Inside Out

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Given Jarrett's visibility and current exalted reputation, a certain amount of significance has been attached to this foray into a program of (gasp!) original compositions, as played by Jarrett's widely acclaimed 'Standards Trio' in a live concert setting on July 26 and 28, 2000, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The trio, with Jarrett on acoustic piano, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Gary Peacock on bass, has been breathing new life into the classic popular music songbook of the 1930s and 1940s for the better part of the last eighteen years, with time off only for Jarrett's occasional classical recordings (and for Jarrett's unfortunate off-and-on-again struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome).

However, even the numerous earlier standards recordings contained the occasional original composition, one of the most notable examples being the lengthy group improvisation on the 1991 Miles Davis tribute CD, 'Bye Bye Blackbird'. And of course, for those listeners of a certain age or breadth of musical knowledge, there are the numerous (and excellent) Jarrett recordings as far back as the mid-70's, with both his American and European quartets, which often consisted solely of Jarrett originals and/or extended group improvisations. In that larger context, Inside Out is hardly a 'breakthrough' CD, and while it is an excellent recording, it won't contain any major surprises for the true Jarrett enthusiast.

DeJohnette and Peacock are superb soloists in their own right, and the three musicians' collective empathy gives their music an impressive flexibility. As a jazz pianist, Jarrett is certainly capable of conventional improvisation on a theme, i.e., chord changes, rhythmic accents, melodic inversions, etc. (Technically, he's probably capable of anything he sets his mind to.) But on this CD, he also dips deeply at times into his solo piano repertoire of blues riffs, modal patterns and minimalist drones, with DeJohnette and Peacock providing additional color and rhythmic enhancements.

Listeners more recently converted to Jarrett's playing by virtue of the trio's thoughtful interpretation of standards may be somewhat put off by these sometimes repetitive flights of fancy, but listeners who liked both the standards trio AND the best of the solo work will no doubt be charmed, rightly regarding this disk as a bridge between Jarrett's two musical worlds. Part of Jarrett's magic, after all, is his fluid and natural movement through so many genres and styles, and his consistent refusal to differentiate between high and low culture.

Some of Jarrett's vigorous, two-handed blues and gospel attack on '341 Free Fade' sounds like the second coming of Les McCann (or maybe Ramsey Lewis on a REALLY good day), but the difference between Jarrett and the old soul-jazz pianists like McCann is that Jarrett has the versatility (and chops) to move from funk to bebop to avant garde to baroque classical in the blink of an eye. Granted, Jarrett's longer pieces (and this CD is no exception) can come perilously close to pastiche, as he moves from theme to theme and style to style. But for the most part it's an invigorating ride, and to the extent that Jarrett ever falters, or suffers from an occasional lapse of taste, the impeccable DeJohnette and Peacock are there to pick him up.

The last track on the CD, apparently an encore, inverts the normal course of things, with the trio offering a standard, 'When I Fall In Love.' Curiously, it seems a little anti-climatic, perhaps because the trio has been playing more or less by its own rules for the previous hour, and now seems somewhat boxed in and constrained by the demands of someone else's tune.