The Landfill Chronicles: Keith Jarrett Celebrates the Trio’s 25 Anniversary 2008, Chapter 24 Part 3
Dan Ouellette’s The Landfill Chronicles — Pivotal Conversations on Eclectic Music Elevated to a State of Art (the archival conversation memoirs by Dan Ouellette published at Medium)
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“I haven’t heard consciousness coming through other players in so long that I’m addicted to my own band.”
STANDARDS TRIO — HAPPY 25 (2008)
Two years earlier in a conversation at his New Jersey home, Keith waved off any suggestions that he might ever expand his Standards trio of Gary and Jack. “This band is about consciousness,” he said. “If one member changes, it dissolves.” He paused, then added, “I haven’t heard consciousness coming through [other] players in so long that I’m addicted to my own band.”
Keith echoed the same sentiment this past summer at his annual Carnegie Hall show as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. At the beginning of the second half of the show, in a rare gesture, he addressed the audience. “I want to publicly thank John and Gary for the music,” he said. “A lot of people ask if I’d want to play with other musicians. But I feel that this group is still forming.”
Indeed, on the eve of the group’s 25th anniversary as arguably the greatest working band of all time, ECM is releasing two different documents in celebration. Arriving this fall is a new double album, My Foolish Heart, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2001. It’s the trio’s 18th album, all of which have been released by the label. In January ECM delivers a remastered box set, Setting Standards, bundling for the first time the trio’s debut recordings — Standards, Vol. 1; Standards, Vol. 2; and Changes — all recorded in the same session at New York’s Power Station in 1983.
Keith is pleased. “As long as we have integrity and respect amongst ourselves, we’ll keep on playing,” he says, in a recent telephone conversation. “That’s the way it was from the very first note, in the very first session. As time has gone on, it’s easier for us to understand what a privilege it’s been and continues to be to play together. It’s mind-boggling how the music is so complicated and yet so simple. We don’t bring any baggage. We wake up, get into the appropriate state of consciousness and play.”
While the band members have other gigs, they all keep their calendars open for the annual tour, which averages about 12 dates per year, says Keith says. “Normally you feel exhausted after touring, but when we play there’s a level of ecstasy and concentrated focus that gives us energy,” he says. “All I can say is that it’s the best the trio has ever sounded on the last two tours we did, in Japan and Europe.”
Gary attributes the band’s longevity to trust. “We all surrender to the music, and we’re all 200 percent committed to the melodies in the American songbook,” he says. “But, if someone had told me at the time we started that I’d be playing in the same band, even for 10 years, I would have thought they were a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. But we have stayed together, by immersing ourselves into these great songs, by engaging in a spirited symbiosis and reaching a depth that’s rare to achieve. After 25 years, it’s like family.”
“We’ve all gone through lots of changes since we first started,” says Jack. “But it still feels good. We’re older now, and the music has its wisdom, but we play like we have nothing to prove. Our faculties are still there, and we challenge each other and have fun.”
In reflecting back on the trio’s beginnings, Keith recalls the early ’80s as a time where “there was lack of joy in the music. Something was missing. It was all about that you had to own the music, you had to write it, you had to arrange it. So, then I thought about being a sideman, where you’re not in charge and you can just show up and be yourself. What if you could form a band to personify that? Instead of one person in charge, three could be.”
Keith chose the trio format, thus avoiding horns or a chordal instrument like guitar from muddying the mix. “It’s like Japanese flower arrangements, “ he says. “You put a fourth flower in and it looks weird. I wanted three of us to play together, to stop at any time, to keep going as long as the music has enough integrity.”
Jack notes that he and Keith had played together in Charles Lloyd’s quartet in the ’60s and shortly with Miles Davis, then recorded the duo album Ruta and Daitya (1971, ECM). All three joined for the first time on Gary’s album Tales of Another (1977, ECM). But it wasn’t until six years later that they reconvened. “Keith had the idea to form a band where we would use standards to jump off for improvisation,” Jack says. “He talked to Manfred [Eicher], and I agreed to try it, to play as long as long as it feels good.”
Since Gary had used the American songbook as the text for a class on theory and ear training that he taught at Cornish College in Seattle, he initially thought the idea of playing this exclusively wasn’t to his liking. “At first, I said I wouldn’t do that,” he says. “But then I thought about it. If Keith is proposing this, he must be setting out to do something different.”
So, Keith assembled Gary and Jack to a dinner before the sessions to talk about his ideas before committing them to a recording. “I was fired up after we talked,” says Gary. “I was thinking we were going to just do one album, but we just kept going so that we had three albums done in a day and a half. It was very special. It was very unique.”
As for the new album, My Foolish Heart, that too was a distinctive event and a departure from the norm. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment to release this album,” says Keith. “This is special. In a nutshell, this is a unique representation of the bandwidth of material we feel comfortable playing.”
He recalls the evening in Montreux well. The room was hot and uncomfortable, the sound was bad and the piano was lousy. Plus, he felt the Swiss audience was responding to the trio’s music with a detached sense of apathy. “There was nothing about playing there that night that suggested something special would happen,” he says. “But I was absolutely committed to finding out what would move the audience. I was compelled to do something different. So we played music that we had never played before and have never played since.”
The icebreaker turned out to be ragtime music. Gary recalls that during sound check, Keith was noodling around playing stride piano. “That’s part of my roots,” Gary says. “It’s some of the earliest jazz I heard. So I told Keith, why don’t we do that? So, the three of us just started playing around.”
“I felt fine fooling around in sound check, but I had no plans to go out on a limb and play that in concert,” says Keith. “But I did it on the spur of the moment and that’s when the audience came around. We played two ragtime numbers and then a third with a modern jazz middle. As a result, as a trio we found a new place we hadn’t explored before.”
Keith felt the time to issue My Foolish Heart is now, especially in light of ECM’s boxed set plans. It’s his way of testifying that the Standards Trio is still vital, energized and alive to new possibilities.
So, another 25 years? Jack laughs and says. “That’s a long time and a lot of music. I don’t know how much longer we can play, but we still feel the music and we still have a long way to go.”
“We haven’t rehearsed in years,” Gary says. “If we decide to play a new tune, we work on I, in sound check. We go out and never discuss what we’re going to play. Keith usually starts things off, but there are always surprises. That’s keeps us aware of being on the edge. Sure, there’s uncertainty about how long this can go. But there are no guarantees in anything, which is why I see the trio as a life-and-death situation. Every night is the first note and the last note.”
His last concert took place at Carnegie Hall in 2017.
END NOTE
In 2018 Keith suffered two strokes (in February and May) that partly paralyzed his left side. He is still able to play his piano with his right hand, but it’s unlikely he will ever perform again.
His last concert took place at Carnegie Hall in 2017. In the past he had often exhibited an aggressive stance with his audiences. Prime example: in 2007 at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, he abruptly had his trio leave the stage after he had curtly warned the crowd to not take pictures. At the Carnegie Hall show a decade later, Keith was quite the opposite. Performed shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency, Keith set up a microphone away from the piano to periodically rail against the political turmoil and made other humorous asides throughout the concert. He was having fun and even applauded the audience after his performance for bringing him to tears.