Jarrett’s Formative Years

Jarrett was only 28 when the music on this protean, five-CD collection of performances was recorded. But he already had performed with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Charles Lloyd, Miles Davis and led his own ensembles. A year earlier, he had begun the solo concerts (first chronicled on disc in his 1973 ECM sets from programs in Bremen, Germany, and Lausanne, Switzerland) that opened his music to an entirely new audience.

He was, as the performances here make clear, a jazz artist with a golden future. The group he led for these dates, the American Quartet, included, in various performances, saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Paul Motian and percussionists Danny Johnson or Guilherme Franco. For some performances, Sam Brown was added on guitar.

The music was a direct reflection of Jarrett’s probing musical mind, as well as the seething quest for change that had been present in jazz since the early ‘60s. It is not music that will necessarily appeal to the segments of Jarrett’s audience that favor either his interpretations of standards or his impressionistic solo ventures. But it is, nonetheless, music filled with surprises: soulful grooves; avante-garde-style free improvisation; intense spontaneous interaction between Haden and Motian forecasting Jarrett’s work with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette; occasional moments of deliciously rhapsodic solo piano work.

In sum, the music and performances are striking revelations of a gestating creative mind in its early phases. As much as anything, it reveals that Jarrett’s precisely focused contemporary work is the distillation of a carefully cultivated, omnivorous musical imagination.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four stars (excellent).