Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5

Disc 2:

1. Part 6
2. Part 7
3. Part 8
4. Part 9
5. Part 10
6. The Good America
7. Paint My Heart Red
8. My Song
9. True Blues
10. Time On My Hands

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21136 in Music
• Released on: 2006-09-26
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Live
• Dimensions: .29 pounds

Album Description
Keith Jarrett is nothing less than a living legend. Audiences flock to his rare performances in the world’s finest concert halls, and it is his unique ability to create music in the moment that has made him most famous – his spontaneous improvisations often sound as if they’ve been carefully composed over time. His 1975 album, The Köln Concert, catapulted him onto the world stage, and – at 4 million copies and counting – is the best-selling solo piano recording of all time. In 2005, Keith Jarrett played his first US solo concert in a decade on the stage of Carnegie Hall, America’s most celebrated venue. One year later to the day, this electrifying night of music will be released.

Amazon.com
Since being afflicted in the late '90s with chronic fatigue syndrome, which kept him on the sidelines for several years, Keith Jarrett has had to reinvent himself as a performer. It's no slight on his classic live recitals of the past to suggest that has proven to be a fruitful development. In moving away from his long, inwardly streaming, lyrically sustained works and adopting a more easygoing episodic approach, he has become more accessible (and less windy) without sacrificing intensity or the freedom to draw upon all manner of styles including blues, gospel, and Americana. Recorded in 2005, The Carnegie Hall Concert features a 10-part piece that runs a gamut of moods and emotions. The enjoyable encore portion consists of three new originals, including a standard, "Time on My Hands," and a rare, enthusiastically received Jarrett oldie, "My Song," from the '70s. This is the 61-year-old artist's 25th solo album for ECM--most in a jazz genre but some classical, most on piano but some on organ and harpsichord and even wind instruments. It leaves you looking forward to number 26. --Lloyd Sachs 

About the Artist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American pianist and composer. His career started with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in both classical music and jazz, as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisation technique combines not only jazz, but also other forms of music, especially classical, gospel, blues, and various ethnic-folk musics. Solo piano - Jarrett's first album for ECM, called Facing You (1971) was a solo piano date recorded in the studio. He has continued to record solo piano albums in the studio intermittently throughout his career, including Staircase (1976), The Moth and the Flame (1981), and The Melody At Night, With You (1999). Book of Ways (1986) is a studio recording of clavichord solos. The studio albums are modestly successful entries in the Jarrett catalog, but in 1973, Jarrett also began playing totally improvised solo concerts, and it is the voluminous recordings of these concerts that have made him one of the best-selling jazz artists in history. Albums recorded at these concerts include: Solo Concerts (Bremen/Lausanne) (1973), originally released as a three-LP set, The Köln Concert (1975), one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, Sun Bear Concerts (1976), five complete Japanese concert recordings, originally released as a ten-LP set, Concerts (Bregenz/München) (1981), originally released as a three-LP set, only the Bregenz concert is included on the single CD release. The München concert (more than an hour and a half long) has not yet been reissued on CD, apart from a ten minute section on the :rarum collection which was compiled by Jarrett himself. According to the ECM website however, a reissue is in the works. Paris Concert (1988), Vienna Concert (1991), which Jarrett has stated is his finest solo concert recording and La Scala (1995). Jarrett has commented that his best performances were during the times where he had the least amount of preconception of what he was going to play at the next moment. A possibly apocryphal account of one such performance had Jarrett staring at the piano for several minutes without playing; as the audience grew increasingly uncomfortable, one member shouted to Jarrett, "D sharp!", to which the pianist responded, "Thank you!," and launched into an improvisation at speed. Another of his solo concerts, Dark Intervals (1987, Tokyo), is not so much a freeform improvisation but more a set of recited compositions, making it a very separate entity to the concerts listed above. In addition to the different form, it lacks the jazzy verve associated with the above concerts, preferring to go down a gloomier, more moody path. In the late 1990s, Jarrett was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and was confined to his home for long periods of time. It was during this period that he recorded The Melody at Night, With You, a solo piano record consisting of jazz standards presented with very little of the reinterpretation in which he usually engages. The album had originally been a Christmas gift to his wife. By 2000, he had returned to touring, both solo and with the Standards Trio. Two 2002 solo concerts in Japan, Jarrett's first solo piano concerts following his illness, were released on the 2005 CD Radiance (a complete concert in Osaka, and excerpts from one in Tokyo), and the 2006 DVD Tokyo Solo (the entire Tokyo performance). In contrast with previous concerts (which were generally a pair of 30-40 minute continuous improvisations), the 2002 concerts consist of a linked series of shorter improvisations (some as short as a minute and a half, a few of fifteen or twenty minutes). In September 2005 at Carnegie Hall Jarrett performed his first solo concert in North America in more than ten years, released a year later as a double CD set (The Carnegie Hall Concert).

Customer Reviews

About that Applause
When my son and I walked out of Carnegie Hall on September 26, 2005, we both knew that we had seen something that would eventually be shared with the world on a CD (or 2). I'm thrilled to hear this concert again exactly one year later, and the applause brings me right back to our seats high up in the balcony of that magical room. Just as important as the clapping and screaming at the end of each section is the ABSOLUTE audience silence right before and during the music. Please note how the sense of perfect silent attention (and sometimes tension) in that sold-out hall comes through as well as the release between pieces. The piano was unamplified, so no one even dared to shift his or her weight while he was playing. So imagine the joy and freedom of being able to stand and shout and stomp your feet between the five encores.

People more knowledgable than me will be writing about this music for years, but I just want to comment on the recording as someone who was present at its creation. ECM could not have done a better job at capturing this night. I personally think that no one better captures the sound of a solo piano, and in this case they have lived up to their high standards. Breaking the two CDs right where Keith took his intermission again emphasizes this as a record of one night's performance. Each CD needs to be listened to in sequence, at a sitting. The first five parts before the intermission would stand as a record on their own (especially part five with its bass and depth), but when you hear the first two parts on disc two, you know you're in the presence of something totally new (yet somehow familiar). Maybe I'm prejudiced (after all, two of those clapping hands being immortalized are mine), but I think this is easily going to surpass Köln as Keith Jarrett's signature recording.

What Koln was pointing toward 31 years ago
I don't know if it is possible to get too esoteric about Keith Jarrett, but here goes. This is the finest solo recording of his career, and in many ways, both technically and thematically, this is what he was pointing toward with The Koln Concert 31 years ago. In the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Heidegger writes about clearing the ground, not so that Truth and Being can stand there naked in front of you, but so that that very act of preparation might ready you for Truth and Being to lean over and take you into its confidence, appropriate you, if you will, for the Grounding of Being itself.
Haven't lost you, have I? Well, you might say that what Koln first suggested by not explicitly stating is articulated more silently now than at any point in Jarrett's career. As Miles pointed out, it's not the notes, but the silences they embrace. The emrace here is as warm and passionate as you hear from any musician in your life. You will recognize moments from Sun Bear, from Bremen Lausanne, The Melody of the Night, Deer's Head Inn, all the way thru to Radiance in the course of these 10 parts and 5 encores. The basic concert is two 30+ minute sets with another 30 minutes of extraordinary encores that will get you to stop the car and get out and applaud, or jump on the coffee table and cheer. It is as beautifully recorded as anything ECM has ever done. The silences are deep, his growling is at an all time minimum, and the applause is so heartily spontaneous that you will know that this is an exceptional CD, and maybe one of the greatest pieces in improvisational music ever.
Technically since Koln, Jarrett's left hand has found its own life and never so much as here. I am amazed at how fluid, how pointillist, how bastract and how impressionist his hands draw colours and lines, and the piano responds as a willing lover to Jarrett's intrepid touch. That must be some kinda piano, as a German friend of mine quipped.
And unlike some of his recordings, which have evidenced the ordeal as much as the message, this one flows from someplace very deep in this man's soul, without impediment. If you were to buy only 1 CD this year, it should be this one. Jarrett has been on his way to this epoch all of his life, and you should see how well he has arrived. Wonder where he's off to next.......

Talent ripened, dreams realized
Like many of the first reviewers here, I was at the Carnegie Hall concert, and I agree that it was a special evening. It's a welcome opportunity to hear this performance on CD a year later, after memory has dropped the details of the experience into forgotten corners. Jarrett that night was playing the role of Beloved Master, entertaining and enthralling those who made the pilgrimage. After all the solo concerts played in Tokyo, Paris and Koln, he came home and played American standards in an American venue. The urgency of the applause and the anticipation of the silences show an appreciation that go beyond mere listening. "Carnegie Hall" was a moment when magic took flight -- when everyone acknowledged the return of the master, now secure in his reputation and handing out sonic miracles.

This CD took about three close listenings over two days to get the whole thing digested. It is by turns elaborate, generous, challenging, melodic and angular. It's like visiting a strange new/old city and finding the familiar and the exciting around every corner. The more abstract pieces lay aside conventional rules and compel the listener to examine the discrete fragments and then fit the pieces together (as challenging to hear as it was for Jarrett to play, I think). The sweeter pieces are sentimental with the brakes applied: melancholic, hopeful and inspired. And what would any Jarrett concert be without his gospel-inflected boogie, accompanied with insistent foot stomps?

The sound quality of this CD surpasses other Jarrett recordings (except perhaps "Radiance," made not too long before "Carnegie Hall."). It's difficult to award a full five stars merely because it was a greatly anticipated concert. I still prefer things like "Koln Concert" and "Bremen/Lausanne" because those were Jarrett at his pioneering best, with everything still ahead of him. Because the shorter, more abstract work inaugurated on "Radiance" and cemented at Carnegie Hall is still so fresh in the mind, there needs to be some time to reflect. In a way, this concert didn't reveal any new sounds to me so much as reinvent thirty years' worth of accumulated virtuosity. It was the sound of the American heartland drawn on a new canvas. It was Jarrett's talent ripened and his dreams realized.