Word: jarrett
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...Jarrett N. Blanc...
...comes The Melody at Night, with You (ECM), a superlative album that at first may look like a straightforward melding of Jarrett's predilections for solo works and standards: unaccompanied versions of such old favorites as Someone to Watch Over Me and I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good). But you don't have to listen very long to realize that, once again, he's up to something completely different. Gone are the swirling right-hand cascades and rocking gospel vamps, the layered harmonies and high-energy codas; in their place is a style of quiet, unvirtuosic simplicity...
What on earth is the man who brought you The Koln Concert doing playing such penny-plain ditties as My Wild Irish Rose and Shenandoah? The answer is as simple as the tunes: Jarrett, 54, has spent the past three years stitching his life back together. In 1996 he staggered off the stage after a concert in Italy, completely exhausted and wondering whether he would ever be able to play again. He canceled his upcoming gigs, retired to his New Jersey home and withdrew into the dark netherworld of illness, eventually learning that he had contracted one of the various...
...Melody at Night, with You is the first album Jarrett has made since falling ill. "I started taping it in December of 1997, as a Christmas present for my wife," he recalls. "I'd just had my Hamburg Steinway overhauled and wanted to try it out, and I have my studio right next to the house, so if I woke up and had a half-decent day, I would turn on the tape recorder and play for a few minutes. I was too fatigued to do more. Then something started to click with the mike placement, the new action...
...mystically minded Jarrett suspects there was more to his latest CD than the right piano at the right time. "There was something deep going on," he says matter-of-factly, and he might be onto something. Sometimes a great artist does everything right and nothing happens; sometimes a sick man sits down carefully at the piano and suddenly finds himself 10 ft. off the ground. The trick, as Jarrett says, and the pleasure for listeners to this recording, is to be ready for anything, even a little miracle...