Rick Beato tells us about a beautiful two minutes of improvised piano by Keith Jarrett.
Again: all improvised.
The creative beauty that can spring spontaneously and fully formed from the mind of a musician ... it just blows me away.
One minute there’s nothing and the next minute something completely new, truly beautiful and awesome just flows out, sounding like it must have always existed because it’s so perfect.
The name Keith Jarrett is familiar to me but I had never lisened to any of his music, and frankly I was not ready to listen to it for a long time.
Over the last several decades my tastes in music have expanded several times, including major shifts into Jazz and Country and Brazilian / Latin Jazz and more recently Folk and Bluegrass (“Americana” or “roots music”) and Jazz/Pop singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and others.
With these shifts — plus just getting older — I have learned to appreciate on a deeper level the space between the notes as the magic behind all music.
Lots of people can play a bunch of notes, sometimes very fast, but the feelings we get from it are determined by the space between those notes. That’s where the drama is, that’s where the feelings are.
Something like this beautiful improvisation by Keith Jarrett would have been lost on me until recently.
Another Keith Jarrett live performance, “Bye Bye Blackbird” recorded in tribute to Miles Davis shortly after his passing.
From DownBeat.com, Five Essential Keith Jarrett Albums to Mark His 75th Birthday (May 8, 2020)
His extensive discography (quite prolific, this guy was).