mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for jarrett returned 8 posts.
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Keith Jarrett - Opening

This live performance is one of the darkest and most overwhelming pieces of Jarrett’s catalog, and is best appreciated at extraordinary volume in pitch blackness; if it can be arranged, rain is appropriate as well; and if one is truly committed, one could do no better than listening to it during a storm at sea. I offer it as partial repayment to S. Stratodrive for his many contributions to my library.

(See here for other Jarrett posts).

Tags: jazz music piano keith jarrett
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Keith Jarrett - Excerpt from Vienna Concert, Part I.

Taking an excerpt from the Vienna concert is like showing a two-minute clip of one’s most cherished movie, or reading three pages from one’s favorite book, or perhaps like having a long-distance relationship.

But Part I, which is available in its entirety here, is 41 minutes long; in its astonishing perfection, too, it can require more attention than is reasonable to request. I hope, perhaps absurdly, that this excerpt appeals; I think Jarrett is one of the finest musicians of our time.

(And here are some previous videos and comments about him).

Tags: jazz keith jarrett piano music

I’ve posted bits of Keith Jarrett before, but as his best work is too long to upload (and in any event is something one either finds and loves or doesn’t) I haven’t mentioned him in a while.

But this is one of the rather rare video snippets online of a contemporary solo improvisational piece (2002), and it’s pretty extraordinary. It requires some focus, and at times makes me a bit anxious (that is, its melodic and harmonic language isn’t formulaic and thus isn’t reassuring), but I think it’s wonderful.

I am still simple enough that I sometimes prefer this or this, but the above is amazing, and seeing him play helps make it intelligible and appealing.

Update: Part 2 is really lovely.

Tags: music jazz keith jarrett piano

This isn’t a great piece in Keith Jarrett terms; he often improvises extremely beautiful and complex pieces, and the last album of his I got still renders me speechless.

This is from 1984 in Tokyo, and is pretty simplistic, if virtuosic. I’m mainly posting it for you, Will and Syd, so you can see what the man looks like playing.

Update: it may be structurally simple, but this is totally fucking awesome. The different tempos, the joy, the propulsion.  I love it.

Tags: music jazz keith jarrett piano

katrina: Giant Steps. 

Totally brilliant. There are so many wonderful things about jazz, but one of its greatest qualities is its density; creativity in jazz is restless, and so is discomfited by repetition, however attractive or entrancing it may be.

By contrast, much of the other music I love thrives on repetition: on droning, on verses, on crescendoes that largely work because of our expectation of simple, satisfying resolutions. I am not suggesting that one or the other of these sorts of music is superior.

But there is so much music in jazz, so many slivers of articulated creation that, on their own, could be full songs in another genre; I often say that listening to a Keith Jarrett song is like listening to 15 other compositions; fragments that could be full forms are dashed out, explored, and abandoned as he looks for the next structure, texture, relationship.

[Of course, some jazz relies on repetition; for example: Coltrane’s “Ole,” which my dad gave to me so long ago, is an 18 minute song with a rock-and-roll level of structural simplicity; I am generalizing. Blame the codeine and cough syrup]. 

That’s me during a period of my life I can’t process without my memory being emotionally distorted; recollections pass by knots of feelings too dense to allow their trajectory, and they’re pulled off course like light passing a black hole. I’m quite sick right now, and feel again like a boy, and that happens to be one of the photos I took this weekend; it’s in my parents’ living room (you can see their windows reflected, because I’m a poor photographer). I am tripping balls: dextromethorphan, pseudoephedrine, some antihistamine, exhaustion, maybe fever, all have combined to create a pitched mental state that seems simultaneously meaningful and nonsensical. I think it’s more of the latter. Anyway, I can’t be coherent now, so it’s time to list a few notes before I pass out and have nightmares all night: There has to be room in your personal cannon both for Keith Jarrett and for the Magnetic Fields; more perfect music than what they make is hard for me to imagine. Being sick makes me go crazy. I despair, I feel expansive and euphoric, and I pretend I’m dying; it’s such a masculine thing, I hear from my female friends: every damn cold turns into the stations of the cross. I will say that every woman I’ve dated has been tougher when ill than I am. How fraught is my relationship with New Orleans? I loved my weekend there, but this illness is a direct result of the molds and vapors of the city; it’s poisonous and intoxicating for me. I get ill every time. Talked to an old friend for a long time tonight; that’s always wonderful. If I gave advice, I’d say: never fall out of touch. I hope I don’t drift apart from anyone else.

That’s me during a period of my life I can’t process without my memory being emotionally distorted; recollections pass by knots of feelings too dense to allow their trajectory, and they’re pulled off course like light passing a black hole. I’m quite sick right now, and feel again like a boy, and that happens to be one of the photos I took this weekend; it’s in my parents’ living room (you can see their windows reflected, because I’m a poor photographer).

I am tripping balls: dextromethorphan, pseudoephedrine, some antihistamine, exhaustion, maybe fever, all have combined to create a pitched mental state that seems simultaneously meaningful and nonsensical. I think it’s more of the latter.

Anyway, I can’t be coherent now, so it’s time to list a few notes before I pass out and have nightmares all night:

  1. There has to be room in your personal cannon both for Keith Jarrett and for the Magnetic Fields; more perfect music than what they make is hard for me to imagine.
  2. Being sick makes me go crazy. I despair, I feel expansive and euphoric, and I pretend I’m dying; it’s such a masculine thing, I hear from my female friends: every damn cold turns into the stations of the cross. I will say that every woman I’ve dated has been tougher when ill than I am.
  3. How fraught is my relationship with New Orleans? I loved my weekend there, but this illness is a direct result of the molds and vapors of the city; it’s poisonous and intoxicating for me. I get ill every time.
  4. Talked to an old friend for a long time tonight; that’s always wonderful. If I gave advice, I’d say: never fall out of touch. I hope I don’t drift apart from anyone else.

What I Do


It’s fairly cold at night now, so I wore quite a few layers as I made my way across the deserted street in front of my house, holding my dogs near me with the occasional grunted command. I prepare before leaving: a cut, lit cigar, a playlist of Keith Jarrett’s music set, a tennis ball.

My neighborhood is illuminated, in places, by the amber sodium vapor lights I happen to have loved since my dad narrated a series of fantastic stories to me in Bay St. Louis involving a protective…

Getting Real

…If you don’t know Keith Jarrett, you’re depriving yourself of one of the great talents of our time: a jazz pianist who expanded into classical repertory and then developed a kind of supra-genre capability that is more or less without peer, his work is shocking to hear.  It is moving, fascinating, brilliant, and never opaque or referential; that is, Keith Jarrett makes art as I believe it should be: self-defining, self-elaborating, self-sustaining…