Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is considered one of the most important living jazz piano players. His career started as a keyboardist for Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s, he has enjoyed a great deal of success in both classical and jazz music, as a group leader and a solo performer.

The standards trio

In 1983, Jarrett asked bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, with whom he had worked on Peacock's 1977 album Tales of Another, to record an album of jazz standards, simply entitled Standards, Volume 1 (Standards, Volume 2 and Changes were recorded at the same session). The success of this album and its ensuing tour, which came as traditional acoustic post-bop was enjoying its Wynton Marsalis upswing in the early 1980s, led to this new "Standards Trio" becoming perhaps the premier working group in jazz, and certainly one of the most enduring, continuing to record and perform live over more than twenty years.

Related Topics:
Gary Peacock - Jack DeJohnette - Jazz standards - Wynton Marsalis

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The trio has recorded numerous live and studio albums of jazz repertory material, including Still Live (1988), The Cure (1991), Bye Bye Blackbird (1993, a tribute to the recently deceased Miles Davis), Whisper Not (2000), Up For It - Live at Juan Les Pins (2002), and the six CD box At the Blue Note (1994), which records six complete sets in the famous nightclub. The group has also produced recordings of challenging original material, most notably 1987's Changeless. The live recordings Inside Out and Always Let Me Go (both 2001) marked a renewed interest in wholly improvised free jazz. The Standards Trio undertakes frequent world tours of recital halls (the only venues in which Jarrett, a notorious stickler for acoustic sound, will play) and is one of the few truly lucrative jazz musicians to play both "straight-ahead" (as opposed to smooth) and free jazz.

Related Topics:
Free jazz - Smooth

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A related recording, At the Deer Head Inn (1992), is a live album of standards recorded with Paul Motian replacing DeJohnette, at the venue in Jarrett's hometown where he had his first employment as a jazz pianist. It was the first time Jarrett and Motian had played together since the demise of the American quartet sixteen years earlier, and also reunited the drummer and bassist who had backed Bill Evans on his album Trio 64 (1963).

Related Topics:
Paul Motian - Bill Evans

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