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.
