Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert


Book Description

In Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert, Peter Elsdon presents, for the first time, a detailed musical account of Keith Jarrett's best-selling The Köln Concert. It explores the way in which Jarrett developed the format of the solo improvised concert, and looks at the subsequent reception of the record.




Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert


Book Description

Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential pianists in jazz history. His The Köln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano performances featuring no well-known songs. In Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert, author Peter Elsdon seeks to uncover what it is about this recording, about Keith Jarrett's performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Köln Concert as a multi-faceted text, Elsdon engages with it musically, culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated his own cultural and musical outlook, and establish himself as a serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text, of the recording and of the live performance, Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as Keith Jarrett's many fans.




Keith Jarrett


Book Description

Keith Jarrett is one of the great pianists of our times. Before achieving worldwide fame for his solo improvisations, he had already collaborated with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. His 'Köln Concert' album (1975) has now sold around four million copies and become the most successful solo recording in jazz history. His interpretations of the music of Bach, Händel, Bartók or Shostakovich, have also received much attention in later years. Jarrett is considered difficult and inaccessible, and has often abandoned the stage during his concerts due to restless audiences or disturbing photographers.Few writers have come as close to Keith Jarrett as Wolfgang Sandner, who has not only closely followed Jarrett's remarkable career from the 1960s, but has also had the opportunity to visit him in his home in the United States. For this biography, which is full of detailed musical analysis and cross-references to other artistic genres, Sandner has collected new information about Jarrett's family background, much of which is thanks to the translator, Keith Jarrett's youngest brother Chris. The book explores Jarrett's work with other musicians, in particular the members of his American and European Quartets and his Standards Trio, it charts the development of his solo concerts, and it also investigates his work in the classical sphere, as well as the highly original music he has created in his own home studio. It also covers his associations with his various record labels and producers, notably his unparalleled relationship with ECM and its founder Manfred Eicher. This English edition is a significantly extended and updated version of the German original.




Keith Jarrett's the Köln Concert


Book Description

Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential pianists in jazz history. His Köln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: an unprecedented feat for a 2 disc set of solo piano performances featuring no well-known songs. This book seeks to uncover what it is about this recording and performance that elicits such success.




Playing Changes


Book Description

One of jazz’s leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: it is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise. “Playing changes,” in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes—ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical—that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music. Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters—from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding—who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.




Creative Pedagogy for Piano Teachers


Book Description

Improvisation can be beneficial to a young pianist's musicality. The musical games and exercises in this book can lead to a better understanding of music theory and style, and can help students develop confidence in their ability to perform.




Keith Jarrett


Book Description

Keith Jarrett is probably the most influential jazz pianist living today: his concerts have made him world famous. He was a child prodigy who had his first solo performance at the age of seven. In the sixties he played with the Jazz Messengers and then with the Charles Lloyd Quartet, touring Europe, Asia, and Russia. He played electric keyboards with Miles Davis at the beginning of the seventies, and went on to lead two different jazz groups—one American and one European. He straddles practically every form of twentieth century music—he has produced totally composed music, and has performed classical music as well as jazz. Jarrett has revolutionized the whole concept of what a solo pianist can do. And his albums such as Solo Concerts (at Lausanne and Bremen), Belonging, The Koln Concert, and My Song have gained him a worldwide following.Now, with Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, Ian Carr has written the definitive story of Jarrett's musical development and his personal journey. This is a revealing, fascinating, and enlightening account of one of the outstanding musicians of our age.




Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz


Book Description

Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance offers a new and exciting way to listen to and understand jazz. When describing a performance, most jazz writers focus on the improvised lines of the soloist and their underlying harmonic progressions. This approach overlooks the basic fact that when you listen to jazz, you almost never hear a single line, but rather a musical fabric woven by several musicians in real time. While it is often pragmatic to single out an individual solo line, it is important to remember that an improvised solo is but one thread in that fabric; and it is a thread supported by, responded to, and responsive of the parts being played by the other musicians in the group. Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance explores the process of player interaction in jazz, and the role this interaction plays in creating improvised music, including: jazz improvisation through theory and analysis musical roles, behaviours and relationships harmony, interaction and performance Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance will appeal to students of jazz history, composition, and performance, as well as to the general jazz audience.




The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68


Book Description

The "Second Quintet" -- the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s -- was one of the most innovative and influential groups in the history of the genre. Each of the musicians who performed with Davis--saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams--went on to a successful career as a top player. The studio recordings released by this group made profound contributions to improvisational strategies, jazz composition, and mediation between mainstream and avant-garde jazz, yet most critical attention has focused instead on live performances or the socio-cultural context of the work. Keith Waters' The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68 concentrates instead on the music itself, as written, performed, and recorded. Treating six different studio recordings in depth--ESP, Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro--Waters has tracked down a host of references to and explications of Davis' work. His analysis takes into account contemporary reviews of the recordings, interviews with the five musicians, and relevant larger-scale cultural studies of the era, as well as two previously unexplored sources: the studio outtakes and Wayne Shorter's Library of Congress composition deposits. Only recently made available, the outtakes throw the master takes into relief, revealing how the musicians and producer organized and edited the material to craft a unified artistic statement for each of these albums. The author's research into the Shorter archives proves to be of even broader significance and interest, as Waters is able now to demonstrate the composer's original conception of a given piece. Waters also points out errors in the notated versions of the canonical songs as they often appear in the main sources available to musicians and scholars. An indispensible resource, The Miles Davis Quintet Studio Recordings: 1965-1968 is suited for the jazz scholar as well as for jazz musicians and aficionados of all levels.




Make to Know


Book Description

Make to Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery will change the way you think about creativity. The book upends popular notions of innate artistic and visionary genius and probes instead the event of discovery that happens through the act of making. In contrast to the classic tale of Michelangelo, who 'saw the angel in the stone', the artists and designers Buchman interviews for this book talk about knowing their work as they engage in the doing. Make to Know explores the revelatory nature of the creative journey itself. As Buchman weaves together the vivid stories of his multiple conversations, we learn about writers of all stripes as they confront creative spaces of uncertainty 'the blank page'; about visual artists and what they understand from the materials they encounter; about designers and architects and the iterative process of solving problems; and about actors and musicians facing the surprises of improvisational performance. Make to Know is a book that will, ultimately, open a path to your own making, and, in the end, will have significant implications for how you live. Make to Know presents a way of thinking that democratizes creativity and uncovers a process that leads to knowing both ones work and oneself. It is relevant to anyone interested in why creativity matters.