Jazz legend confronts a future without the piano

Pianist Keith Jarrett revealed he had two strokes in 2018 and is unlikely to perform again. PHOTO: DANIELA YOHANNES/ ECM RECORDS

NEW YORK • The last time Keith Jarrett performed in public, his relationship with the piano was the least of his concerns.

This was at Carnegie Hall in 2017, several weeks into the administration of a divisive new United States president.

Jarrett - one of the most heralded pianists alive, a galvanising jazz artist who has also recorded a wealth of classical music - opened with an indignant speech on the political situation and unspooled a relentless commentary throughout the concert. He ended by thanking the audience for bringing him to tears.

He had been scheduled to return to Carnegie the following March for another of the solo recitals that have done the most to create his legend - like the one captured on the recording Budapest Concert, to be released on Friday. But that Carnegie performance was abruptly cancelled, along with the rest of his concert calendar.

At the time, Jarrett's long-time record label, ECM, cited unspecified health issues. There was no official update in the next two years.

But this month, Jarrett, 75, broke the silence, plainly stating what happened to him - a stroke in late February 2018, followed by another one that May. It is unlikely he will perform in public again.

"I was paralysed," he said by phone from his home in north-west New Jersey. "My left side is still partially paralysed. I'm able to try to walk with a cane, but it took a long time for that, a year or more. And I'm not getting around this house at all, really."

Jarrett did not realise how serious his first stroke was. But after more symptoms emerged, he was taken to a hospital, where he gradually recovered enough to be discharged.

His second stroke happened at home and he was admitted to a nursing facility. During his time there, from July 2018 until this May, he made sporadic use of its piano room, playing right-handed counterpoint.

"I was trying to pretend I was Bach with one hand," he said. "But that was just toying with something."

When he tried to play some familiar bebop tunes in his home studio recently, he discovered he had forgotten them.

Jarrett's voice is softer and thinner now. But over two roughly hour-long conversations, he was lucid and legible, aside from occasional lapses in memory. He often punctuated a heavy or awkward statement with a laugh like a faint rhythmic exhalation: ah-ha-ha-ha.

"I don't know what my future is supposed to be," he said. "I don't feel right now like I'm a pianist. That's all I can say about that."

After a pause, he reconsidered. "When I hear two-handed piano music, it's very frustrating, in a physical way. If I even hear Schubert or something played softly, that's enough for me. Because I know I couldn't do that. And I'm not expected to recover that. The most I'm expected to recover in my left hand is possibly the ability to hold a cup. So it's not a 'shoot the piano player' thing. It's 'I already got shot'. Ah-ha-ha-ha."

If the prospect of a Jarrett who no longer considers himself a pianist is dumbfounding, it might be because there has scarcely been a time he did not.

Growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he was a prodigy. According to family lore, he was three when an aunt indicated a nearby stream and told him to turn its burbling into music - his first piano improvisation.

Broad public awareness caught up with him in the late 1960s, when he was in a zeitgeist-capturing group led by Charles Lloyd, a saxophonist and flautist.

The brilliant drummer in that quartet, Jack DeJohnette, then helped jazz icon Miles Davis push into rock and funk. Jarrett followed suit, joining an incandescent edition of Davis' band. In live recordings, his interludes on electric piano cast a spell.

Jarrett soon hit on something analogous in his own concerts, allowing improvised passages to become the main event. He was a few years into this approach in 1975, when he performed what would become The Koln Concert - a sonorous, mesmerising landmark that still stands as one of the best-selling solo piano albums made.

He later reconvened his long-time trio, a magically cohesive unit with DeJohnette and virtuoso bassist Gary Peacock. Their first comeback concert, in 1998, recently surfaced on record, joining a voluminous discography. It captures a spirit of joyous reunion not only for Jarrett and his partners, but also between a performing artist and his public. He titled that album After The Fall. ECM released it in March 2018, unwittingly around the time of his first stroke.

Loss has shrouded Jarrett's musical circle of late.

Peacock died last month, at 85. Jon Christensen, the drummer in Jarrett's influential European quartet of the 1970s, died earlier this year. Jarrett also led a ground-breaking American quartet in the 1970s, and its members - saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, all major figures in modern jazz - have died too.

Faced with these and other difficult truths, Jarrett has not exactly found solace in music, as he once would have. But he derives satisfaction from some recordings of his final European solo tour. He directed ECM to release the tour's closing concert last year as Munich 2016. He is even more enthusiastic about the tour opener, Budapest Concert, which he briefly considered calling The Gold Standard.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on October 26, 2020, with the headline Jazz legend confronts a future without the piano. Subscribe