For Keith Jarrett's 80th Birthday: 10 Key Tracks from His Early Career

I celebrate the pianist's milestone birthday by sharing my favorite music from his first decade as a recording artist

Keith Jarrett became an unlikely superstar in the closing days of 1975. Almost overnight the pianist found himself transformed from a fringe figure, known only by serious jazz fans, into a crossover artist with a huge audience.

The reason was a solo piano album Jarrett had recorded in Cologne, Germany earlier that same year. This record, released on November 30, 1975,  became the bestselling solo piano album of all time.

Up until this moment, Keith Jarrett had been considered brilliant—but cranky, eccentric, and sometimes hostile to audiences. But now, all of a sudden, he was trendy.

I saw it happen with my own eyes.

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I was a teenager in 1975, and one cold December evening I was browsing through the jazz record bins at Banana Records on El Camino Real in Palo Alto. This was a strange record store built in the shape of an enormous wooden crate.

The building looked like a sad joke, and the selection was even sadder. I preferred shopping at Tower Records in Mountain View, but Banana Records was closer to my college dorm room. I sometimes went there just to kill time.

But this proved to be a memorable evening. The mood in the big wooden crate turned magical when the clerk at the checkout counter put an unexpected record on the turntable.

No, it wasn’t Frampton Comes Alive—an album that seemed to follow me everywhere I went during the next 12 months, like some avenging ghost—or the fashionable debut album from a Palo Alto High School keyboardist who had recently adopted the odd name Pablo Cruise for his band.

It was something much different tonight—the new Keith Jarrett album, The Köln Concert. It had been released the previous week.

I’d discovered Keith Jarrett back in high school and was already a huge fan. I wasn’t just listening to his albums during my teen years, I was studying them as part of my self-directed music education.

I listened to them for hours on end. Sometimes I kept them playing at night while I slept.

So I smiled in approval to this music coming from the checkout counter. It was like hearing a familiar friend.

But I didn’t think anyone else in the store was listening.

I was dead wrong.

Over the next few minutes, I watched as customer after customer walked up to the counter and asked the clerk the name of the album he was playing. As soon as they learned the title, they bought the record.

Within 15 minutes, the store had sold every copy of The Köln Concert they had in stock.

This must have happened elsewhere too—because soon even my less-than-hip classmates, raised on the thinnest top 40 pablum, knew about Keith Jarrett.

Sometimes they would even take Frampton Comes Alive off the record player, and put on The Koln Concert instead.

This unnerved me—these two albums belonged in different universes, and should never share a turntable. But clearly Jarrett found his new-found fame even more distressing.

In the aftermath of The Köln Concert success, Jarrett refused to play any of the music on the album in concert. He made no attempt at recording a follow-up hit in the same style.

In fact, the next time Jarrett released a live solo piano recording he made sure it was packaged as a bulky and pricey 10-album box set unsuitable for the mass market. For years, he worked to prevent others from recording or publishing the Cologne music.

He later told an interviewer: “We also have to learn to forget music. Otherwise we become addicted to the past.” That’s always a good philosophy for a jazz musician. But in this instance, Jarrett was referring specifically to his bestselling album.

This success, even if it was disavowed by the pianist, testifies to his extraordinary musicality. The Köln Concert was a powerful creative statement. But successes of this sort don’t come out of nowhere.

So let me probe the origins of Keith Jarrett’s style in 10 tracks. Each of these was recorded between the ages of 20 and 30. They make clear that Jarrett was already a formidable musician from the moment of his first recording, but somehow managed to expand and advance his vision at a scary rate for another decade.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Jarrett not only broadened the scope of his own ambitions during these years, but somehow managed to widen the entire jazz vocabulary. On many of these early recordings, Jarrett did things nobody had attempted in the genre before.

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Keith Jarrett (with Art Blakey): “Secret Love,” recorded live at The Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach, California, January 1966

Jarrett made only one album as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but it’s a doozy. This is still one of my favorite Jarrett tracks, although he was barely out of his teens when he made it. Everything here earns my praise: his touch at the keyboard, his improvised lines, his rhythmic sophistication, his effortless virtuosity. But I’m especially struck by how confidently he challenges the legendary drummer Art Blakey, who was Jarrett’s boss at the time.

From the opening notes of his solo, at the 5:15 mark, Jarrett pushes the tonal center to the brink—in a way that I’d never heard anybody do in Blakey’s band. After all, the Messengers enjoyed renown as a soulful hard bop ensemble, not an avant-garde outfit—pianists in the band were supposed to play with a funky, boppish groove on songs like this. But Jarrett has a different agenda, starting out with strident atonality, but eventually shifting into hardass bebop around the 6:45 mark. The whole solo is breathtakingly disruptive.

I would love to hear a dozen more albums of Jarrett with the Blakey band. In some ways, Blakey was an ideal drummer for Keith, countering the impressionistic tendencies that defined much of Jarrett’s later work, and giving him an effective kick in the piano seat. But fans like me only have this one live date to enjoy.

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Keith Jarrett (with Art Blakey): “My Romance,” recorded live at The Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach, California, January 1966

I need to share one more track from this Art Blakey album—because it’s the earliest example of Jarrett’s lyrical playing on record. This overt melodicism would come to the forefront on The Köln Concert, but you can already hear hints of it on this same 1966 performance at The Lighthouse. Here the band delivers one of those slow ballads that even hard bop band occasionally played—in this instance “My Romance,” composed by Richard Rodgers in 1935.

The melody statement and opening solo are handled here by Chuck Mangione, who would also sell quite a few records in the next decade. Mangione takes care of business, and earns my respect. He’s not the fluffmeister some will have you believe. But then the young Keith Jarrett follows up with a piano solo at the 3:45 mark that obliterates everything that’s come before it.

Each phrase is fresh and free and lovely—and the listener feels instantly that this is what a romantic jazz ballad should sound like. It’s emotionally direct, but never clichéd or saccharine. It’s more like a flirty conversation with someone you know you’re going to fall in love with. And check out the tone that Jarrett gets out of that beaten-down Lighthouse piano. There’s so much music here—but the entire solo lasts just 100 seconds.

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Keith Jarrett (with Charles Lloyd): “Of Course, Of Course,” recorded and filmed at RTB Studio in Belgium, on May 2, 1966

Ten months later, Jarrett appeared on film for the first time—as a member of Charles Lloyd’s quartet—and he’s rocking and rolling. No, I’m not talking about the music (which is straight-ahead jazz) but the pianist’s constant body motion at the keyboard. If I had done this at my student piano recitals, my teacher (a nun named Sister Camille Cecile) would have hit me upside the head.

Jarrett is already digging into his Cage-and-Cowell-ish bag of tricks here—slapping the piano strings or strumming them or pressing down on them to distort the notes. But I want to call particular attention to his solo on “Of Course, Of Course,” which starts at the 7:20 mark. Here we find the origin of all those funky vamps and ostinatos on Jarrett’s later albums.

This hardly sounds like jazz anymore—there’s more Ray Charles and Meade Lux Lewis here than anything you might hear at a jazz club. The remarkable fact, however, is that Jarrett was completely schooled in advanced jazz pianistics at this stage, and had drunk deeply from the most progressive masters of the art form, but then he sits down at the piano, as if he had forgotten all that, and instead channels some gospel-ish groove from a revival meeting.

This kind of talent was scary—and Jarrett is still 6 days away from his 21^st birthday.

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Keith Jarrett, “Liza,” recorded in Oslo on May 7, 1966

This track was recorded five days after the previous one—but seems to be a bootleg. Somebody found it in the Norwegian Jazz Archives, a donation from Randi Hultin, who befriended so many jazz legends over the years.

It was probably recorded at Hultin’s house, and certainly wasn’t intended for commercial release. Keith didn’t play like this in concert at the time—or at any other time. He’s just having fun here, or maybe showing off.

What he delivers is so amazing that you can hear people (Charles Lloyd? Randi Hultin? Jack DeJohnette?) laughing in amazement in the background. For a start, Keith demonstrates that he can play in the traditional stride piano style, and has studied closely Art Tatum and the other masters of the idiom.

And then he moves on from there into his own two-handed keyboard pyrotechnics. This is ultra-high level virtuosity, but Jarrett tosses it off like it’s nothing. 

Jarrett is still 20 years old, but will turn 21 the following day.

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Keith Jarrett (with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian), “Everything I Love,” recorded in New York on May 4, 1967

Atlantic Records offered the young pianist a contract, and he recorded his debut leader date in 1967. This was a big deal—Atlantic was home for Aretha Franklin, Sonny & Cher, Otis Redding, and other heavy names. The label probably wanted something soulful, but Jarrett opted to record with a nuanced jazz trio.

Jarrett explained in the liner notes:

“I must add a word about the recording session. It was done without any restrictions whatsoever on the music. Mr. Avakian (man of many worlds) supervised the recording but not one alteration in the music was made. I am extremely grateful for this.”

Even as the start, Jarrett demanded artistic freedom—almost as much a trademark of his work as any specific musical vocabulary. And who could complain about his choice of bandmates: bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian? They would stay with Jarrett for the next decade.

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Keith Jarrett, “For You and Me,” recorded in New York on March 12, 1968

Nothing prepares you for what Jarrett did next.

All of sudden, he drops jazz and turns into a Bob Dylan-ish folk rock singer—with a bit of Donovan thrown in for good measure.  But not even Dylan and Donovan combined played 11 different instruments on an album. The ambitions ran so high that the Atlantic label even added a chart to the back cover, so you could follow what Keith was playing on each track.

Hardly anyone talks about this album nowadays—not even Jarrett fanatics. It’s too strange. Jarrett soon abandoned  his folk rock ambitions (although some of these elements found their way into his jazz piano work). When I first heard it, years ago, I couldn’t handle this album, not in the least.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I now think that Jarrett had a pleasing guitar sound, and knew how to write a pop-oriented melody. His voice is a little raw but, honestly, so is Dylan’s.

Restoration Ruin wasn’t a strong enough statement to climb the charts, but with some patience Jarrett might have pursued this alternative vision with some success. If he had devoted a few years to touring as a singer-songwriter, he may very well have blown our minds.

Yet I have no regrets because Keith had greater things in his future than this.

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Keith Jarrett (with Miles Davis): “Honky Tonk,” recorded and filmed live at Chateau Neuf, Oslo, Norway on November 9, 1971

I have to laugh every time I hear people talking about how Miles Davis chased a crossover audience in the 1970s. This ain’t no crossover music, my friends.

The songs are strange and unsettling, without radio-friendly hooks. In fact, the tracks are so long and rambling, that even jazz disk jockeys hesitated before spinning this deep fusion for their listeners. I can’t deny that some of these Davis albums sold in large quantities but, at moments like this, I think Miles was defying his rock audience instead of currying favor with it.

No, I don’t think this is Jarrett’s best music of the era, but he benefited from working with a jazz legend willing to take chances and resist expectations. A few years later, Jarrett would also enjoy a big boost in sales even while breaking many of the accepted rules of the genre. Long before The Köln Concert, he learned how to build  long, rambling forms out of interludes, vamps, change-ups, and textures. Much of it he learned under the tutelage of Mr. Davis.

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Keith Jarrett: “In Front,” recorded in Oslo on November 10, 1971

The album Facing You marks the most important turning point in Jarrett’s career. In fact, this record belongs on any short list of the most important solo jazz piano records of all time.

Up until this point, Jarrett was a prodigy who could do almost anything, but there’s no real cohesion to his worldview. Those tracks with Miles and Blakey and the showy stride solo piece above sound like the work of different pianists.

Yet somehow Jarrett develops—almost overnight, it seems—a unified, holistic style that incorporates all of these previously disparate ingredients, from lyrical to funky. The end result sounds unlike any other jazz piano album up to that juncture.

Here all of the familiar modern jazz phraseology of the past is replaced by something unprecedented. Where did he get all of these new phrases and textures—Bartok? Shostakovich? John Coates back in Delaware?

I don’t think we’ll ever know. And, in all fairness, Jarrett was creating so much new stuff here that the antecedents hardly matter. That said, let’s give plenty of credit to Keith’s new producer (Manfred Eicher) and label (ECM). No partnership between producer and musician in jazz history has been more productive over so many years.

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Keith Jarrett: The Bremen Concert, recorded live in Bremen, Germany on July 12, 1973

During my formative years, there was no album I listened to more often than Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne. This was the music I played all night long on a tape loop. It was like sleep learning for me. Then I would listen to it again during the day. 

If Facing You represents the turning point in Jarrett’s stylistic synthesis, the subsequent solo concerts showed how far Jarrett could push his new conceptualization of jazz piano. The performances were totally improvised—there weren’t even song titles, the music just flowed. The only constraint was the pianist’s watch, which he would put on the piano. It gave him some sense of how long to play, but everything else happened without rules or restrictions.

I love every nook and cranny of this music. But the opening twenty or thirty minutes of the Bremen concert belong on my desert island list.

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Keith Jarrett (with his American Quartet): “Introduction/Yaqui Indian Folk Song,” recorded in New York on February 27-28, 1974

Jarrett continued to record as a bandleader for several US labels—including Columbia, which infamously signed the pianist to a contract and dropped him after a single album. It’s all too fitting that the artist sold millions of records in the two years following his dismissal.

But even as Jarrett was redefining solo jazz piano he continued to move into new areas with his so-called American quartet—built around Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, and Dewey Redman. Many of us still lament the fact that this group broke up in the mid-1970s. Jarrett would go on to lead other outstanding ensembles, but none ever sounded like this one.

The American combo deserves an article on its own, but let me slip in one track here—an adaption of a Native American folk song that Jarrett’s band played as an encore the first time I saw this group in concert (five weeks after that evening in the big wooden crate). Here he demonstrated that this new lyrical strain, so evident in his solo piano work, could also flourish within the context of a postmodern jazz quartet.

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These tracks laid the groundwork for the bestselling Köln Concert—and a lot else. At a future date, I plan to explore Jarrett’s mid-career work from his thirties. That’s a rich body of work, encompassing his American and Norwegian quartets, various keyboard projects, orchestral compositions, and even Jarrett’s debut as a classical pianist.

But this first decade set a high standard—not just for Jarrett, but for all his peers too. The body of work he left us from this period is still at the heart of his legacy, and marks a major contribution to modern American music.

Happy listening!