Jasmine

Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden

Jasmine
Release date: 07.05.2010 ECM 2165
CD18,90 €add to cart
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Jarrett and Haden back together again! Thirty three years after the break-up of Keith Jarrett’s great ‘American quartet’ , the pianist and bassist Charlie Haden reunited for an album of standards, played with deep feeling. The programme on “Jasmine” includes such classic songs as “Body and Soul”, “For All We Know” , “Where Can I Go Without You”, “Don’t Ever Leave Me” and more. Intimate, spontaneous and warm, the album, recorded at Jarrett’s home, has affinities, in its unaffected directness, with Keith’s “The Melody At Night With You”. Jarrett and Haden play the music and nothing but the music – as only they can. As Keith Jarrett says in his liner notes: “This is spontaneous music made on the spot without any preparation save our dedication throughout our lives that we won’t accept a substitute… These are great love songs played by players who are trying, mostly, to keep the message intact.”

Featured Artists Recorded

March 2007, Cavelight Studio

Original Release Date

07.05.2010

  • 1For All We Know
    (J. Fred Coots, Samuel M. Lewis)    09:45
  • 2Where Can I Go Without You
    (Victor Young, Peggy Lee)    09:20
  • 3No Moon At All
    (David A. Mann, Redd Evans)    04:40
  • 4One Day I'll Fly Away
    (Joe Sample, Will Jennings)    04:15
  • 5Intro / I'm Gonna Laugh You Right Out Of My Life
    (Keith Jarrett, Cy Coleman, Joseph McCarthy)    12:09
  • 6Body And Soul
    (Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Frank Eyton, Robert Sour)    11:09
  • 7Goodbye
    (Gordon Jenkins)    08:01
  • 8Don't Ever Leave Me
    (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II)    03:11
As a concept, these piano-and-bass explorations of eight classic American songs could not be simpler, but the poise and subtlety of both thought and execution make it a spell-binding experience. Jarrett has a remarkable talent for creating an aura of stillness around him, so that every note he plays stands out clear and bright and the slightest harmonic nuance carries meaning. Haden’s bass, with its intimate, woody tone, lays the perfect groundwork, as always.
Dave Gelly, The Observer
 
It is more than 30 years since they last recorded together, but their dialogue has the detailed intimacy of old friends exploring common themes.
Mike Hobart, Financial Times
 
It’s an intimate, home-studio recording of love songs – deep, almost painfully heartfelt – and so good it will be sure to top most best-of-lists … If you buy only one album this year...
Phil Johnson, Independent on Sunday
 
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
 
Standards aus dem Real Book,… still, schön und so bescheiden, dass die Soli nie wie Soli wirken, sondern wie ein selbstverständlicher Teil der Songs. Als spazierten die Melodien nach all den Jahrzehnten einfach weiter, um zu schauen, was hinterm letzten Akkord liegt. … Jasmine klingt nun wie ein zarter Abschiedsbrief.
Alex Rühle, Süddeutsche Zeitung
 
Jasmine ist tatsächlich eine verträumte Nachtmusik. Das Interplay wirkt ruhig, gelassen und schlafwandlerisch sicher. Dabei hatten die beiden jahrzehntelang nicht zusammen musiziert. … Die Partner mochten die Kompositionen – alte, eher selten gespielte Standards… - nicht groß variieren, dekonstruieren. Sie ließen sich auf die musikalische Vorgabe quasi wie auf ein momentanes Schicksal ein. Statt die Stücke zu verfremden, verklären sie diese.
Uli Bernays, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
 
This is a wonderful disc that is not just for jazz fans.
Colin Morris, The Dominion Post NZ
 
Haden is best known as a minimalist who – especially on ballads – locks into the loam, relishing the space surrounding each fat, substantial note. Jarrett seems to respond in kind, channelling Haden’s playing into his own fluid, lyrical lines. The result is by turns a ravishing and reflective musical encounter with two of jazz’s greatest instrumentalists, who are getting along famously again.
Josef Woodard, JazzTimes
 
In the hands of these masters, musical elegance and aplomb transport listeners to a place where love is young and all-consuming. … Like jasmine, a night-blooming flower, Jarrett’s and Haden’s solos unfold slowly to deliver sweet fragrance.
Jazziz
 
There’s renewal and then there’s refinement, and this first duo recording from the pianist Keith Jarrett and the bassist Charlie Haden, both masters, delivers its melodies on a velvet cushion. But the music isn’t decorous; it glows with maturity and patience.
The New York Times
 
This music that rewards repeated listening, as more and more detail rises from each hearing.
Robert Baird, stereophile.com


An intimate new disc by two of jazz’s most influential players, heard here with a programme of love songs and standards. “Jasmine” is the first recorded collaboration between Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden in more than thirty years. The last time they were together on record was on the live “Eyes of the Heart” disc, recorded 1976, a document from the final days of Jarrett’s great American Quartet (with Haden, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman), the group which also gave us the epochal “Survivors Suite”.

“Jasmine” is music-making of quite different scale and intention. Much has changed in the music of both men in the interim, but not the quality of their commitment to it. Amongst other endeavours, Jarrett and Haden have each, separately, given renewed attention to the music of the Great American Songbook, Jarrett in his widely-admired “Standards” project with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, for instance, and Haden with his Quartet West.

Early in 2007 Jarrett was invited to contribute some reminiscences to a film documentary about Haden (Reto Caduff’s “Rambling Boy”). This led to some informal playing together, which both enjoyed greatly. Jarrett then invited Haden to come over to his home for four days of recording in March 2007

Keith Jarrett (from the liner notes): “This recording was done in my small studio. So it is direct and straightforward. I chose to use the American Steinway that really isn't at all in the best of shape, yet I have this strange connection with it, and it is better for a kind of informality and slight funkiness that was going to work with the music. With a choice of songs this good, it was hard not to become engaged right away. We did not rehearse per se, but went over chords when necessary. ... Over close to three years we lived with these tapes, talked a lot about them, disputed over choices, but eventually I found Charlie to be the most remarkable and sensitive helper in getting this finally assembled. I wanted only the distilled essence of what we had, and it took some time to wean ourselves from going for hip solos or unevenly played tunes (even though they had wonderful things inside them). This is spontaneous music made on the spot without any preparation save our dedication throughout our lives that we won't accept a substitute. These are great love songs played by players who are trying, mostly, to keep the message intact. I hope you can hear it the way we did.”

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