14 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020Classical
The last time Keith Jarrett performed in
public, his relationship with the piano was
the least of his concerns. This was at Car-
negie Hall in 2017, several weeks into the ad-
ministration of a divisive new American
president.
Mr. Jarrett — one of the most heralded pi-
anists alive, a galvanizing jazz artist who
has also recorded a wealth of classical music
— opened with an indignant speech on the
political situation, and unspooled a relent-
less commentary throughout the concert.
He ended by thanking the audience for
bringing him to tears.
He had been scheduled to return to Car-
negie the following March for another of the
solo recitals that have done the most to cre-
ate his legend — like the one captured on the
recording “Budapest Concert,” to be re-
leased on Friday. But that Carnegie per-
formance was abruptly canceled, along with
the rest of his concert calendar. At the time,
Mr. Jarrett’s record label, ECM, cited un-
specified health issues. There has been no
official update in the two years since.
But this month Mr. Jarrett, 75, broke the
silence, plainly stating what happened to
him: a stroke in late February 2018, followed
by another one that May. It is unlikely he will
ever perform in public again.
“I was paralyzed,” he told The New York
Times, speaking by phone from his home in
northwestern New Jersey. “My left side is
still partially paralyzed. I’m able to try to
walk with a cane, but it took a long time for
that, took a year or more. And I’m not get-
ting around this house at all, really.”
Mr. Jarrett didn’t initially realize how seri-
ous his first stroke had been. “It definitely
snuck up on me,” he said. But after more
symptoms emerged, he was taken to a hos-
pital, where he gradually recovered enough
to be discharged. His second stroke hap-
pened at home, and he was admitted to a
nursing facility.
During his time there, from July 2018 until
this past May, he made sporadic use of its
piano room, playing some right-handed
counterpoint. “I was trying to pretend that I
was Bach with one hand,” he said. “But that
was just toying with something.” When he
tried to play some familiar bebop tunes in
his home studio recently, he discovered he
had forgotten them.
Mr. Jarrett’s voice is softer and thinner
now. But over two roughly hourlong conver-
sations, he was lucid and legible, aside from
occasional lapses in memory. He often punc-
tuated a heavy or awkward statement with
a laugh like a faint rhythmic exhalation: Ah-
ha-ha-ha.
Raised in the Christian Science faith,
which espouses an avoidance of medical
treatment, Mr. Jarrett has returned to those
spiritual moorings — up to a point. “I don’t
do the ‘why me’ thing very often,” he said.
“Because as a Christian Scientist, I would be
expected to say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’
And I was doing that somewhat when I was
in the facility. I don’t know if I succeeded,
though, because here I am.”
“I don’t know what my future is supposed
to be,” he added. “I don’t feel right now like
I’m a pianist. That’s all I can say about that.”
After a pause, he reconsidered. “But when
I hear two-handed piano music, it’s very
frustrating, in a physical way. If I even hear
Schubert, or something played softly, that’s
enough for me. Because I know that I could-
n’t do that. And I’m not expected to recover
that. The most I’m expected to recover in
my left hand is possibly the ability to hold a
cup in it. So it’s not a ‘shoot the piano player’
thing. It’s: I already got shot. Ah-ha-ha-ha.”
IF THE PROSPECTof a Keith Jarrett who no
longer considers himself a pianist is dumb-
founding, it might be because there has
scarcely been a time he didn’t. Growing up
in Allentown, Pa., he was a prodigy. Accord-
ing to family lore, he was 3 when an aunt in-
dicated a nearby stream and told him to turn
its burbling into music — his first piano
improvisation.
Broad public awareness caught up with
him in the late 1960s, when he was in a
zeitgeist-capturing group led by Charles
Lloyd, a saxophonist and flutist. The bril-
liant drummer in that quartet, Jack De-
Johnette, then helped Miles Davis push into
rock and funk. Mr. Jarrett followed suit, join-
ing an incandescent edition of Davis’s band;
in live recordings, his interludes on electric
piano cast a spell.
Mr. Jarrett soon hit on something analo-
gous in his own concerts, allowing impro-
vised passages to become the main event.
He was a few years into this approach in
1975, when he performed what would be-
come “The Köln Concert” — a sonorous,
mesmerizing landmark that still stands as
one of the best-selling solo piano albums
ever made. It has also been hailed as an ob-
ject lesson in triumph over adversity, includ-
ing Mr. Jarrett’s physical pain and exhaus-
tion at the time, and his frustration over an
inferior piano.
That sense of overcoming intransigent
obstacles is an enduring feature of Mr. Jar-
rett’s myth. At times over the years, it could
even seem that he set up his own road-
blocks: turning concerts into trials of hercu-
lean intensity, and famously interrupting
them to admonish his audience for taking
pictures, or for excessive coughing. A New
York Times Magazine profile in 1997 bore a
wry headline: “The Jazz Martyr.” The fol-
lowing year, Mr. Jarrett announced that he
had been struggling with the consuming
and mysterious ailment known as chronic
fatigue syndrome.
While regaining strength, he recorded a
series of songbook ballads in his home stu-
dio (later released as the exquisite album
“The Melody at Night, With You”). Then he
reconvened his longtime trio, a magically
cohesive unit with Mr. DeJohnette and the
virtuoso bassist Gary Peacock.
Their first comeback concert, in 1998, re-
cently surfaced on record, joining a volumi-
nous discography. It captures a spirit of joy-
ous reunion not only for Mr. Jarrett and his
trio partners but also between a performing
artist and his public. He titled that album
“After the Fall”; ECM released it in March
2018, unwittingly around the time of his first
stroke.
Loss has shrouded Mr. Jarrett’s musical
circle of late. Mr. Peacock died last month, at- Jon Christensen, the drummer in Mr.
Jarrett’s influential European quartet of the
1970s, died earlier this year. Mr. Jarrett also
led a groundbreaking American quartet in
the ’70s, and its other members — the saxo-
phonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie
Haden, the drummer Paul Motian, all major
figures in modern jazz — have passed on,
too.
Faced with these and other difficult
truths, Mr. Jarrett hasn’t exactly found sol-
ace in music, as he once would have. But he
derives satisfaction from some recordings
of his final European solo tour. He directed
ECM to release the tour’s closing concert
last year, as “Munich 2016.” He’s even more
enthusiastic about the tour opener, “Buda-
pest Concert,” which he briefly considered
calling “The Gold Standard.”
AS HE BEGINSto come to terms with his body
of work as a settled fact, Mr. Jarrett doesn’t
hesitate to plant a flag.
“I feel like I’m the John Coltrane of piano
players,” he said, citing the saxophonist who
transformed the language and spirit of jazz
in the 1960s. “Everybody that played the
horn after he did was showing how much
they owed to him. But it wasn’t their music.
It was just an imitative thing.”
Of course, imitation — even of oneself — is
anathema to the pure, blank-slate invention
Mr. Jarrett still claims as his method. “I don’t
have an idea of what I’m going to play, any
time before a concert,” he said. “If I have a
musical idea, I say no to it.” (Describing thisprocess, he still favors the present tense.)
Beyond his own creative resources, the
conditions of every concert are unique: the
characteristics of the piano, the sound in the
hall, the mood of the audience, even the feel
of a city. Mr. Jarrett had performed in Buda-
pest four times before his 2016 concert at the
Bela Bartok National Concert Hall, feeling
an affinity he ascribes to personal factors:
His maternal grandmother was Hungarian,
and he played Bartok’s music from an early
age.
“I felt like I had some reason to be close to
the culture,” he said.
The embrace of folkloric music by Bartok
and other Hungarian composers further
nudged Mr. Jarrett toward a dark quality —
“a kind of existential sadness, let’s say, a
deepness” — present in the concert’s first
half. The second half features a few of Mr.
Jarrett’s most ravishing on-the-spot compo-
sitions. Those ballads, like “Part V” and
“Part VII,” spark against briskly atonal or
boppish pieces, gradually building the case
for a mature expression that might not have
been possible earlier in his career.
Part of that evolution has to do with the
structure of Mr. Jarrett’s solo concerts,
which used to unfold in long, unbroken arcs
but now involve a collection of discrete
pieces, with breaks for applause. Often the
overarching form of these more recent con-
certs is only apparent after the fact. But Bu-
dapest was an exception.
“I saw this one while I was in it, ” Mr. Jar-rett said. “I mean, I knew it. I knew some-
thing was happening.”
The crucial factor, he acknowledged, was
an uncommonly receptive audience. “Some
audiences seem to applaud more when
there’s something crazy going on,” he said.
“I don’t know why, but I wasn’t looking at
that in Budapest.”
Given that Mr. Jarrett has made all but a
small portion of his recorded output in front
of an audience, his cantankerous reputation
might best be understood as the turbulent
side of a codependent relationship. He put
the matter most succinctly during a Car-
negie Hall solo concert in 2015, when he an-
nounced, “Here’s the big deal that nobody
seems to realize: I could not do it without
you.”
As he renegotiates his bond with the pi-
ano, Mr. Jarrett faces the likelihood of that
other relationship — the one with the public
— coming to an end.
“Right now, I can’t even talk about this,”
he said, and laughed his deflective laugh.
“That’s what I feel about it.”
And while the magnificent achievement
of “Budapest Concert” is a source of pride,
it’s not hard to see how it could also register
as a cosmic taunt.
“I can only play with my right hand, and
it’s not convincing me anymore,” Mr. Jarrett
said. “I even have dreams where I am as
messed up as I really am — so I’ve found
myself trying to play in my dreams, but it’s
just like real life.”Confronting Life Without His Piano
Health issues make it unlikely
that Keith Jarrett will ever
again perform in public.
By NATE CHINENROBERTO POLILLO/CTSIMAGES‘I don’t know
what my future
is supposed to
be. I don’t feel
right now like
I’m a pianist.’DANIELA YOHANNES/ECM RECORDSNORMAN SEEFFKeith Jarrett, above,
whose left side is partly
paralyzed from a pair of
strokes he suffered in
2018; top, in Bologna,
Italy, in 1969; and above
left, in rural New Jersey,
where he still lives, in- Mr. Jarrett says he
is unable even to discuss
losing the strong bond he
feels with the public.
.