Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett’s ECM discography embraces solo improvisation, duets, trios, quartets, original compositions, multi-instrumental ventures, masterpieces of the classical repertoire and wide-ranging explorations of the Great American Songbook.

Jarrett was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May 1945. He took his first piano lesson before his third birthday and gave his debut solo recital aged seven. “I grew up with the piano,” he has said, “I learned its language while I learned to speak.”

His earliest training was classical, but by the age of 15 his piano lessons had ceased and Jarrett’s interest in jazz was burgeoning. He turned down an opportunity to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and in 1964 took the decisive step of moving to New York to establish himself in the jazz world. After a spell touring with Art Blakey’s New Jazz Messengers, Jarrett joined Charles Lloyd’s quartet in 1966. He also played organ and electric piano with Miles Davis in 1970 and 1971.

Jarrett’s association with ECM dates from November 1971, when he and producer Manfred Eicher first collaborated on the hugely influential solo piano album Facing You, eight short pieces which, in Eicher’s words, “hold together like a suite”. The album also prefigured the solo piano concerts which would be such a defining aspect of Jarrett’s career.

In 1973 ECM organised an eighteen-concert European tour, consisting solely of Jarrett’s solo improvisations. Solo-Concerts Bremen Lausanne, a triple LP document of this early period, was showered in awards and hailed as recording of the year in publications from Time Magazine to Japan’s Swing Journal. The Köln Concert (1975) has unsurprisingly passed into legend: a multi-million-selling album that has been the subject of numerous studies and a complete transcription. But Köln should not eclipse the achievement of the whole sequence of improvised concerts, a genre which Jarrett effectively created. After the success of that first solo tour, Jarrett continued to pursue the improvised solo concert format, the decades of his career studded with records of his endlessly fertile imagination, usually referred to simply by where they took place: Paris, Vienna, Lausanne, Carnegie Hall, La Scala...

Jarrett has been the leader of several outstanding groups. In the mid-1970s he began recording with his so-called “European Quartet” consisting of saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen. Their recordings include Belonging, My Song, Nude Ants, Personal Mountains and Sleeper. No less essential is his contemporaneous “American Quartet” work with Charlie Haden (bass), Paul Motian (drums) and Dewey Redman (saxophones), whose output included The Survivors’ Suite and Eyes of the Heart (both 1976). The American Quartet extended the range of Jarrrett’s trio with Haden and Motian. The early trio’s work is documented on Hamburg ’72.

In the early 1980s Jarrett formed his “Standards Trio” with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, which proved to be one of the most fertile and long-lasting partnerships in jazz history. Over a period of 30 years, they toured and released an unparalleled series of albums of standards and freely improvised sets, including the 6-CD set At the Blue Note, an extraordinary record of three extraordinary nights in June 1994, about which the New York Times wrote: "Jarrett makes each new note sound like a discovery... The music whispered and glimmered, seeking a pure, incorporeal song.”

In 1984, Keith Jarrett was heard in duet with Gidon Kremer, playing Arvo Pärt’s Fratres on the album Tabula Rasa, a recording which introduced the Estonian composer to a vast new audience. Three years later, Jarrett initiated a series of recordings of some of the great monuments of the classical keyboard repertoire with Bach’s Wohltempierte Klavier, Book I, which was followed by the Goldberg Variations (1989) and the second book of Wohltempierte Klavier (1990). For a pianist with such a fine command of voicing, Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, was perhaps a natural next step: "It didn't feel like I was playing someone else's music," Jarrett said of his first encounter with these works. "[The pieces] are coming from some strange quirky place that I'm familiar with.” The New York Times was just one of many to hail this award-winning recording: no mere crossover curiosity, “Jarrett has finally staked an indisputable claim to distinction in the realm of classical music”. Other major recordings of classical music include two volumes of Mozart Piano Concertos with the Stuttgart Kammerorchester under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies.

ECM has released several recordings of Jarrett’s orchestral and chamber music compositions. These include Luminessence and Arbour Zena (both with Jan Garbarek), In The Light, and Bridge of Light. Hymns/Spheres and Invocations feature improvisations on the mighty baroque organ. while the unique Book of Ways found Jarrett playing two clavichords simultaneously on some of its spontaneously-realized pieces.

40 years on from his ECM debut, Facing You, Rio (2011) blazed with as much energy and invention as any of his solo concerts from the past four decades, while his duet sessions with the late bassist Charlie Haden (Jasmine and Last Dance) reveal the players at their most intimate and introspective: “When we play together it's like two people singing,” Jarrett said of these recordings.

2015 saw two simultaneous releases, a mid-80s recording of Barber’s piano concerto and Bartók’s third, and Creation, a curated nine-piece ‘suite’ with music selected by Jarrett from concerts in the pianist’s 2014 concert tour. Creation is amongst the most strongly lyrical of Jarrett's solo releases, the choice of music emphasizing pieces in which there is a sense of song being born, voices striving to be heard.

In 2016, Keith Jarrett’s final European solo piano tour took place. To date, four concert recordings have been released from the tour: Munich 2016, Budapest Concert, Bordeaux Concert and most recently, New Vienna. Each of them shows Jarrett at the peak of his powers, creating new music in real time, continuing to develop the solo piano idiom that he had initiated in the early 1970s.

In 2018, health issues brought Jarrett’s performing life to a premature end. In consultation with him, ECM has continued to release some very remarkable albums by the great pianist, drawing on a treasure trove of recordings made over the decades, and spanning a wide range of genres.

These have included more music from the Deer Head Inn, the intimate venue in the Pocono Mountans which, back in 1961, had given Keith Jarrett his very first gig as leader of a piano trio. The Old Country features Jarrett with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, conveying– in a 1992 show - “what jazz is all about”, in Keith’s words. In 2025, the inspired Deer Head performance was reprised on the vinyl box set At The Deer Head Inn – The Complete Recordings.

Jarrett’s capacity as an insightful interpreter of classical tradition is to the fore on a previously unreleased concert recording made in Troy, New York, in 1987 of the first book of J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. No less fascinating is Jarrett’s revelatory reckoning with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Württemberg Sonatas. “Jarrett’s approach to this music is rooted in his renowned understanding of improvisation, resulting in interpretations which are simultaneously surprising and delightful”, Canada’s The Whole Note declared. “His ability to find colours, textures and affects within individual movements and depict the architecture of the whole is unparalleled.”

In 2025, the 50th anniversary of The Köln Concert generated a new wave of worldwide media attention on Jarrett’s unique achievements. And, as he turns 80, the release of New Vienna reconfirms that there is, still, nothing else in jazz or contemporary music that resembles a Keith Jarrett solo concert. As the committee citation for the Polar Music Prize (one of Jarrett’s many awards) noted, “Through a series of brilliant solo performances and recordings that demonstrate his utterly spontaneous creativity, Keith Jarrett has simultaneously lifted piano improvisation as an art form to new, unimaginable heights.”

Further releases are in preparation.