2013 is an exciting year for Keith Jarrett fans. ECM Records has already released / re-released three Keith Jarrett albums (“Hymns/Spheres”, “Somewhere”, and “Bach: Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano”), and will soon release “No End” and re-release “Concerts: Bregenz / München”, in November. That’s 10 CDs worth of music!

Vic Olsen – “Keith Jarrett: Bregenz Concert / Franz Liszt: Sonata in B minor”

If that’s still not enough for you, CVM Records is releasing a recording of the Bregenz concert by pianist Vic Olsen. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

For the first time in music recording history, an improvised concert by the renowned pianist Keith Jarrett has been recorded in a studio by another performer.

The Bregenz Concert was improvised by Keith Jarrett on May 28, 1981 in Austria. In a widely acclaimed biography titled The Man and His Music, Ian Carr wrote, “The Bregenz/Munich concerts were Jarrett’s most brilliant live solo recordings to date; his level of inspiration is quite extraordinary, and the music covers a wider musical and emotional range than ever. He takes fabulous risks, pushing everything to the limit.” A good many critics would agree.

Pianist Vic Olsen has dared to confront the perilous challenge of replaying this vast fresco — and what a job he has done! He brings to life the lyricism, expressive power and polyphonic rapture of this essential and yet unclassifiable music as superbly as when it was first performed. What we are listening to isn’t Keith Jarrett, but it is a celestial, Jarrett-like voice that can be heard throughout Olsen’s outstanding, masterly rendition.

More information can be found on cvm-records.com.

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Concerts: Bregenz / München

According to Jazzwise (“Jazz breaking news: Two Keith Jarrett gems emerge from the vaults”), ECM Records will release two Keith Jarrett albums in November 2013 (currently both listed with a release date of November 25 on Amazon):

• “Concerts: Bregenz / München” (1981) – as announced on KeithJarrett.org in May 2013 (although I didn’t expect this 3-CD set to be released before 2014)
• “No End” (1986) – featuring “a rarely heard side of Jarrett’s output as he multi-tracks himself on electric guitars, Fender bass, drums, tablas, percussion, recorder and piano at his home studio”

No End

Excerpt from “In conversation with Keith Jarrett” (2009) about the “No End” session:

“You mentioned the quartet earlier. Do you see a role for that again in your music?

I am basically never thinking of the future. I actually have things from the past. Believe it or not there’s a sequel to Spirits that was done on all electric instruments: two guitars, electric bass, drums, percussion, voice and occasionally something else.

When did you do this?

Shortly after I did Spirits in the late 1980s, and this has been resting in my house ever since and I played it for a couple of people recently and they go, ‘Oh my God! This has to come out, because nobody is going to believe this stuff!’ And one of the things about it is, I’m playing all the instruments, but the thing I really get a kick out of it every time I hear it is how tight the rhythm section is. It’s like the best feel on some of these things I could ever get because I knew what I wanted. When you’re with percussionists, their sense of time is slightly different. Every drummer is different, and you’re playing piano and you’re trying to blend and find where the rhythmic point is, and it’s a blend of all those guys. But here, it’s so contagious because [the rhythm section] was all me. And I’m not saying this from an egotistical standpoint. It’s… I guess the word is contagious. It’s like hearing Miles’ rhythm section at the Blackhawk, and you hear how they are at one. Every beat at exactly the same precise place, and for me it was all my sense of time. The reason I bring that up is there is not just a future, there’s [also] a past. At the moment the Trio is going to go the length. The next release is going to be the Paris and the London concerts together; there was something special going on there.”

Thanks to David and Felix on the Keith Jarrett Yahoo! Group for the information.

Update (October 10, 2013). Post updated with album covers.

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Samples from “J.S. Bach: Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano” are now available on Amazon’s UK site. Thanks to Håvard for the information!

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