When a standard tune is well-written it provides the door, but you don't just enter and sit there. The problem is not that one is easier or harder. When Jarrett first embarked, back in the early 1980s, upon what has become a meticulous reinvestigation of the American popular songbook he pointed out, "It's the same thing playing Samuel Barber or 'All The Things You Are'. If "The Melody" resembles anything else in his performing history, then it is those moments at the conclusion of one of his solo concerts when, case proven, journey completed, he has given an informal reading of "Danny Boy" or "Over The Rainbow" as a parting gift to the audience. Elsewhere the mood is tender, hushed and affectionate on what may be Jarrett's most intimate recording to date. Only on Ellington's "I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good" does he let rip with a cascading solo of glittering elegance. Instead he strips these songs to their melodic essence and, gently, lays bare their emotional core. On "The Melody At Night", Keith Jarrett dispenses with the jazz soloist's conventional emphasis on dexterity, the "clever" phrase, the virtuosic sleight-of-hand. An album of "standards" played solo, its character is quite unlike that of the ebullient, outgoing "Standards Trio" - and yet Keith has often performed these pieces and recorded some of them previously, including "Blame It On My Youth" and "Don't Ever Leave Me" in his group with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette (see for instance the albums "At The Blue Note" and "The Cure"). Secondly, it concerns itself not with improvisation as a compositional process in Jarrett's long-running "solo concerts" tradition but with the finely-crafted material at hand - love songs, by some of the outstanding songwriters of the century, including Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, and others, plus interpretations of the traditional songs "My Wild Irish Rose" and "Shenandoah". Firstly, it is not a concert recording, but was recorded at the pianist's home studio in rural New Jersey. "The Melody At Night, With You", Keith Jarrett's radiant new solo album, breaks patterns established by its predecessors.
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