Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Keith Jarrett specializes in surprises. His youthful stints with the bands of Miles Davis and Charles Lloyd put him at ground zero of the jazz-rock fusion movement. Then, in the 1970s, he unplugged his keyboards and started giving the totally improvised, all-acoustic solo concerts that established him as the most individual (and successful) jazz pianist of his generation. The '80s saw him recording arrestingly fresh versions of pop ballads with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette--as well as Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on piano and harpsichord...
...just didn't have the energy to be clever. Also, I'd just stopped drinking coffee." He laughs. "So the album ended up being about how you play melody without cleverness. It's almost as though I was detoxing from standard chordal patterns. I didn't want any jazz harmonies that came from the brain instead of the heart...
...wish: rarely has a jazz album come so directly from the heart. The opening cut, George Gershwin's I Loves You, Porgy, is exquisitely tranquil and songful, and the 10 tracks that follow are no less tender. Even Be My Love, Mario Lanza's high-C jukebox hit, is transmuted into a limpid cameo. The result is a record made to be played late at night, when the streets are empty, the air is still, and you feel like thinking about what might have been or could...
...jazz go? It's a music of all soul and no limits, but there are, at some times and in some hands, certain arbitrary restrictions. Free form is fine, but the more precise disciplines of melody and orchestration can lead to suspicions of musical conservatism, even retrogression. Yet jazz can--and should--go anywhere, as long as the direction's not conventional, and there is no one better than Charlie Haden at taking an old road to a brand-new place...
Haden's most recent album with his Quartet West, the ravishing The Art of Song (Verve), is a lyrical excursion across a landscape that embraces classical music (Rachmaninoff's Moment Musical), folk (Wayfaring Stranger), American popular song (Kern's In Love in Vain) and contemporary jazz (Jeri Southern's Theme for Charlie and Haden's own Ruth's Waltz). The only thing these disparate pieces have in common is Haden's singular vision, his insistence that this music beats with a single heart that pulses as steadily as his bass swings...