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My Year of Listening Obsessively to Keith Jarrett after My Father-in-Law Died

I felt an urge to sit with the music as deeply as he had

Keith Jarrett, the American pianist and improviser whose solo concerts redefined the boundaries of jazz and may have accidentally given birth to New Age music, was considering not walking onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House on January 24, 1975. It was supposed to be just a man and a Bösendorfer, no music prepared. But the piano wasn’t right. Travel had been hard. His back was in traction. The Italian food he’d eaten earlier wasn’t sitting well. Somehow, he agreed to go on, and despite the obstacles and the drama, the music he recorded that night, released as The Köln Concert, would become the best-selling album of solo piano music of all time. Not just in jazz but in all music.

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It turned fifty last year, but Jarrett, by then eighty, didn’t take part. He wasn’t an executive producer on the feature film, dramatizing the backstory; he wasn’t a talking head in the documentary pulling back the curtain on the biggest night in improvised solo-piano history. It was feted in all the ways you’d expect and more. Apparently, there’s even going to be a graphic novel.

Jarrett has always been uneasy about the concert, the music, the way it takes him back to that fraught night and ties him to something that he doesn’t see as part of his mission.

His mission, if it can be defined from the outside looking in, from parsing his sometimes pretentious and cantankerous statements about who he is and what he does, from the mass of music he’s made anywhere other than that one night on a stage in Cologne, might boil down to a single word: forward.

Feeling more ambivalent than usual about commercial anniversaries (in a year where it felt like zero-sum market logic was finally driving humanity off a cliff), I resolved to turn The Köln Concert into the sacred cow it is and kill it, to move forward without knowing how or where to, only that the next thing had to remain unknown. The mysteries in Jarrett’s body of work had always called to me, but something in the fuss over Köln had kept me from going all in. I wanted to truly hear him without the burden of a masterpiece calling me to look back, turning Jarrett’s amazing achievement into a birthday party with an overly sweet cake and chintzy candles. Because anniversaries are a trap. They flatten a singular artist into a single object. And in Jarrett’s case, they encourage us to mistake one dazzling 1975 evening in Cologne for the whole of a restless, uncontainable project. To listen to Köln in the shadow of its birthday and think you’ve “heard” Jarrett is, in a way, to have heard nothing at all.

Even without the anniversary, I’d always been hesitant about Köln, loving it despite—or, horror of all horrors, because of—its easy beauty. Those soaring lines and sweet chords were why it was so popular, such a big seller, why half a century of it existing felt like a big deal. Whatever I thought about it, I couldn’t deny it had a centre of gravity that was hard to pull away from.

To do this, that is, to escape the black hole of the over-marketed masterpiece and join Jarrett in his restless creative mission of pushing deeper into sonic space, I decided to dive into 1976, to listen to everything he recorded the year after Köln, to celebrate an anti-versary of sorts, with one word only in mind: forward.

It seemed simple enough, until I really started to listen to the torrent of music that followed, a deluge so heavy and intense and varied that the only logical conclusion to be drawn from it is that time is a circle. I was listening against the impulse of anniversary, in the past’s future, finding that any moment I could grasp in 1976 would send me swirling though time and Spotify. So maybe not forward, exactly, but whirling my way into mystery.

Around the same time I started listening against Köln, I chanced upon a copy of the 890-page Letters of Wallace Stevens in a used bookstore. Although I’ve been reading Stevens since my teens, I’ve never understood a single one of his poems. Maybe this book, this purchase that I’d probably never read, could help. Another quixotic new year’s project: understand a single poem of Wallace Stevens. It quickly occurred to me that I didn’t really know what a poem was—and then just as quickly, what a poet is.

I was teetering on the edge of AI-induced unemployment, about to turn forty-two; heavier than I wanted to be, with a collection of short stories no one wanted to publish; my only creative fulfillment was making soups from scratch. Having vowed to walk away from writing altogether—another one of those new year’s projects—it seemed more sensible, even dignified, to devote my energy to defining the vocation of a poet.

He was trying to articulate the mystery of having this thing inside you that screams it has to mean something!

I could have asked my father-in-law, Bill. He was a prolific, unpublished poet, who spent his eighty years turning over a single theme again and again, focused on reducing his language, pruning it into expressing the wonder he felt about the world and our place in it. He was trying to articulate the mystery of being here, of knowing that it all ends and means nothing, and yet having this thing inside you that screams it has to mean something! in as concise a way as possible.

For Bill, a poet was someone who wrote poems. He might have quoted Omar Khayyám in Edward FitzGerald’s version, which is as good a definition as any of the many I sought out in the following year:

Where poetry came from was a bit of a mystery, too.

Bill and I agreed on that, but not much else. Our relationship—a wine-and-whiskey-sodden probing of that mystery, one of the most contentious and meaningful of my life—was defined by and through two things we disagreed about constantly: poetry and jazz.

He died suddenly in May of last year. The year in which I was going to finally find out what a poet was. In the ICU, when they took him off life support, we played music for him that he had loved. We played Bach. We played Pat Metheny. Finally, we played him The Köln Concert, through the crummy little speakers of an iPhone—a slight indignity to his audiophile sensibility that I choose to believe he would forgive us for. There it was at the end, the only two things we ever wholeheartedly agreed on: the mystery and Keith Jarrett.

The Survivors’ Suite, the first album Jarrett recorded in 1976 with his American Quartet, is the album I returned to again and again in the early months of my year of not listening to The Köln Concert. It’s one of Jarrett’s singular achievements, and one of the best jazz records of the seventies. This group—with Dewey Redman on reeds, Charlie Haden on bass, and Paul Motian on drums—can sound less like a working band and more like four people........

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