Original released on Double LP ECM 1064/65
(GERMANY, 1975)
Recorded in January 24, 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. (Thom Jurek in AllMusic)
