![]() Most of Jarrett’s albums are recorded in concert. ![]() A short list of Jarrett favourites might include “Autumn Leaves,” “When I Fall in Love,” “If I Were a Bell,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Stella by Starlight,” the last four of which, in fact, turn up on Yesterdays. Over the years quite a few tunes have returned like old friends. It is now twenty-six years since Jarrett first invited bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette to record standards with him and in that time twenty trio albums have been released on ECM, including a few that contain free improvisations. ![]() And because players tend to have their favourite standards, tunes to which they return over their whole career, it is also possible to gain a historical perspective, to hear a player changing across ten, twenty or thirty years or, perhaps, within the space of a few days. But ask those same six players to give you their versions of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and you gain perspective, you hear exactly where they’re coming from. The neophyte can listen to half a dozen different players and quickly get lost in the range of styles and approaches. The rich variety of jazz available today can seem baffling in its stylistic range. If you ask a group of very different artists to draw the same vase of flowers, you will quickly discover their various aesthetic preferences, their technical differences and similarities, even the contrasting ways in which they see a bunch of peonies in water. In one sense, however, standards really are like drawing. And since no one in this discussion is actually right or wrong, the contention will always continue and much time will be wasted. And anyway, knowing your standards is to jazz musicians what drawing is to visual artists. It is only the templates – harmonic, melodic, stylistic, instrumental – that situate the music within that particular genre. Others would argue that if the music is merely spontaneous and free there is no special reason to label it jazz. Jazz is an improvised music and, some say, it should pour out of its performers, spontaneous, free and unhampered by a dependency on the harmonic template of a song composed eighty years ago by George Gershwin. Most concepts in jazz are more or less contentious – jazz musicians and, particularly, jazz fans are an opinionated lot – but the standard is something of a special case, because it goes to the heart of the matter. The concept of the standard has long been a matter of contention in jazz circles. On Yesterdays, it is actually Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (from 1933) that yields the presumably unwitting fragment of “Wonderwall.” It’s either a classic bebop tune by the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk or Powell himself or it’s from the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley pantheon of composers such as Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern. His idea of a standard is little different from Bud Powell’s or Bill Evans’s. Younger players such as Brad Mehldau might tap pop music from Paul Simon to Radiohead, or even “Wonderwall” itself, in search of potential new standards, but Jarrett remains a traditionalist. TOWARDS THE END of a track on his newly released trio recording, Yesterdays, pianist Keith Jarrett plays a melodic phrase that sounds as though it has escaped from the Oasis song “Wonderwall.” It brings the listener up short, because of course Jarrett is not that kind of jazz musician.
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