Keith Jarrett – Byablue (1977/2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Byablue (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 42:12 minutes | 1,73 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Impulse!

Released in 1977, Byablue features performances by Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian.

Amidst rumored tension within the band, Keith Jarrett’s “American” Quartet met for one last marathon recording date before disbanding, and Impulse made the most of it by spreading the music out over two separate releases. From the evidence of this, the first and slightly superior LP, the band certainly doesn’t sound as if it was ready to break up; the interplay has become telepathic, the musical ideas are still fresh and there is a willingness to experiment. “Rainbow,” credited to Margot Jarrett, is top-flight lyrical Keith, while “Trieste” evokes the mood and some of the language of spiritual Coltrane. There is adventure, too; with Dewey Redman and Jarrett wailing on tenor and soprano respectively, “Konya” sounds almost like a muezzin call to prayer, and “Yahllah” is a rare, brave, moving merger of jazz and the Middle East. Highly recommended on LP, since the Middle Eastern tracks were deleted from the CD reissue. –Richard S. Ginell

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Keith Jarrett – Budapest Concert (Live) (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Budapest Concert (Live) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:27:41 minutes | 808 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The second complete show to be issued from Keith Jarrett’s 2016 European tour – following on from the widely-acclaimed concert released as Munich 2016 – this double album documents the pianist’s solo performance at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest. Jarrett, whose family roots reach back to Hungary, viewed the Budapest concert as akin to a homecoming, and the context inspired much creative improvisation. Where Jarrett’s early solo concerts shaped a large arc of music over the course of an evening, the later concerts have generated suite-like structures, comprised of independent “movements”, each of them a marvel of spontaneous resourcefulness. Creative energy is applied also to familiar songs given as encores, “It’s A Lonesome Old Town” and “Answer Me”, transformed in the Budapest concert.

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Keith Jarrett – Bop-Be (1977/2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Bop-Be (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 39:14 minutes | 1,46 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Impulse!

Originally released in 1977, Bop-Be features performances by Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian.

Bop-Be is the final album on the Impulse label by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s ‘American Quartet’. Originally released in 1977 it features performances by Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian. It is the last album recorded by the American Quartet and the final album Jarrett released on a label other than ECM.
To date, Bop-Be has only ever been reissued on compact disc in Japan, packaged in a miniature replica of the original vinyl LP sleeve. However, it was included in the four-disc collection Mysteries: The Impulse Years 1975-1976. This also applies to the Jarrett album Back Hand.

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Keith Jarrett – Belonging (1974/2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Belonging (1974/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 46:52 minutes | 1,67 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

From beginning to end we are treated to a mélange of moods in this, the first effort from Keith Jarrett and his European quartet. Compositionally astute and clearly the work of steadied hands, Belonging finds each musician in fine form. Whether it is Garbarek’s punctilious doubling in the buoyant “Spiral Dance,” Danielsson’s mellifluous bass solo in “Blossom,” or Christensen’s rollicking snare in “The Windup,” everyone gets their moment in the spotlight. Jarrett’s fingerwork is, of course, superb throughout, but it is the energy underlying his playing—the very spirit of his pianism—that really seems to drive things forward. The album is zigzagged, fading adeptly from head-shaking abandon to heavy darkness from one cut to the next. Ballads make up the longest passages on Belonging and seem to turn ever inward within the confines of their own emotional borders. For the most part, sax and piano are explicitly unified, as if trekking on either side of the same divide, although sometimes they seem to look in opposite directions, as if involved in a long-running debate, unsure of whether reconciliation can be had in the throes of so much dialogue. Jarrett’s jilted approach is well suited to these down-tempo moments while the bass gently asserts its tremulous presence in the background. Garbarek’s sudden entrances weave a dense stratosphere of brassy elegance. “’Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” is pure Jarrett and provides Garbarek with plenty of space to run amok with his screeching serenade. The title cut is another ballad, this one of a different shade than the rest; not an alleyway, but a brief lapse into self-pity. As the album’s center, it also encapsulates a core theme: this music evokes a past from which one cannot escape or, more positively, simply a sense of belonging as the title would imply, the inescapability of one’s roots in place and time. Overall, this is an essential example of what ECM can do when it throws a handful of singular talents into a studio. –ecmreviews.com

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Keith Jarrett – Arbour Zena (1975/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Arbour Zena (1975/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:00 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

“I consider this one of my most richly lyrical and consistently inspired works,” wrote Keith Jarrett of “Mirrors”, the almost half-hour long concluding piece onArbour Zena. “Jan Garbarek’s contribution is irreplaceable and ecstatic.” It is easy to agree that Arbour Zena as a whole is one of Jarrett’s most exceptional albums. Evocative writing for strings, beautiful playing by Keith and Jan and by Charlie Haden at his most soulful, and a glowing panoramic production make this 1975 recording one of the finest of the early ECMs.

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Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden & Paul Motian – Hamburg ’72 (Live) (1972/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden & Paul Motian – Hamburg ’72 (Live) (1972/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:24 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The Keith Jarrett Trio, playing live at NDR Funkhaus, Hamburg in July 1972. The trio with Haden and Motian was Jarrett’s first great band, his choice of players a masterstroke. Charlie and Paul hadn’t worked together until Jarrett brought them into each other’s orbit in 1966. With the bassist who had learned his craft in Ornette Coleman’s band, and the drummer from Bill Evans’s ground-breaking trio, Jarrett was able to explore the broadest scope of modern jazz, from poetic balladry to hard-swinging time-playing to ferocious and fiery free music. The improvisation heard in the Hamburg concert includes episodes with Keith on soprano sax and flute as well as piano, while Motian expands the role of percussion in the music, developing the supple, elastic, supremely unpredictable vocabulary that would subsequently become such a crucial part of both Jarrett’s groups and Paul’s own.

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Keith Jarrett – Concerts: Bregenz, Munchen (1982/2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Concerts: Bregenz, Munchen (1982/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:30:19 minutes | 2,77 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

After Bremen/Lausanne, after The Köln Concert, after the epic Sun Bear Concerts, the next development in Jarrett’s solo concerts was the all-embracing music captured here. Two 1981 improvised concerts from Austria and Germany are featured, recorded respectively at the Festspielhaus Bregenz and the Herkulessaal Munich, venues noted for outstanding acoustics. While the Bregenz concert has hitherto been available as a single CD, this set marks the first appearance of the complete Munich performance on compact disc. The 3-album set includes extensive text booklet with liner notes by Keith Jarrett, an essay by Swiss critic Peter Rüedi, and poetry by Michael Krüger.

“The Bregenz/Munich concerts were Jarrett’s most brilliant live solo recordings to date; his level of inspiration is quite extraordinary, and the music covers a wider musical and emotional range than ever.”
– Jarrett biographer Ian Carr

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Keith Jarrett – The Koln Concert (1975) [Japan 2017] SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Keith Jarrett – The Koln Concert (1975) [Japan 2017]
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 66:17 minutes | Scans included | 2,68 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 1,23 GB

Recorded in 1975 at the Köln Opera House and released the same year, this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid – and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school – owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records, along with Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, Take Five, A Love Supreme, and something by Grover Washington, Jr. Such is cultural miscegenation. It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that’s another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle. With all the tedium surrounding jazz-rock fusion, the complete absence on these shores of neo-trad anything, and the hopelessly angry gyrations of the avant-garde, Jarrett brought quiet and lyricism to revolutionary improvisation. Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous. Although it was one continuous concert, the piece is divided into four sections, largely because it had to be divided for double LP. But from the moment Jarrett blushes his opening chords and begins meditating on harmonic invention, melodic figure construction, glissando combinations, and occasional ostinato phrasing, music changed. For some listeners it changed forever in that moment. For others it was a momentary flush of excitement, but it was change, something so sorely needed and begged for by the record-buying public. Jarrett’s intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. The concert swings with liberation from cynicism or the need to prove anything to anyone ever again. With this album, Jarrett put himself in his own league, and you can feel the inspiration coming off him in waves. This may have been the album every stoner wanted in his collection “because the chicks dug it.” Yet it speaks volumes about a musician and a music that opened up the world of jazz to so many who had been excluded, and offered the possibility – if only briefly – of a cultural, aesthetic optimism, no matter how brief that interval actually was. This is a true and lasting masterpiece of melodic, spontaneous composition and improvisation that set the standard.

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Keith Jarrett – Bordeaux Concert (Live) (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Keith Jarrett – Bordeaux Concert (Live) (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:11:25 minutes | 611 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Bordeaux Concert is a special document from Keith Jarrett’s last European tour, each of Jarrett’s 2016 solo piano concerts had its own strikingly distinct character, and in Bordeaux the lyrical impulse is to the fore.

In the course of this improvised suite, many quiet discoveries are made, and there is a touching freshness to the music as a whole, a feeling of intimate communication. Reviewing the July 2016 performance, the French press spoke of hints of the Köln Concert and Bremen-Lausanne in the flow of things, and extended sections of Bordeaux are beguilingly beautiful.

Tender songs are pulled from the air, “rousing a community of listening at the edge of silence”, as Le Monde put it, “an awareness of time out from the noise and weariness of the world.”

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Charlie Haden, Keith Jarrett – Jasmine (2010) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Charlie Haden, Keith Jarrett – Jasmine (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:02:49 minutes | 511 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Throughout, the duo operates in a comfort zone that values felicitous melody and openhearted sentiment over displays of bravado. Jasmine is as unashamedly expressive a recording as either man has ever made. – Steve Futterman, The New Yorker

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Keith Jarrett – Ritual – Dennis Russell Davies (1982/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Dennis Russell Davies – Keith Jarrett: Ritual (1982/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 32:13 minutes | 528 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Artwork: Digital booklet | © ECM

Keith Jarrett and conductor-pianist Dennis Russell Davies have been friends and musical comrades for forty years. In the mid-70s the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, under Davies direction presented Jarretts chamber music. In the 90s Jarrett recorded the Mozart piano concertos with Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Near the beginning of their association, Jarrett invited Davies to play a composition he had written for solo piano. To listen to Ritual is akin to experiencing the core of a Jarrett solo concert. The interpreter may be different, but the lyrical expression is remarkably consistent. As Dennis Russell l Davies says: “Those who know Keith will hear him in this music. It couldnt have been written by anyone else”. (more…)

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