Rainbow
Everything that Lives Laments
Piece for Ornette
Take Me Back
Life, Dance
Song for Che
Keith Jarrett (piano, flute, soprano saxophone, percussion): Charlie Haden (bass): Paul Motian (drums)
Recorded live 14 June 1972 NDR-Jazz Workshop in Hamburg [55:25]
This is a remastered and first release of a concert given in Hamburg in June 1972 by Jarrett, Haden and Motian. It was made shortly after Jarrett had first
recorded for ECM – his LP called Fancy You came out in 1971 – and just before he formed the quartet with Dewey Redman.
There are six tunes and each one has numerous points of interest to long-time devotees of the trio. The long lyrical piano solo that starts Rainbow generates anticipatory intensity, which is duly met when Motian and Haden join Jarrett. The interplay is thoroughly convincing and it
inspires Jarrett to one of his rousing rootsy solos with some explosive chording to segue into the lyric Everything that Lives Laments where
Jarrett plays flute and Motian’s shimmering percussion veils the music in refinement. Meanwhile Haden’s hypnotic bass figures add to the variety of
textures to be savoured – a lulling, expressive experience with the briefest of darting flute flurries.
Jarrett’s flute and saxophone playing is, for many, a taste they have never managed to acquire but he acquits himself well on this date and takes up the
soprano for Piece for Ornette. Increasingly factitious and frenetic it provides the most visceral aural evidence of Jarrett’s enthusiasm for the
avant-garde but is followed, perhaps appropriately, by Take Me Back. Here he unveils his lexicon of Country affiliations (complete with
tambourine) – and it’s notable that both he and Haden (who was raised on such music) and elsewhere at much the same time Gary Burton - were not in the
least ashamed of playing as they pleased when it came to Country music – but on their own terms. The finale, Song for Che, offers more
avant-gardism, less structured and convincing than had earlier been the case in Take Me Back but providing evidence anew as to the superb
cooperation between the trio.
NDR’s sound is resplendent, and it captures, for instance, every quivering tensile movement of Haden’s bass and Motian’s abundant rim shots. This is a
splendid addition to the Jarrett-Haden-Motian discography.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
ECM 470 4256
