Keith Jarrett (b. 1945)
KEITH JARRETT: JAZZ PIANO PERSONIFIED
Whether playing solo, as on his acclaimed The Melody at Night, with You, or mixing it up with his "Standards Trio," featuring bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, on the new Whisper Not, the legendary Keith Jarrett exemplifies the best in creative jazz piano. He spoke with B&N.com's Ted Panken about his undiminished passion for music.
Barnes & Noble.com: Whisper Not concentrates on the repertoire of the bebop era.Can you talk a little generally about what that period means to you?
Keith Jarrett:If you think about what was recorded in sequence just before this release, you'll notice the approach we take here was starting to happen -- we're in time more, not playing around with the time as much. Moving toward bebop was a good thing for me, because although I knew these tunes from hearing them, I hadn't spent any time playing them before. I am much more influenced by horn players than pianists; when I feel I've been successful with the trio in a jazz context, it's occurred to me that I'm basically hearing Charlie Parker when I try to play. I wasn't hearing what a piano would do; I was hearing what a horn would do. The phrasing from that period has a character that I can't quite figure out how to describe, but I would say it's both soft and hard. The bebop era to me has the elements that all other periods of jazz have used, one way or another. And it just focuses on the musical line. If you go back to the very earliest playing that we know on recordings, they hadn't flatted the fifth very much yet. But if you listen to anybody play jazz who is a good player, somewhere in what they do, bebop has the qualities they're using; it's somehow center stage to what modern jazz has done even since then. I don't think you can really include Albert Ayler in that necessarily [laughs] or a few other guys. But you know, we're using the same instruments, the same configurations.
B&N.com: I know you've been playing since you were unimaginably young. But did listening to records, to styles, to tonal personalities have a big influence on how your sensibility developed?
kj: I think you're asking a bigger question than you intend to. Around 1967 I did a tour; up to that time, I thought that what a jazz player is supposed to do is work on his voice and find out who he was musically.If I played something that sounded like somebody else or something else, I think what I used to do would be to say, "No-no, that's really not me." Then next time I'd hope that I could find where I was in that particular piece. But one evening we were playing, we took a break, and when I came back onstage, I realized that what I thought was the last stage in the things you work on, to find your voice, was probably way down the list. Because once you find your voice, then the imperative is to play, and not think about that.
B&N.com: Tell me if this is an accurate paraphrase. Are you saying that you decided to play, and whatever you played would be your voice?
kj: I think I determined by the time we finished the first set that by that time I had played so much of my life -- luckily, I started early -- that it was possible to drop that other shit, and just say, "Well, I'm who I am when I'm playing. I don't have to be who I am and then make sure I am who I am by playing what I think I am." So that freed me to do really whatever I heard. I don't know whether it's a forgotten thing, or whether it's never been thought of. [laughs] But I think it's the way it works. If a player doesn't do that, if they get stuck in their own voice, then where do they go from there? I've often said the art of the improviser is the art of forgetting. Our brains can probably forget better than our fingers.
B&N.com: This trio is one of the longest-standing entities in improvised music. What is it about Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette that makes them so suited to interact with you?
kj: We've all been bandleaders and played our own music, and played the music of the other bandleaders we've worked with. We know how freeing it is to be just playing, not to rehearse your own material, not to say, "use brushes here, we'll go into time there," the whole kit and kaboodle of that stuff. The group has to be like wired together. There's no format. We have to be like superconductors for each other. And there are no mistakes. You have to use whatever you play. Change is the eternal thing. I mean, the trio has a style in that we can't play what we don't hear, and we have limitations because we are human beings, and we only hear what we hear when we're playing. Gary has things his fingers end up playing, I have things my fingers end up playing, and Jack has ways of playing that are his. But I think that's where it ends. And that's where it's supposed to end. That was what the principle of the thing was.
B&N.com: Can you speculate on why the group has remained together as long as it has?
kj: If you reverse how these questions are answered, it's the future that proves the past. We're still doing things that knock us out together, and therefore we're together! I think one great difficulty in music is that players get locked into their own food sources. It's like a biofeedback. If you're stuck in a tape loop, you're stuck in a tape loop. It doesn't matter if it's a small one or a big one. It's the fact of being stuck that makes what you do ineffectual to the listener. Say somebody is a fan of somebody else. Well, you can go only so far with that. That fan can be stupid enough to accept the person they're listening to doing the exact same thing the exact same way forever. But what we're talking about is the creative act, and the creative act continues to demand different things of you as a player. It's like the act asks you. You don't say, "I think it would be very creative of me to do this." [laughs] That's not how it works.
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