A Night at the Opera
By Roberto Muggiati
“The treasure has always been there/ It is not hidden/ But is only where certain people would look/ At all.” (from the liner notes of the album Treasure Island by Keith Jarrett.)
For the second time in my life, I went to see Keith Jarrett play solo piano at the Municipal Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. At the first presentation in 1989, the relationship between the artist and the audience was affected by the noise of the infamous beepers or pagers (does anyone remember them?) This time, on Saturday, April 9, the villains could well have been the mobile phones, not only because of the occasional annoying noise, but also for the capture of photographs and video.
Every seat in the house was full; it was one of those brilliant nights that only the Municipal can offer. However, we entered the theatre in cautious mood, if not terrified. There were good reasons. Last October, on the same stage, Brad Mehldau – another student of the piano solo – cut short his encore because of photographs taken on mobile phones. In Sao Paulo, three days before the concert in Rio and for the same reason, Jarrett also aborted the encore and left the stage. If the mobile phones were not enough, there was also the risk of throat-clearing and uncontrollable coughing, caused by the audience on the brink of a nervous breakdown (and the advanced age of many).
Forearmed, Dell’Arte, the company producing the concert, distributed with the programme, a “user manual” and an elegant tulle bag with throat lozenges as we entered the auditorium. When Keith Jarrett – in a shirt, trousers, shoes and dark glasses – finally entered the giant stage, we all froze: some unfortunate wag wolf-whistled. The pianist pretended not to notice and proceeded to get his hands dirty. Not only his hands, but also his feet, marking the rhythm, and even his body, playing in a standing position from time to time, leaning over the keys, and underlining the chords with nasal humming.
The tour programme promised “An Evening of Solo Piano Improvisations”. It is a format that Jarrett has been developing since the early 1970s, when he reached a satori state of Zen at the Heidelberg Jazz Festival. “I started playing songs and suddenly, in a way, to interconnect them with transitional parts that joined everything together and that, in turn, evolved into the expanded solo concert in which there are no more songs and everything is improvised on the spot.”
Jarrett challenged the gods of music making upon exploring the myth of absolute improvisation. He finally put intention into practice in a magical moment: Thursday, January 24, 1975, when, at the age of 29, he performed at the Opera of Cologne, Germany. The concert could have gone horribly wrong: the promoter was an 18-year-old girl, and the chosen Bösendorfer 290 Imperial grand piano was mistakenly changed by stagehands for a baby grand that mouldered backstage. Jarrett arrived tired from a long trip driving a jalopy, ate a cold sandwich and was shocked when he saw the terrible instrument. He almost cancelled the concert. According to one expert, “the instrument was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, so Jarrett often used ostinatos and left-hand rhythmic figures during his performance to give the effect of stronger bass notes, and concentrated his playing in the middle portion of the keyboard.” At the last minute, the sound engineers placed microphones to record the presentation, albeit only for the Opera’s archives. However, many masterpieces have been born so, out of adversity. The Köln Concert became the best-seller among both solo and jazz piano albums, with nearly four million copies sold.
The concentration required for piano solo is terrible. In 1996, Jarrett was attacked by a mysterious illness called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He called a halt to everything. However, he managed to bounce back and today diversifies his work among the standards, interpretation of the classics, his own compositions in the classical language and the solo piano tours, which he classifies as “an adventure on the brink of a precipice.” He says, “Playing solo is like jumping off a cliff without knowing what’s down there, stone or water.”
The evening at the Municipal Theatre in Rio was perfect. The public swallowed their coughs, put their mobile phones in their pockets and lived a magical and memorable musical moment with Keith Jarrett.
