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Keith Jarrett applauds his fans at the end of a jazz concert ‘Piano solo’ at La Fenice theater in Venice as part of the Veneto Jazz 2006 event.
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Pianist Keith Jarrett marks 70th birthday with simultaneous jazz, classical releases

AFP/Getty Images

Pianist Keith Jarrett marks 70th birthday with simultaneous jazz, classical releases

CREATION and BARBER/​BARTOK/​JARRETT

Keith Jarrett (ECM)

Keith Jarrett is celebrating his 70th birthday this month by simultaneously releasing two albums on the ECM label that show why he is in a league of his own as both a jazz and classical pianist.

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Creation — his first new solo recording in four years — marks a further evolution in Jarrett’s spontaneously improvised solo piano recordings. He created the genre in the ’70s with such albums as the multiplatinum The Koln Concert, featuring tightrope-walking free improvisations stretching out 30 minutes or more on which he filled in a blank slate.

After recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome in the late ’90s, Jarrett changed his solo concert format by linking together a series of shorter improvisations. But on Creation, rather than offering a single concert, Jarrett has selected “the most revelatory moments” from six solo concerts in four cities from April to July, 2014.

In his new role as producer, Jarrett has added another layer to the creative process in the way he’s sequenced the nine parts to create in effect an improvised suite. The self-editing might surprise some of Jarrett’s critics who have accused him of being self-indulgent in his solo releases.

The result is one of Jarrett’s most intimate and reflective solo recordings, full of beautiful sparse melodies — far different from his earlier solo outings that featured highly rhythmic, repetitive blues, and gospel vamps.

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The highlights include “Part IV,” in which Jarrett references Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” the inspiration for Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain,” and the poignantly romantic “Part V,” which occasionally hints at Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova “Waters of March.”

On the classical side, Jarrett’s other birthday release, Barber/​Bartok/​Jarrett, offers previously unreleased recordings of 1984-85 concerts in Germany and Japan in which he interprets two technically challenging 20th-century works — Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto op. 38 and Bela Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3.

Jarrett deftly handles the furious rhythms of the opening and closing movements of the Barber concerto, no doubt drawing from his jazz background, and displays a sensitive touch on the slow middle movement.

On the Bartok concerto, Jarrett engages in some intricate interplay with the woodwinds on the opening movement, shows his more lyrical side in the pastoral middle movement and deftly transitions between solo and accompanying roles on the closing allegro movement. As an encore, Jarrett performs a beautiful nearly 5-minute spontaneously improvised ballad.

What links these two releases is Jarrett’s virtuosity, rhythmic command, and melodic sensitivity that serve him well as both an interpreter of notated music and a spontaneous improviser.

— CHARLES J. GANS,Associated Press

 

SOL INVICTUS

Faith No More (Reclamation Recordings/​Ipecac Recordings)

Eighteen years after releasing their last studio album, Faith No More returns in rude, crude health.

Sol Invictus kicks off in menacing fashion with the album’s eponymous, piano-led track, before exploding into life with single “Superhero” that — thanks to a repetitive vocal line — outstays its welcome despite a blistering start.

Thankfully, it’s all uphill from there.

From “Sunny Side Up” — a pop-rock ode to positivity (complete with tongue-in-cheek lyrics: “Rainbows will bend for me (curvy)/ Honey bees will sting for me (stingy)” — to the album’s closing track, “From the Dead,” Faith No More 2.0 doesn’t set a foot wrong over the course of the next 30 minutes.

As ever, the band’s not-so-secret weapon is frontman Mike Patton, whose voice is capable of flipping from touching falsetto to larynx-ripping raw screams within a single line.

In the stunning “Cone of Shame,” Patton begins the track crooning over a spaghetti Western-influenced guitar line before morphing into a Tom Waits-ian, smoke-addled narrator, shape-shifting, finally, into a demonic presence — multitracking a series of guttural wails as the song reaches its crushing conclusion.

Sol Invictus shimmers to a glorious, harmonic close with the lines: “Back from the dead/ I can see the end — welcome home my friend” — and it’s good to have them back.

— MATTHEW KEMP,Associated Press

First Published May 28, 2015, 12:14 p.m.

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Keith Jarrett applauds his fans at the end of a jazz concert ‘Piano solo’ at La Fenice theater in Venice as part of the Veneto Jazz 2006 event.  (AFP/Getty Images)
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