Whisper Not

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Recorded live July 5, 1999 at the Palais des Congrés Paris, before an effusively appreciative crowd, beautifully packaged (as with virtually all ECM releases, and featuring classic typography), ECM release another Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette live performance. It is, as ever, a majestic performance.

It's all standards again, with not a single original trio piece. With every new release by this trio, I hanker after a few more of their darkly introspective original improvisations, unrivalled pieces of stately, spacy, new music, barely a relation of jazz at all. Yet this group seems to be entirely focussed on an idea - not exactly a new one - of reinterpreting show tunes. But it is more than that. The real conceit is to simultaneously build to the specifications of the original piece, whilst constructing an entirely new piece within it, before eventually building outside the original structure. Which is difficult to describe, never mind achieve. Yet the players here are almost without equal in their individual fields, and this trio has been working together for over 20 years, having worked as empathetic bandleaders and bandmembers for many more. Consequently there's an almost casual genius at work here, evidenced, for example, in the way Jarrett is seamlessly joined by his compatriots in a stunning introduction to "What Is This Thing Called Love". This piece also features an irresistibly funky coda, emanating from Peacock's solo, and featuring DeJohnette hurling the kitchen sink at the brilliant angular chord-blocks hammered in by Jarrett, before the theme is restated, and trailing off into interplay between Jarrett's nudged patterns and DeJohnette. They display seemingly endless invention. Jarrett describes their affinity thus: "The group has to be like wired together. There's no format. We have to be like superconductors for each other."

In the same recent interview, Jarrett tried to elucidate on 'his voice' as a player: "Well, I'm who I am when I'm playing. I don't have to be who I am and then make sure I am who I am by playing what I think I am". Perhaps it's a perfect description, not because of what he literally said - which I can barely entangle - but because the rapid-fire, mind-twisting pattern of words sounds akin to his intensely rhythmic melodic lines. He also, as ever, seems to possess a higher than average allocation of fingers. But with Jarrett, it's never been about showboating. Nor is it often about restraint here - his playing has a fierily intense quality strangely absent in the previous "The Melody At Night, With You". It in no way approaches his tempestuous early- to mid-70s American Atlantic quartet or his first 'Scandinavian' ECM groups, but he still burns brighter than many subsequent uptight pretenders. There are a few ballads, which feature delicately scribed structures, delicately pinned in place in space, and on which Peacock's beautifully nimble lines can more clearly be heard (particularly the impossibly romantic "Prelude To A Kiss"). Overall though, this is a pacy, headlong rush through some of the greatest popular music ever written - be-bop - in which compelling and attractive melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns were aligned with complexity, invention, and sharp musical intelligence as never before (and rarely since). The resulting sounds are dense, rich, florid, highly-complex, expressive and ultimately hugely involving.

Apparently ECM are now recording every concert Jarrett performs, which might seem distasteful given his recent health problems; almost as if to say, "Don't go just yet, there's still another DAT to fill". However this is certainly great news, for storage enthusiasts, Jarrett completists, and others interested in these master musicians' ability to breathe creative life into old-fashioned compositions for the old-fashioned piano trio.