Edward Strickland, in his book American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music, gives the story:
After abandoning the solo concerts in early 1984, Jarrett began releasing albums of jazz standards with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, with whom he continues touring and recording. For a year and a half he devoted himself primarily to performing classical recitals and concerts. In mid-1985, frustrated to the point of numbness, he canceled further engagements and recorded what became Spirits alone in his studio in a reconverted barn beside his home. He used only the instruments on hand and two cassette recorders, on which he overdubbed himself playing a family Moeck recorders, tablas (the Indian drums that are his favorite instrument), soprano saxophone, other winds, plucked strings, percussion, and a bare minimum of piano. Jarrett described the unpremeditated primitivism of Spirits as intuitive rather than a calculated reaction to the speciousness of contemporary musical and other technology. Its twenty-six sections range from under two to eight minutes, some pristine in their lyricism, others pulsing with rhythm or unsettling in their desolation. Jarrett considers Spirits his most important composition to date, and subsequent conversations and correspondence, now five years after its inception, confirm it as a watershed work in its influence on both his interpretive and his compositional concerns.
How did Jarrett follow up his “most important composition to date”? With Book of Ways, a double album of clavichord improvisations.
Book of Ways was recorded on the 14th of July 1986 in Ludwigsburg. The sequence of improvisations has been adapted for this double album without being changed in order. The great variety of sound and rhythm here is impressive – Jarrett played alternately one or two instruments simultaneously. Beyond unmistakeable echoes of lute music and Japanese koto, the whole range of modes of expression of the clavichord comes to the fore. Upon its release Spin magazine raved: “Jarrett has been able to perform with all his accustomed inwardness and yet with paradoxically greater objectivity and force; the music, however sensitively and beautifully played, comes right at you, insists that you listen to it, demands an equivalence with your own physical existence, looks you right in the eye…”
As Jarrett himself wrote in 2002:
To my knowledge, this recording is unique in several ways. We had three clavichords in the studio, two of which were angled together so that I could play them both simultaneously, and the third off to the side. Also we miked the instruments very closely so that the full range of dynamics could be used (clavichords are very quiet and cannot be heard more than a few feet away). The two CDs were made on an off day between concerts with my Trio, and no material was organized beforehand. Everything was spontaneous. The recording was done in four hours.
Roundeye plays tonight in Medford, home to both Oregon’s only In-n-Out and its finest Chinese buffet, Tin Tin.
Leave a Reply