Keith Jarrett – Facing You (1972/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 47:42 minutes | 1,53 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The stunning ECM debut that unleashed one of the greatest piano players of our time. Using jazz as an excuse, Jarrett initiated and indoctrinated us with improvised solo piano, something to which listeners would become used to over the next three decades. Facing You is boogie-woogie, country hoedown, blues, folk, rock ‘n’ roll-flavoured jazz, and is still an astonishing album. The music press at the time of issue were bereft of ideas about how to categorize him; it would have been much simpler just to wallow in the music. Much of Jarrett’s and Manfred Eicher’s future musical philosophy started out with this important record.

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Keith Jarrett – Eyes Of The Heart (1979/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 51:02 minutes | 1,83 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Eyes of The Heart is a jazz album by American pianist Keith Jarrett released in 1979 by the ECM record label. The personnel on the album is the “American Quartet”, made up of Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. It was recorded at the Theater am Kornmarkt, Bregenz in Austria in May 1976. The studio album The Survivors’ Suite had been recorded one month earlier.

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Keith Jarrett – Creation (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:12:33 minutes | 617 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

‘Creation’ signals a departure from the ‘traditions’ of Keith Jarrett’s many ECM recordings of solo improvised piano. Earlier concert recordings have reflected the flow of musical ideas and inspirations as developed in the course of an evening but this album – drawn from concert recordings made in Japan, Canada and Europe in 2014 – is different.

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Keith Jarrett – Concerts: Bregenz, Munchen (1982/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:30:19 minutes | 2,77 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

After Bremen/Lausanne, after The Köln Concert, after the epic Sun Bear Concerts, the next development in Jarrett’s solo concerts was the all-embracing music captured here. Two 1981 improvised concerts from Austria and Germany are featured, recorded respectively at the Festspielhaus Bregenz and the Herkulessaal Munich, venues noted for outstanding acoustics. While the Bregenz concert has hitherto been available as a single CD, this set marks the first appearance of the complete Munich performance on compact disc. The 3-album set includes extensive text booklet with liner notes by Keith Jarrett, an essay by Swiss critic Peter Rüedi, and poetry by Michael Krüger.

“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.”
– Jarrett biographer Ian Carr

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Keith Jarrett – Byablue (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 42:12 minutes | 1,73 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Impulse!

Released in 1977, Byablue features performances by Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian.

Amidst rumored tension within the band, Keith Jarrett’s “American” Quartet met for one last marathon recording date before disbanding, and Impulse made the most of it by spreading the music out over two separate releases. From the evidence of this, the first and slightly superior LP, the band certainly doesn’t sound as if it was ready to break up; the interplay has become telepathic, the musical ideas are still fresh and there is a willingness to experiment. “Rainbow,” credited to Margot Jarrett, is top-flight lyrical Keith, while “Trieste” evokes the mood and some of the language of spiritual Coltrane. There is adventure, too; with Dewey Redman and Jarrett wailing on tenor and soprano respectively, “Konya” sounds almost like a muezzin call to prayer, and “Yahllah” is a rare, brave, moving merger of jazz and the Middle East. Highly recommended on LP, since the Middle Eastern tracks were deleted from the CD reissue. –Richard S. Ginell

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Keith Jarrett – Budapest Concert (Live) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:27:41 minutes | 808 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The second complete show to be issued from Keith Jarrett’s 2016 European tour – following on from the widely-acclaimed concert released as Munich 2016 – this double album documents the pianist’s solo performance at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest. Jarrett, whose family roots reach back to Hungary, viewed the Budapest concert as akin to a homecoming, and the context inspired much creative improvisation. Where Jarrett’s early solo concerts shaped a large arc of music over the course of an evening, the later concerts have generated suite-like structures, comprised of independent “movements”, each of them a marvel of spontaneous resourcefulness. Creative energy is applied also to familiar songs given as encores, “It’s A Lonesome Old Town” and “Answer Me”, transformed in the Budapest concert.

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Keith Jarrett – Bop-Be (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 39:14 minutes | 1,46 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Impulse!

Originally released in 1977, Bop-Be features performances by Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian.

Bop-Be is the final album on the Impulse label by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s ‘American Quartet’. Originally released in 1977 it features performances by Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian. It is the last album recorded by the American Quartet and the final album Jarrett released on a label other than ECM.
To date, Bop-Be has only ever been reissued on compact disc in Japan, packaged in a miniature replica of the original vinyl LP sleeve. However, it was included in the four-disc collection Mysteries: The Impulse Years 1975-1976. This also applies to the Jarrett album Back Hand.

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Keith Jarrett – Belonging (1974/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 46:52 minutes | 1,67 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

From beginning to end we are treated to a mélange of moods in this, the first effort from Keith Jarrett and his European quartet. Compositionally astute and clearly the work of steadied hands, Belonging finds each musician in fine form. Whether it is Garbarek’s punctilious doubling in the buoyant “Spiral Dance,” Danielsson’s mellifluous bass solo in “Blossom,” or Christensen’s rollicking snare in “The Windup,” everyone gets their moment in the spotlight. Jarrett’s fingerwork is, of course, superb throughout, but it is the energy underlying his playing—the very spirit of his pianism—that really seems to drive things forward. The album is zigzagged, fading adeptly from head-shaking abandon to heavy darkness from one cut to the next. Ballads make up the longest passages on Belonging and seem to turn ever inward within the confines of their own emotional borders. For the most part, sax and piano are explicitly unified, as if trekking on either side of the same divide, although sometimes they seem to look in opposite directions, as if involved in a long-running debate, unsure of whether reconciliation can be had in the throes of so much dialogue. Jarrett’s jilted approach is well suited to these down-tempo moments while the bass gently asserts its tremulous presence in the background. Garbarek’s sudden entrances weave a dense stratosphere of brassy elegance. “’Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” is pure Jarrett and provides Garbarek with plenty of space to run amok with his screeching serenade. The title cut is another ballad, this one of a different shade than the rest; not an alleyway, but a brief lapse into self-pity. As the album’s center, it also encapsulates a core theme: this music evokes a past from which one cannot escape or, more positively, simply a sense of belonging as the title would imply, the inescapability of one’s roots in place and time. Overall, this is an essential example of what ECM can do when it throws a handful of singular talents into a studio. –ecmreviews.com

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Keith Jarrett – Arbour Zena (1975/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:00 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

“I consider this one of my most richly lyrical and consistently inspired works,” wrote Keith Jarrett of “Mirrors”, the almost half-hour long concluding piece onArbour Zena. “Jan Garbarek’s contribution is irreplaceable and ecstatic.” It is easy to agree that Arbour Zena as a whole is one of Jarrett’s most exceptional albums. Evocative writing for strings, beautiful playing by Keith and Jan and by Charlie Haden at his most soulful, and a glowing panoramic production make this 1975 recording one of the finest of the early ECMs.

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