KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION FULL
KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION PLUS
KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION SERIES

The piano line Jarrett’s playing as it begins reminds me of Linda Ronstadt and Carole King songs I used to hear as a child, on the radio stations my mom liked. “De Drums” is the most overtly ’70s track on Fort Yawuh, to my ear. Shaving off the last three or four minutes, even if it meant losing some Philip Glass-esque stuff in the last two, would have done the piece as a whole a service. This piece seems to end about four times, though-one of the perils of live albums. There are times when they almost reconcile the two sides, but then they seem to consciously decide to let them just coexist, as when Redman’s solo ends and Jarrett comes in with some almost Wyndham Hill piano. Redman takes a sharp, piercing reed solo around 11 minutes in, as the rhythm section gets all North African behind him-initially at least, this blending of desert music with post-bop built around Jarrett’s weird, almost prog-rock melodic concept is what’s most interesting about this band.

KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION SERIES

And when Redman comes in, playing a ballad melody atop Jarrett’s lushly rippling piano and Haden’s throbbing bass, with Motian offering a series of small eruptions rather than attempting to impose a rhythm on the slowly expanding music, this piece really turns into something beautiful. He starts singing along with himself a little bit here, but not enough so that it becomes bothersome. I’ve always thought of Jarrett as a somewhat fussy player, more concerned with baroque classical melodies than really gettin’ it pumpin’, but apparently back in the ’70s he could kick ass when he wanted to. Then there’s a brief passage of nothing but “little instruments” (shakers and tiny cymbals) before the piece gets rolling with a churning, surprisingly powerful piano solo.

KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION PLUS

The title track is next, a ballad on which Jarrett’s piano is initially challenged by what sounds like a cuatro, a four-stringed guitar heard in salsa and other Latin music (it’s actually Jarrett himself, plucking the piano’s strings), plus percussion-in addition to the four members cited above, percussionist Danny Johnson is also present on this date. It’s a pretty ballistic first number, and it sets everything else up very nicely. The piece ends with Jarrett and Redman duetting on sax and musette, tackling that long, intricate melody with total precision.

Meanwhile, Haden and Motian are going berserk in the back-Haden’s bass playing is as powerful as it was on Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction, and Motian is positively assaulting the kit, sounding almost like Max Roach at times the way he crushes the toms. Jarrett picks up a musette late in Redman’s solo spot and begins duetting with him.

KEITH JARRETT THE WINDUP TRANSCRIPTION FULL

Redman’s tenor sax solo is full of honks and farts at the bottom of the instrument’s range, and at one point he even begins shouting through the reed, a fairly convincing display of abandon. It starts with “(If the) Misfits (Wear It),” a long and winding keyboard excursion that eventually gives way to a full-on rampage by the other three bandmembers. (The group also made three albums for Atlantic, one of which was a trio date without Redman, one for Columbia and two for ECM I have never heard any of those.)įort Yawuh is a double live album recorded at the Village Vanguard.

What follows are my impressions of those eight albums, written as a kind of first-draft daily exercise.

(All of this material is now available in a single eight-disc box get it from Amazon.) The first one covered 19, the second one covered 1975-77, and both included a bunch of bonus tracks. So I picked up the two boxes Impulse! devoted to that group’s output. But a while ago, I read this excellent interview that Ethan Iverson conducted with Jarrett, and it made me want to check out the ’70s American quartet ( Dewey Redman on sax, Charlie Haden on bass, Paul Motian on drums), a group I’d never gotten around to before then. I tried listening to some of the early “Standards Trio” recordings, but the humming, buzzing vocal thing he does became so distracting I couldn’t even hear the piano anymore-it was like trying to listen to music with a dragonfly zooming around my head. Considering the size of his discography and his prominence in the world of jazz, I haven’t really spent very much time at all listening to Keith Jarrett. I reviewed one of his solo discs for Jazziz back in 2006, and obviously I’ve heard his electric work with Miles Davis.

Keith jarrett the windup transcription