punctuated the concert with occasional political commentary, which at one point got him so worked up that nearly broke down in tears. The music was extraordinary.
I’ve been reflecting today on gratitude & grief. Gratitude for being there and for his music. And grief for the loss of the artist’s ability to perform.
As today wound down, I stumbled across another performance, this time online — recorded Town Hall in NYC, just blocks from Carnegie Hall. But it was the date that caught my eye most of all: March 13, 2020. Just days before the lockdown, the tidal wave of fear and death. The show is Nathaniel Rateliff, opening with a Leonard Cohen-inspired, rapid-yet-gentle fingerpicking tune on a candle-lit stage surrounded by an invisible chorus.
The song opens with a shockingly appropriate line — a friendly reminder of the cosmic web interconnecting all things:
Tonight, you’re a one-armed man.
And just as relevant to the times, the song closes with the repeated refrain:
If the world goes strange, its dying flames
will light the end of the last morning.
