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geo GELLER's avatar

Wow Robert, Ted Goia sent me / I love your conversation with Keith Jarrett / as a documentary filmmaker, I have a work in progress doc "Soul Searching" - "what's my relationship to music ?"

I really resonated with you r conversation with Jarrett and feel that you were able to get inside of him as much as anybody could and brought out something's that surprised me and probably him too / "a good talker is a better listener" and enjoyed your listening and follow up questions / at the bottom is a little back story on the Koln Concert you might enjoy too

as the other commenters below have their opinion / he's not for everyone / a friend of mine produced his Koln Concert, that almost didn't happen because he was frustrated at the German piano tuning and actually was about to cancel the concert and was in the limo and as she told me, she says to him (and I paraphrase) "it's ok it you leave and I will reimburse the audience and lose some money, but the people who come will be disappointed, and don't care about the piano they come because they love you and come for you" and the rest is history

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dean weiss's avatar

Prickly. Huge influence. I panicked when I saw the headline.

I walked into a local record store chain in a Detroit suburb probably age 14. Looking through the jazz albums, haven't a clue. A cute employee asks if I need any help, I say I'd like to buy a jazz album. Could I be more specific? She says what instrument do I like? I say well I play piano concertos. She steers me to the Koln concert. I never looked back. Went to Columbia in part so I could hear as much live jazz as possible. Probably would have gone there anyway, Manhattan just blew me away. Probably would have stumbled onto buying jazz albums one way or another. Years later looking back you can say the staff was well-coached. Or not. Maybe I wasn't ready for Monk, or Cecil Taylor. The story of how the Koln concert came to be is fascinating in its own right, and should have taught Keith a huge lesson about going with the flow. But on some level, it didn't. Okay this is out of order and belongs a bit further down below.

Years later he's a big influence on my playing. A latent fear that my mind will go blank and the improvisation will hit a dead end, or I'll run out of ideas. But those left hand ostinatos . . . He ran out of ideas, that's why even in the Koln concert he'll repeat the same phrases measure after measure until something inspires him to change direction and explore that.

So getting back to the piano and that first album. What if I'd said synthesizer? Or organ? Maybe the employee steers me to Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, or Jimmy Smith. Different ice cream flavors, and I couldn't imagine always licking the same one. Duke Ellington with "there are 2 kinds of music, and good kind and the other kind."

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