Roma (Live 2016) Keith Jarrett

• 1 Roma, Part I (Live) 10:24
• 2 Roma, Part II (Live) 05:08
• 3 Roma, Part III (Live) 05:30
• 4 Roma, Part IV (Live) 05:40
• 5 Roma, Part V (Live) 04:25
• 6 Roma, Part VI (Live) 05:19
• 7 Roma, Part VII (Live) 05:35
• 8 Roma, Part VIII (Live) 05:08
• 9 Roma, Part IX (Live) 03:45
• 10 Roma, Part X (Live) 06:31
• 11 Somewhere Over the Rainbow (Live) 06:39
• 12 It's a Lonesome Old Town (Live) 05:22
• Total Runtime 01:09:26

Info for Roma (Live 2016)

Roma is the fifth and final concert recording from Keith Jarrett's highly acclaimed last European solo tour of 2016, captured at the Santa Cecilia Hall in Rome on July 12th. It brings the chapter to a close with music that stands apart even within this remarkable series. As the Italian daily paper La Repubblica summarily stated at the time of the concert: “Ultimately, Jarrett celebrates a timeless ritual—one that, in some respects, is as old as humanity itself. He pays tribute to the act of creation, to spontaneous composition, and he does so in front of an audience, sharing with listeners the excitement of discovery.”

The procedure on this evening, familiar yet separate, unfolded according to its own inner logic: first the canvas is cleared; in “Part I”, Jarret builds momentum with dense chromatic lines, staccato, before themes become apparent and the keys are allowed sustain. “Part II” continues in this sombre yet more obviously organised fashion before in the subsequent parts familiar touch and lyricism give way to unexpected counterpoint and passages of concentrated rhythmic insistence – all forming one great architectural structure.

We witness Jarrett’s unmatched ability to pull a swinging gospel out of thin air in “Part V”, a gritty blues in Part “IX”, his penchant for stacking large arpeggiated harmonic arcs in “Part VI”, as well as the pianist’s deep respect for the songcraft of the first half of the 20th century, translated to melodies of his own design – created in the moment –, in Parts “VII-VII”. In “Part X”, Jarrett brings the canvas back to its original state. Encore favourites “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and “It’s A Lonesome Old Town” conclude this concert, again familiar yet with a fresh delivery, rejuvenated.

If the concerts from Budapest, Bordeaux, Munich and Vienna each revealed a distinct musical landscape, Roma offers another, unmistakably its own. Five concerts in 13 days, each its own unique episode, with one-in-a-kind implications. There is a sense of summation without retrospection, of an artist remaining wholly committed to discovery in the moment.

Keith Jarrett, piano

July 2016, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome

Keith Jarrett
At the end of 2008, Keith Jarrett added two concerts to his schedule at short notice – one at Paris’s Salle Pleyel (November 26), one at London’s Royal Festival Hall (December 1) . The music on “Testament” is from these concerts. Their range is compendious, Jarrett’s improvisational imagination continually uncovering new forms, in a music stirred by powerful emotions. In his liner notes, the pianist is forthright about the personal circumstances promoting a need to lose himself in the work once more.

He also reminds the reader/listener that “it is not natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas and play something that is of lasting value and brand new.” This, however, has been the history and substance of the solo concerts since Jarrett initiated them, almost forty years ago . Over time their connection to ‘jazz’ has often become tenuous, yet Jarrett’s solo concerts, with the foregrounding of melody and the continual building, and relinquishing, of structure, are also removed from “free improvisation” as a genre. Jarrett’s solo work is effectively its own idiom, and has been subject to periodic revisions by the pianist. “In the early part of this decade, I tried to bring the format back: starting from nothing and building a universe.”

Since the “Radiance” album and the “Tokyo Solo” DVD of 2002 Jarrett has been adjusting the flow of the work, more often working with shorter blocks of material. “I continued to find a wealth of music inside this open format, stopping whenever the music told me to.” This approach distinguished “The Carnegie Hall Concert” (2006), and it is most effectively deployed in “Testament” , where the strongly-contrasting elements of the sections of the Paris concert in particular have the logic of a spontaneously-composed suite. The nerves-bared London performance (the first UK solo show in 18 years) is different again: “The concert went on and, though the beginning was a dark, searching, multi-tonal melodic triumph, by the end it somehow became a throbbing, never-to-be-repeated pulsing rock band of a concert (unless it was a church service, in which case, Hallelujah!).”

In the end, the improviser does what must be done. As Keith Jarrett said, a long time ago, “If you’re a rock climber, once you’re halfway up the face of the cliff, you have to keep moving, you have to keep going somewhere. And that’s what I do, I find a way.”

These days, however, Jarrett is rationing the number of ascents: there have been less than thirty solo concerts in the last decade, making “Testament” a special event indeed. Two further solo performances are scheduled for 2009 – at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels on October 9, and at Berlin’s Philharmonie on October 12.

Booklet for Roma (Live 2016)