I turned 45 last week. Completely coincidentally, I was drawn deeply into a series of recordings made exactly 45 years ago. On Keith Jarrett’s November 1976 tour of Japan, the great pianist played a series of improvised solo piano concerts. He created, spontaneously, works of overwhelming beauty, logic and depth. To show up for a two-hour concert prepared with no material—mind and imagination wiped clean until seated to play the first note, and allowing structures of melody and harmony to be created spontaneously in such a profoundly architectural way. Many great musicians have performed completely improvised concerts; only Keith Jarrett routinely creates masterpieces of invention.
So I bought myself the original Japanese pressing of the Sun Bear Concerts 10LP box set on ECM. It’s a giant hard cardboard box containing what’s essentially a mammoth coffee table book. The box opens with the Kyoto concert—and it’s one of the most enchanting and mysterious pieces of music I’ve ever heard.
Unfortunately—in a pretty inexplicable oversight during the 1978 release of the Sun Bear Concerts—the more compact and song-like encores from each performance were not included. The CD box set in the mid-90s corrected this, and Jarrett’s improvised encore from Tokyo has since gone on to be among his most famous and beloved works. It’s such a masterpiece—nothing out of place—that it’s not surprising Radiohead stole it to create their song “Paranoid Android.”
Originally published at Late Republic Nonsense.