Keith Jarrett walked onstage alone with no plan and sold millions
Keith Jarrett built a career on sitting down at a piano with almost no idea what he would play next. Those fully improvised solo concerts, above all the 1975 Koln Concert, made him one of jazz's best-selling artists and produced the best-selling piano recording ever made.
Born on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Jarrett had absolute pitch and started lessons before turning three. At five he appeared on a TV talent show run by Paul Whiteman, and at seven he gave a formal recital that closed with two pieces he had written himself. He turned down an invitation to study composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris because jazz was already pulling at him, and after high school in 1963 he went to Berklee in Boston.
New York followed in 1964. A stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers lasted four months amid friction, but drummer Jack DeJohnette then steered him into the Charles Lloyd Quartet, whose Forest Flower became a mid-1960s jazz hit and whose Royal Albert Hall show drew The Beatles. Miles Davis hired him next; Jarrett played organ and Rhodes piano despite disliking electric instruments, stayed partly for DeJohnette, and left in December 1971 once the drummer had gone.
Through the 1970s he led two very different bands. His American quartet with Charlie Haden, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman mixed free jazz, gospel and Middle Eastern colours, with Jarrett picking up soprano sax, banjo and recorder. A letter from producer Manfred Eicher brought him to ECM, where a European quartet with Jan Garbarek leaned toward folk and classical influences. Solo improvised concerts began in 1973, and Time magazine named Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne its jazz album of the year.
Chronic fatigue syndrome kept him housebound in the late 1990s; during that time he recorded jazz standards as a Christmas present for his second wife, Rose Anne. In 2003 he became the first Polar Music Prize winner honoured for both contemporary and classical music. Two strokes in 2018 left him partly paralysed and unable to use his left hand, and he has not performed since.
Source: Keith Jarrett
