Word: koln
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Besides, if his Koln Concert is any evidence, Jarrett finds meaning and authenticity only in a surfeit of emotion and moodiness. The album, a recording of one of his improvisational concerts, is a real soul-twister, one part tear-jerker, one part elevator fodder, and one part art. Jarrett oozes presence on the album, as he grunts along with the music over and over and over again...
...mine introduced me to Jarrett the year after I graduated from high school. I was taking a year off, studying in New York, and needless to say, I was very emotional. At the time, Jarrett seemed irreducible, beyond classification, and too true for words. I listened to the Koln concert that entire spring--while walking, studying and having serious conversations...
...time passes, one cannot help but grow out of Jarret's music. Such raw emotion is on the one hand too close to melodrama, and on the other, too close to madness. The Koln concert began to sound less and less convincing, lacking in artistic and critical intelligence. If Jarrett were not so frightened of imitation, and his recent classical recordings hint that he is not, he might find a new sort of authenticity in tradition...
Jarrett's uncompromising career took off in the mid-1970s with his seminal solo-improvisation concerts in Europe--with 2 1/2 million copies sold, his 1975 album, The Koln Concert, is the best-selling solo-piano album ever. "Music should be thought of as the desire for an ecstatic relationship to life," explains the former disciple of the mystic philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff. "Music has to have a deep joy inside...