My review of Keith Jarrett's Creation, today at All About Jazz.

It's been four years since pianist Keith Jarrett--an ECM recording artist since the early '70s--last released a solo piano recording, 2011's Rio. While its more consistently buoyant, optimistic nature reflected similar changes in Jarrett's life, it was not a recording that, for example, ranked as highly as Concerts: Bregenz / Munich --issued, in 2013, in its entirety for the first time on CD since its original 1982 vinyl release.

While Jarrett's well-documented encounter with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the mid-to-late '90s put a halt to the pianist's legendary ability to deliver uninterrupted performances of Herculean strength and length--performances documented on albums like his still-popular Köln Concert from 1975--he began, since returning to solo piano performance, delivering solo sets consisting of shorter pieces rather than one long, uninterrupted drawing of form from the ether. Still, despite some fans pining for the days of releases like the massive Sun Bear Concerts (1978) box--which documented five performances in Japan from 1976, some of his post-CFS recordings absolutely stand alongside his '70s work, an example being 2009's Testament: Paris / London.

And so, with Jarrett turning 70 this year, he is releasing two albums: one, a New Series classical recording of piano concertos by Béla Bartók and Samuel Barber (along with a short encore from an undated Tokyo solo show); the other, a solo piano recording but, in the decades since the pianist stopped recording most solo and group recordings in the studio, a live recording like no other in his discography. The aptly titled Creation is nine improvised pieces culled from six different performances in four cities and five halls, and what's most remarkable about this recording is that it feels like a pre-CFS solo performance; absolutely uninterrupted it is not--there are occasional brief moments of silence between the pieces, simply titled "Part I" through "Part IX" (though each piece also indicates where and when it was recorded)--but what Jarrett has done is to find improvisations that feel as if they are coming from a similar mindset--a similar musical headspace--and sequence them such that they give the impression of a single, contiguous 73-minute performance.

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