Return of the piano man

John Fordham salutes Keith Jarrett's undimmed sense of musical adventure

Keith Jarrett Inside Out
(ECM) ****

It isn't surprising that Keith Jarrett hasn't had much time for the press over the years. When Jarrett was a young piano prodigy without a mainstream reputation, jazz fans loved him and only jazz critics wrote about him. Then, in 1975, he released The Köln Concert, one of the best-selling piano albums of all time. The wider public started loving him - at which point, some jazz fans and critics took to grumbling about Jarrett's cheesy romantic-classical flouncings, hippie spaciness and on-stage histrionics, joshing each other about the queues of Citroën Deux Chevaux likely to be parked outside his gigs bearing "Save the Whale" stickers.

In the 1980s, Jarrett's audiences made him one of the most bankable jazz musicians on the planet. And yet at the same time he was being written off by hardcore jazzers as a fake-hip conservative. He was typecast as a slick technician deft and opportunistic enough to graft the mannerisms of 19th-century classical piano music on to 20th-century jazz, bringing in a little country chording and gentle funk, to produce an audience-flattering mix. None of this represented what Jarrett was really about; nor did it reflect the substance of an immensely gifted and serious artist who, though he didn't always play "jazz" in its familiar idiomatic aspects, always put improvisation at the top of his agenda.

Jarrett has consistently and refreshingly gone against prevailing wisdoms. In the 1970s, when a lot of jazz was electric, Jarrett said he wouldn't play anything but an acoustic instrument. Later on, when every leader wanted to play originals,Jarrett started the Standards Trio to find the most personal and modern way he could to reinterpret old Broadway songs. Now, in a 21st-century jazz world in which not only Diana Krall but even Michael Brecker appears mesmerised by the Great American Songbook, Jarrett is playing free-improvised music again. And that's the story of this disc, a largely free-blowing exchange between the pianist, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, taken from two nights of live recording at London's Royal Festival Hall in July 2000.

In the liner notes to this album, Jarrett writes: "On this recording there are two fades. The first is because we eventually went into an actual song, and didn't play a good enough version of it." Jarrett's resolve in that instance highlights his firm pursuit of a new path here: one of spontaneity, without recourse to familiar melodies, the comforting flag-waving of standby jazz axioms or hot licks. By following that route, the pianist is also testing the resolution of worldwide audiences he has built over years of variations on themes you can hum in the street.

It is anyone's guess whether the change has anything to do with the three-year break he took while suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, from which last year's tour represented Jarrett's triumphant return. It sounded during the concert, and it sounds here, as if this famously all-or-nothing artist is conserving his energies a little more than in the past. He is phrasing more episodically and fragmentedly, opening up spaces for a more conversational group interaction. This is not free-playing of the tentative, tiptoeing, plink-and-rustle variety. Yet, alhough there was plenty of quiet deliberation at the Festival Hall gigs, there were also headlong passages of exhilarating, clamorous, flat-out jamming and astonishingly intuitive calls and responses. Nor did Jarrett act like a man with a doctor at his shoulder: he fidgeted, splayed his elbows, glared, fitfully stood and stomped, and, as ever, howled and muttered in harmony with the general flow.

Plenty of those sound effects are audible on this scintillating set, but the group's collective energy, the music's urgent forward momentum and Jarrett's still-remarkable instincts for snatching melody out of the air almost turn the voice into another instrumental line. Though the pieces are improvisations, the blues are a regular undercurrent, as Jarrett himself acknowledges in the notes. And from a succinct, post-boppish opener that sounds like a cross between Thelonious Monk and Paul Bley, to the washes of classical-piano rumination (with Jarrett coming close to Brad Mehldau's territory), via Peacock's fluttering bass episodes and DeJohnette's restlessly rumbling percussion, the set exemplifies the appeal the pianist promises his listeners.

"People who don't understand free music (like Wynton Marsalis, Ken Burns etc)," Jarrett declares with typical forthrightness in his notes, "are not free to see it as an amazingly important part of the true jazz history. Where's the form? Don't ask. Don't think. Don't anticipate. Just participate. It's all there somewhere inside. And then suddenly, it forms itself."