Keith Jarrett

Jarrett was twenty-one and playing in Charles Lloyd's quartet when he cut this in a single day at Atlantic's New York studio. It is his first album as a leader and the first time he, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian ever recorded together, which turned out to be the start of a partnership that would run for the next decade. Nobody knew that yet. What they knew was that the kid could play, and "Lisbon Stomp" proves it inside of thirty seconds: the melodic turns, the little rocking flourishes, the fast silvery runs. The voice arrived fully formed.

What I like most here is how songful it is. This was 1967, when a lot of young players were burning everything down, and Jarrett instead writes tunes: a Cole Porter cover, a couple of pretty love themes, a rag. Haden anchors it all with that huge woody tone he brought from the Ornette Coleman band, and Motian plays the drums like he is painting rather than keeping time.

It is a debut, and it sounds like one in places. Some tracks feel like sketches, and the piano Atlantic gave him sounds a little dead. But as a document of a major voice showing up complete on day one, it is startling, and the trio chemistry that would carry all the way through the American Quartet years is already there.

The trio live at Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood, two nights at the end of August 1968, with George Avakian producing. The headline is the opener: a jazz piano trio covering Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" in 1968, played completely straight, like a hymn. Jarrett heard what was happening in pop music and did not pretend otherwise, and that open-eared streak runs through his whole career.

The rest of the set jumps around on purpose. There are two rags, a standard, some free playing, and a couple of gorgeous ballads, all inside thirty-nine minutes. "Pretty Ballad" is exactly what the title says and my favorite thing here. You can also hear the gospel and country undercurrents that would define the American Quartet starting to surface, especially in the title track.

It is a grab bag, and the short track lengths keep anything from fully developing, which is why I hold it at three stars. But as a snapshot of where Jarrett's head was at, right before Miles Davis called and everything changed, it is a fascinating little record and an easy one to enjoy.

One man, one piano, one November day in Oslo, and the beginning of everything ECM would become. Facing You is Jarrett's first solo piano record and the blueprint for the entire solo career that followed: the gospel left hand, the folk melodies, the classical touch, the sudden vamps that lock in and ride. "In Front" opens the record with ten minutes that still sound like nothing else in jazz piano before it.

Unlike the marathon concerts that came later, these are eight compact pieces, most under six or seven minutes, and the discipline suits him. Every idea gets stated, developed, and released before it wears out its welcome. "My Lady, My Child" is one of the most beautiful things he ever wrote, and "Starbright" swings harder than a solo piano track has any right to.

Manfred Eicher had founded ECM barely two years earlier, and this record set the sound of the label: close, quiet, every note ringing. If The Koln Concert is the famous one, this is the one pianists talk about. Essential, and honestly the better starting point.

Jarrett's one and only album for Columbia, and he did not waste the budget. Expectations is a sprawling double LP with the future American Quartet at its core, plus Sam Brown's guitar, Airto's percussion, and strings and brass draped over the top. It is gospel, free jazz, Latin groove, and orchestral color all crammed into seventy-eight minutes that barely hold together and are frequently thrilling because of it.

"Common Mama" is the keeper, a rolling gospel-funk groove that might be the single best entry point into early Jarrett. "There Is a Road (God's River)" closes the record like a benediction. Dewey Redman announces himself all over these sessions, playing that raw Texas tenor against Jarrett's church chords, and the chemistry that would fuel the quartet for the next five years is fully lit.

Columbia dropped him not long after it came out, which is one of the all-time label blunders given what happened next. The record itself is too long and occasionally overdressed, but the ambition is the point. Nobody else in 1972 was even attempting music this wide.

The American Quartet's first record for Impulse!, cut live at the Village Vanguard on a February night in 1973, and the moment this band's identity locks in. The title is usually read as a scramble of "Fourth Way," and the music matches that inside-joke looseness: one minute the band is deep in a churchy vamp, the next it has boiled over into full free-jazz froth with everybody banging percussion.

Side one is dense and wild, and Redman's Ornette-schooled tenor is the thread that keeps pulling you through. But side two is where I live. "De Drums" rides one of the fattest grooves Motian ever laid down, and "Still Life, Still Life" is a slow, aching ballad that shows how much tenderness this supposedly chaotic band had in reserve.

Recorded in the club where so much jazz history happened, this one earns its spot in the lineage. If you want to understand why people call the American Quartet the wildest great band of the seventies, start here and play it loud.

The friendliest record the American Quartet ever made. Two studio days in New York in February 1974, Sam Brown's guitar back on a couple of tracks, and a set of tunes that lean into melody instead of away from it. The title track glistens, all soft edges and sweet chords, and "The Rich (And the Poor)" works a soulful country-blues feel that nobody else in jazz was anywhere near at the time.

That does not mean the wildness is gone. "Fullsuvollivus" lets the free side out for a run, and the two percussionists keep everything rustling around the edges. But the balance tips toward song, and it makes Treasure Island the easiest door into this band. If the Impulse! records have intimidated you from a distance, this is the one to try first.

Two months after these sessions Jarrett flew to Oslo and recorded Belonging with an entirely different band, which tells you something about the pace he was working at in 1974. Both records are keepers. This one is the underrated one.

Two days in Oslo with three Scandinavians he barely knew, and Jarrett came out with one of the greatest quartet records in jazz. The European Quartet is the American band's mirror image: where Redman and company churn and erupt, Garbarek, Danielsson, and Christensen play with this cool, clean intensity that makes every Jarrett melody sound carved out of ice and then lit from inside.

The material is perfect. Three burners and three ballads, every one of them a real composition. "The Windup" gets Jarrett's most exuberant piano on record, a double-time solo that just keeps cresting. "'Long As You Know You're Living Yours" rides a country-blues groove so good that Steely Dan absorbed it into "Gaucho" a few years later, and after a legal dispute Jarrett ended up with a writing credit on their song. And "Solstice" and "Blossom" are as gorgeous as small-group jazz gets.

Eicher reportedly could not get Jarrett to record more than one take of the title track, and the whole album has that first-take electricity. If I could only keep one Jarrett band record, it would be this one.

The story is almost too good: Jarrett arrives in Cologne exhausted and in back pain after a long drive, finds the opera house has put out the wrong piano, a small rehearsal Bösendorfer with a thin top end and weak bass, and nearly cancels. The show is at eleven thirty at night. He plays anyway, working around the instrument's limits, hammering the mid-register vamps because that is what the piano could do. The tape of that improvised concert became the best-selling solo piano album ever released, in any genre.

Strip away the legend and the music still delivers. The opening minutes of Part I, that patient, chiming figure blooming into a groove, remain some of the most inviting improvised music ever recorded. Jarrett builds long arcs out of gospel vamps and folk melodies, and you can hear him vocalizing along, riding the thing like it is happening to him too.

Yes, it is the Jarrett album everyone owns, the one that ended up in a million living rooms next to the wine rack. Do not hold that against it. Popularity this durable usually means something real is inside, and fifty years on, Part I still raises the hair on my arms.

The American Quartet's big statement piece. The title track fills a whole side, opening with wood flute and rustling percussion, hanging in the air for minutes before the piano even commits to a pulse, then building by slow degrees into full-band intensity and easing back down again. It asks for patience and pays it all back. This is the quartet's version of a spiritual jazz epic, and they earn every minute of it.

Side two brings it home. "Prayer" is exactly what it says, a long-breathed hymn built on one of Haden's most singing bass lines, and "Great Bird" lifts off on a groove with Franco's percussion chattering all around the kit. These October 1974 sessions were productive enough that a second album, Back Hand, came out of the same two days.

If Fort Yawuh is the wild night out and Treasure Island is the friendly one, this is the deep listen, the record you put on when you have forty minutes and no plans. One of the American Quartet's two or three best.

By the end of 1975 the American Quartet was running out of road, and Mysteries, cut in the same December sessions that produced Shades, is the sound of a band pouring everything out before the lights come up. Four long tracks, exotic instruments everywhere: Jarrett on Pakistani flute, Redman on his squawking Chinese musette, Franco rattling away in every corner of the mix.

"Everything That Lives Laments" is the heart of the record, a slow processional the band had been carrying around since 1971, played here with a heavy, funereal grace. The bass sound Haden gets on it deserves its own credit line. Then "Flame" drifts on flute and percussion like incense smoke, and the title track closes things on a fifteen-minute simmer that never quite boils, on purpose.

It is moodier and less immediate than the earlier Impulse! records, which is exactly why some of us love it. Late-period band records have a particular melancholy, and this one wears it beautifully.

The American Quartet's farewell masterpiece, and the one time the band recorded for ECM in the studio. One continuous suite split across two LP sides, Beginning and Conclusion, with Jarrett layering soprano sax, bass recorder, and celeste around the core quartet. Everything this band spent a decade learning to do is in here: the free heat, the gospel release, the hanging rubato dread, the sudden swing.

What separates it from the Impulse! records is focus. The suite form gives all that wildness an architecture, and the band plays like they know it is the last big canvas. Haden and Motian are monumental, and Redman gets some of the most passionate playing of his life on record. The Penguin Guide flat out called it a masterpiece, and for once the reference books undersell nothing.

The quartet dissolved not long after, with Jarrett already deep into the solo concerts and the European band. As last statements go, this is about as good as it gets in jazz: not a fade-out but a summation. My pick for the most underrated album in the whole Jarrett catalog.

Three and a half years after Belonging, the European Quartet reconvened in Oslo and made its gentlest record. My Song is Jarrett the melodist with all filters off: the title track and "Country" are so open and singable they barely qualify as jazz tunes, closer to hymns or folk songs that happen to have world-class improvisers moving through them.

Garbarek is the revelation here. His tone had gotten purer and colder since 1974, and on "My Song" he floats the melody like light on water. "Country" became one of the most beloved things either man ever recorded, the kind of track people who do not follow jazz still fall for instantly. "Mandala" and "Questar" keep enough rhythmic muscle in the program that the sweetness never goes soft.

Some critics dock it for prettiness, and sure, it is pretty. It is also the European Quartet's most complete set of songs and the perfect closing bracket for this first decade: the restless kid from the Vortex records now writing melodies built to last. Put it on some Sunday morning and see if you disagree.