Keith Jarrett: Testament: Paris/London

In television, it's called jumping the shark. The gimmick gets stale and the audience stops caring. It pains me to say this, but judging by his latest recording Testament: Paris/London (ECM, 2009), I'm afraid the same may have happened to Keith Jarrett.

But maybe I am being insufficiently charitable. I firmly believe that any music must be able to stand on its own, requiring no written or spoken commentary, introduction or analysis, but maybe, just maybe, with Testament you could make a case for starting with the liner notes. Like some of his music, Jarrett's notes have always been a little pompous and self-absorbed for my taste, and Testament is no different, but unlike his previous recordings, here we get way more about the man's emotional state than we bargained for. He tells us about his wife leaving him, about almost having a nervous breakdown before one of the concerts documented here, and about how people around him, both friends and strangers, lifted his spirits and, together with the categorical imperative of playing freely improvised music, helped him get through the ordeal. So those who might be inclined to indulge Testament as something Jarrett had to do out of desperation, and thus forgive whatever artistic deficiencies it might have, have my permission to do so. Ultimately, though, these confessions are neither here nor there. They do not absolve the music from the requirement of having to stand on its own, and that it comes close to not doing.

Jarrett has been playing and recording improvised solo concerts for decades. He would start with a strain or two of melody, or a simple chord progression, and extrapolate from it on the spot for as long as necessary, until the material had nothing left to give up. It did always amuse me that he ran out of steam, however gracefully, just before he would have exceeded the length of an LP side, though in his defense, I will mention that he took the advent of CDs in stride and would improvise non-stop for an hour or more in his late-80s and early 90s concerts. But I digress. Many of these recordings contain moments of sublime beauty and overpowering poignancy. As self-indulgent as they are, we do not need to make extra-musical excuses for their validity. The music itself has always offered more than enough. The guy sure knew how to get at your inner core with stuff that he claimed to have pulled mostly out of his head and mostly on the spot.

About ten years ago, however, after recovering from a long illness, Jarrett's style changed. As first documented on Radiance (2002), each individual improvisation became shorter and more harmonically and melodically dense. He was now communicating in discrete units instead of a long narrative arc. Far more significant than the length, however, was the fact that Jarrett tried to abandon all preconceived notions. He wanted to improvise from a completely blank slate. Much of the resulting music acquired, in the best cases, a certain brooding darkness, initially appealing but ultimately directionless, and in the worst, the seemingly random abrasive dissonance of hyper-modern atonal compositions. Much, but not all. One does not throw away thirty years of experience overnight, or even in the course of a single illness, however serious, and at least half of the material on Radiance betrays much of Jarrett's old style, only on a smaller scale. The heart-rending minor-key melodies are there, as are his trademark foot-stomping vamps that launch his right-hand lines into the sonic stratosphere. Also present is a strong whiff of the American Songbook which he clearly absorbed while working on his album of unaccompanied standards The Melody at Night, With You (1998). On Radiance, Jarrett is not playing the actual standards, of course, but their chords and the general direction in which some of that music moves are definitely in his fingers. There is plenty of incomprehensible, intellectually overwhelming and emotionally closed noodling on Radiance, to be sure, but with the judicious use of your CD player's programming feature, the two discs can be distilled down to about an hour of very enjoyable music.

Which brings us to Testament. Three discs, two complete concerts, no editing. Whatever the personal upheavals in Jarrett's life, it is obvious that he has been moving consistently in the direction started on Radiance, and has traveled quite a distance over the past decade. He still has a lot to say, and in the relatively short time limit of the individual tracks he has imposed on himself (most are in the 6-9 minute range), he has to cram in a lot of notes into each one. The melodic and harmonic foundation of his old style is not completely gone, but he has clearly shed much of what was still in his toolbox a decade ago. The result is that the communication between the performer and his listeners, or this listener at least, has broken down almost completely. Jarrett's thought patterns are so densely packed and idiosyncratic, and are so lacking in audible structure and organization, that when the music is over, I think nothing and feel nothing, but not in a meditative, mind-clearing sort of way. Instead, I seek meaning intensely while he is playing and find myself woefully unsatisfied when he is done.

A small handful of tracks - it seems silly listing names when they are all just Part 1, Part 2, etc. -- are still effective. Predictably, they are the ones that have retained the vestiges of his original style. Where recognizable chord progressions and motifs based on familiar intervals percolate to the surface, Testament momentarily satisfies. These moments are much too few and far between, however. The bulk of the music remains Sphinx-like in its impenetrability. For Jarrett himself, I suspect the recording is a triumph. He has come closer than ever before to being completely spontaneous. His audience, however, has lost a once eloquent improviser who has withdrawn completely into his own world.