Keith Jarrett: Solo Live shows Bremen-Lausanne
(ECM Luminessence vinyl sequence 602445053254 . 3 LP set .Album evaluate by Phil Johnson)

Much less celebrated than the multi-million promoting Koln Live performance of 1975, however under no circumstances inferior, the 2 1973 dwell live performance performances collected within the three LP field set Solo Live shows: Bremen-Lausanne inaugurated an prolonged golden interval of the solo Keith Jarrett’s nearly unbelievable productiveness and brilliance. The Koln double album adopted in 1975, and the ten LP Solar Bear Live shows in 1978. Now reissued on the fiftieth anniversary of the unique launch as a part of ECM’s superlative new audiophile vinyl sequence, Luminessence, the recordings get a well-deserved alternative to shine once more. And it’s a revelatory expertise: they sound completely fantastic, and even higher than I remembered from occasional listenings to my authentic LPs. Purchased second hand, their enclosing cardboard field has not worn properly.
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His ECM debut with Going through You in 1971 had established Jarrett’s mastery of the solo format however that was a studio recording, nonetheless primarily based round particular person tunes moderately than long-haul improv. With Bremen-Lausanne – the primary of Jarrett’s dwell recordings to be issued by the label, who had beforehand cancelled the deliberate launch of earlier live shows as a result of they have been uncertain concerning the technical high quality – we get the full-on epic, and we get it twice. The ecstatic lyricism that turned Jarrett’s solo signature is right here in abundance, however in contrast to Koln, the place an imperfect but pleasingly idiosyncratic instrument made him stick with the center of the keyboard, there’s actual full-width chromaticism. As well as, Jarrett’s emotive lyric mode comes combined in with blues, barrelhouse and boogie from the jazz piano’s previous in addition to these trademark gospel-influenced elongated vamps that he’ll perpetually be related to.

Recorded for broadcast by German and Swiss radio respectively, and combined by ECM for its first version on vinyl late in 1973, with a manufacturing credit score shared by Manfred Eicher and Keith Jarrett, the box-set was voted Downbeat Album of the Yr in 1974. The newly re-released recordings sound even perhaps higher than earlier than – the Luminessence requirements of urgent have been unimpeachable to this point – and the facsimile field seems to be sturdier than my now moderately crushed authentic.

As to the contents: it’s all of an amazingly excessive commonplace, however the opening Bremen facet, and the closing Lausanne, are of a unique order solely, completely on the market, on a stage of genius-quality improvising that it’s onerous to credit score. You possibly can recognise little motifs that can re-emerge in later recordings with the European Quartet, and there’s an inevitable sense that the improvisations sew collectively smaller, particular person cells of creativity into an extended, sustained motion that fills out a efficiency half, or the facet of an edited LP; however the power, the endurance, the pulling the rabbit out of the hat theatricality of those performances can’t be denied. What a pianist, and what a doc. Fifty years previous, and appropriately for a box-set, it sounds solely box-fresh.

LINK Solo Live shows Bremen Lausanne at Correct Music / Launch date 27 October 2023

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