When he first played the Deer Head Inn, a romantic 1840s clapboard hotel on the edge of a Delaware national park, Keith Jarrett was 16, just out of high school and making $48 a week as a shipping clerk. But he was also a piano prodigy from the age of three, a classical recitalist before he was 10 and an intuitive improviser, too. He would regularly sit in at the Deer Head (often playing drums) until he left town to gig with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. As the music world knows, his 1975 solo improv performance on The Köln Concert became a multimillion seller, and made Jarrett a global jazz superstar.
But he never forgot the Deer Head, and in 1992, he returned to play a fundraiser for the jazz-devoted venue where he had once made music with friends and strangers just for fun. The Old Country is from the same gig as Jarrett’s 1994 release At the Deer Head Inn, similarly covering famous Broadway and jazz songs with subtly muscular regular bassist Gary Peacock, and the uncannily reactive, tonally delicate drummer Paul Motian (a unique Jarrett sidekick from the 1970s) deputising on this occasion for Jarrett’s regular Standards Trio partner, Jack DeJohnette.
That change, as well as the leader’s audibly evident delight in the place and the people, make these recordings special. Everything I Love is an unaccompanied whirl turning to entrancing swing, and Thelonious Monk’s Straight No Chaser is a blistering fusion of extended bebop improv and succinct, groove-mimicking phrasing. Jarrett’s Bill Evans roots are plain on All of You, and an initially pensive How Long Has This Been Going On turns into an impassioned onrush. Like its Deer Head predecessor, this set is song-based jazz-imagining at its best, though sceptics about Jarrett’s ecstatic background vocalising should note there’s plenty of that in here.
Also out this month
The prize-winning Brooklyn saxophonist/flautist Anna Webber opens the latest window on her empathic 10-year exploits with pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer/composer John Hollenbeck on simpletrio2000 (Intakt). Webber’s stop-start single-note figures throb within Mitchell’s rippling figures, or twist from guttural tones to top-end squalls while Hollenbeck hovers in snapping, tripping accents, and the leader’s liquid flute lines dance through fresh melodies.
American/Swiss saxophonist Ohad Talmor’s Back to the Land (Intakt) is an inspirational tribute to the late Ornette Coleman and Cool School sax maestro Lee Konitz (Talmor’s friend and mentor), based on recently discovered recordings they made together. Talmor’s sound is hauntingly expressive, and so are the contributions of an A-list band including vibraphonist Joel Ross.
And young UK rising-star pianist Joe Webb confirms his eclectic class with Hamstrings & Hurricanes (Edition), shrewdly reappraising swing, boogie and the blues in storming runs and splashy chording. Approaching the lugubrious clang of Thelonious Monk, he invites listeners into a personal sound world that has taken him from Oasis to Duke Ellington and Liszt.
