Facing You - Keith Jarrett

Mar

7

Facing You - Keith Jarrett

≡ Category: 1970s, Essential, Post Bop, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

I’ve got to admit, I’m not really a huge Keith Jarrett fan. His famous concerts tend to be long on piano noodling and high-pitched, irritating vocalizations for my taste. However, Facing You (on the ECM label) just might be the greatest single solo piano release in jazz history. That’s a pretty strong claim, eh?

Well, after you hear Jarrett’s staggeringly fluid and inventive improvising throughout the gorgeous songs on this record, with nary a spastic yelp, then tell me that I’m exaggerating.

Facing You opens with the ten minute plus Out Front, an upbeat, gospel tinged tour de force which is actually somewhat unrepresentative of the album. Most of the tunes that follow, like Ritooria, are much more melancholy in tone, with an occasional sprightly tune like Starbright or Semblance to break things up.

At this point in Jarrett’s career, he was moving in the direction of completely improvised music, but the songs on Facing You have strong compositional underpinnings, which Jarrett uses as starting points for improvisation, rather than abandoning preplanned harmonies and melodies completely. Facing You benefits hugely from this underlying structure — there is almost zero flab or dissipation of energy on Facing You, making it probably the most fully realized recording of Jarrett’s career.

Every song on Facing You is full to bursting with ideas, making it almost seem as though the songs are through-composed. This is all the more startling when you consider how little the blues, one of the pillars of jazz, figures into Jarrett’s harmonic language. It seems like his ideas come more from European, classical or folk sources, which helps to explain how Jarrett ended up forming a European quartet later in his career, as well as developing a second career as a classical pianist.

But perhaps the most startling thing about Facing You is how lucid it is. If you listen to the release immediately before it, Expectations, or the one immediately after, Ruta and Daitya, you can scarcely believe they are all products of the same creative imagination. Every tune on Facing You is like a diamond, all of the concepts compressed and refined into a glittering jewel. The releases preceding and following Facing You are more like coal, the raw ingredients of a diamond. As enjoyable as they are, Expectations and Ruta and Daitya are more exploratory in nature, with Jarrett seemingly figuring out what he wants to say as he’s saying it, or sometimes vamping until he figures out what he wants to say. Whereas, on Facing You, it’s as though he’s dictating the songs of angels.

If you check out the samples on Amazon, you will get a pretty good indication of what Facing You is like. If you like what you hear, by all means pick it up! You won’t regret it.

For more indulgence-free Keith Jarrett, check out Death and the Flower, Gary Burton & Keith Jarrett, and Airto’s Free (Keith Jarrett plays electric piano on one or two cuts).