Keith Jarrett
Creation
ECM
Four stars
Keith Jarrett celebrates his 70th birthday with another display of his prowess as both a jazz and classical pianist. Creation is his first album in four years and marks a further evolution in Jarrett's spontaneously improvised solo piano recordings.
He is credited for creating the genre in the 1970s with landmark albums such as 1975's The Koln Concert, featuring tightrope-walking free improvisations stretching out 30 minutes or more. Rather than offering a single concert, Creation finds Jarrett selecting "the most revelatory moments" from six solo concerts in four cities between April and July last year. Self-produced, the album is sequenced in that the nine parts feel like an improvised suite.
The result is one of Jarrett's most intimate and reflective solo recordings, full of beautiful, sparse melodies — far different from his earlier solo outings that featured highly rhythmic, repetitive blues and gospel vamps. The highlights include Part IV, in which Jarrett references Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez (the inspiration for Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain) and the poignantly romantic Part V, which occasionally hints at Antônio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova Waters of March.
