Matthew Shipp on Keith Jarrett

[etherbored]

The article posted in another thread mentioned a crowd of 4,000 at 120 euros a pop, that's about a $634,000 take. So 80k almost sounds low.

you're right. it's elementary math. the first time i saw him/them it was in an auditorium with a capacity of 1,200. every time since then it's been, except for once in baden-baden, at a hall with a capacity of 2,500.

[Scott Dolan]

as for Shipp - Steve and Dolan - I of course am not impartial; but he did some brilliant work in the several sessions I have done with him - Jaki's Boat, solo from Jews in Hell; multiple things on Blues and the Empirical; and several cuts on our upcoming CD Field Recordings: Jim Crow Variations and Visions of Ohel Tom.

I like a lot of his material. I wasn't necessarily bagging on him as a musician, just pointing out the fact that many of the things he said about Jarrett could easily be applied to him.

[Justin V]

this may not be the place to ask, but someone mentioned in the 'somwhere' thread that the trio gets 80K per gig. is this public knowledge or ?

The article posted in another thread mentioned a crowd of 4,000 at 120 euros a pop, that's about a $634,000 take. So 80k almost sounds low.

Here is the relevant quote from the Umbria article:

"On Sunday night, the arena, which holds over 5,000 for music, appeared about 75 percent full. Chairs had not been set up on the outer sides of the front section, leaving open spaces. Seats there were 120 Euros. But the two sections farther back, where seats were 75 and 35 Euros, appeared close to full capacity."

[bluesoul]

Ethan Iverson responds.

[B. Clugston]

Ethan Iverson responds.

Iverson did a really nice interview with Jarrett a few years ago: http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-keith-jarrett.html

The Shipp article came out just as I've been revisiting the Cellar Door box set and marveling at much of Jarrett's work there.

[colinmce]

I ultimately agree with Iverson. I thought the refusal to deal with the American Quartet was borderline deliberate.

[Chuck Nessa]

I never thought he added anything to the quartet beyond paying them.

[JSngry]

Shipp seems to have gotten very adept at working the the "get out of my way, jazz superstars" persona. He's a worthy talent, and it's his way into broader name recognition, so good for him with figuring out how that shit works.

Glad to see Joe Sample getting some props as well. I know this probably isn't what Shipp had in mind, but this type of "out there" MOR-Jazz is not something that just any chump could make work at all, much less make it work this well.

Jarrett? Does he play as well as he gets paid?

Really, who does, in either direction?

Trying to reconcile Art with Commerce in a way that is Ultimately True And Fair is ultimately a sucker's game, I think. Pick one and go for it, and hope the other keeps pace. If not, reconsider and then proceed accordingly to the ensuing decision. And if you get lucky, hey, carpe deims(s).

As with a big-money athlete, if the market will bear it, he's worth it, and should he ever stop being worth it, he'll stop getting it.

[robertoart]

Matthew Shipp, Ethan Iverson, Keith Jarrett and Joe Sample Who'd a thunk.

You could pop KJ right into the seat here. And the big crowd would make him feel right at home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3S04CCIp34

Edited July 24, 2013 by freelancer

[robertoart]

Ethan Iverson responds.

It's mostly always rewarding to read Iverson. But he can't get down into the insightful alleys the way Shipp does. Unless we're talking strictly mechanics. Especially with regard to the psychology of Black musicians from the more immediate past. Iverson just doesn't have the background to think about those things. He can respond to them sure, but he wont arrive at them on his own.

Wish more things like this would pop up from time to time.

[mjzee]

Matthew Shipp on Keith Jarrett, boiled down to four words: I don't like it.

He should post here. We get that kind of stuff all the time.

[robertoart]

Matthew Shipp on Keith Jarrett, boiled down to four words: I don't like it.

He should post here. We get that kind of stuff all the time.

It's more than an 'I don't like it' response.

The interview with Perfect Sound Forever is also a little more expansive about Braxton and Taylor and others etc.

Read that one yet mjzee?

The PSF interviewer does confront him (Shipp). with the criticism that the David S Ware band were just playing 'Sixties music, which is the reflexive position I suppose.

[Jim Alfredson]

I have to say I agree with Shipp. I've tried to get into Jarrett but his playing doesn't resonate with me at all.

[Homefromtheforest]

I absolutely love his European quartet but that is mainly for his rhythm section....

I'm also a big fan of Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette but moreso in other contexts...the "standards" trio is good of course but certainly not amazing.

[David Ayers]

Thanks Justin V for the Umbria article link and bluesoul for the Iverson link. Interesting.

There is more at stake than a like/no-like discussion. People who 'don't like' Jarrett take him seriously. What happens for them - and for me, I know his music fairly well - is that we look for things that might draw us in, certain passages that might obsess us, an atmosphere that we might warm to, or just certain clevernesses which might make us at least feel recognition if not joy. When people are frustrated in this quest then they voice their reactions. That's an internal negotiation within the listener/analyst and it is more complicated than like/no-like. Some people have said they like the American quartet for the other musicians. I actually find that quartet pretty irritating myself, just because, again, I find it turned into something less than it might have been. Some people don't like that Jarrett appeals to audiences over the heads of the cognoscenti. To me that's good - that has done a great deal for jazz and jazz-related musics over the decades, for festivals and of course for his record label. I'll continue to listen to Jarrett, I don't think he's a vulgariser - at all - but that oh-my-goodness moment, which has come to me frequently in my revisiting of Waldron/Lacy in recent days (for example) remains elusive - for this listener at least.

[John L]

I have a lot of Keith Jarrett records, but I hardly ever listen to them. It is all very impressive, but somehow too cute and sweet to swallow for long. I also find the so-called gospel and blues elements in his playing that everyone cites to be weak. He does have enormous technical skills, improvisional skills, and sense of melody. That is probably why I own all those records that I almost never play.

Edited July 24, 2013 by John L

[Larry Kart]

A bemused review I wrote of a 1982 Jarrett solo concert:

KEITH JARRETT

If the “human potential” movement (est, Scientology, and all the rest) develops a need for liturgical music, Keith Jarrett should be its Bach. Seated at the piano Saturday night at Orchestra Hall, Jarrett celebrated the self (not his own self as much as the self) with a neo-religious ecstasy that was both impressive and ... I was about to say appalling, but let’s leave it at “impressive” for the moment, and I’ll fill in the blank later on.

Jarrett’s concerts typically consist of two completely improvised solo-piano ruminations, which on Saturday amounted to about seventy minutes of music, separated by an intermission. He began with (and often returned to) a rumbling bass pattern that sounded as though it had been abstracted from a spiritual. Transformed into a soft, graceful stomp, this motif traveled in the direction of gospel music (a short trip, to be sure) before branching off in two different directions--first a hint of bluegrass twang and then a solemn, deeply chorded hymn that resolved with a nutlike sweetness.

At this point, the ten-minute mark or thereabouts, Jarrett stopped, bothered by some coughs from the audience. Still lingering in the air, that sweet cadence may have been the goal of Jarrett’s journey, as a friend later remarked; but now the pianist had to take a long detour in order to find it again. And this side trip was, for me, the most fascinating part of the concert.

Picking up the hymn-tune feel again, Jarrett swiftly expanded it into a piano version of a Bach organ chorale. Increasingly chromatic and increasingly intense, this passage began to acquire some of the choked eroticism of Cèsar Franck, with the erotic aura highlighted by Jarrett’s passionate groans and moans, not to mention his standing pelvic thrusts at the keyboard. One already knew that extreme chromaticism and the physical side of romance have been closely associated since the days of Wagner’s Tristan. But as Jarrett pushed his musical odyssey toward early Schoenberg, it seemed he was out to give the audience a kind of Tubby the Tuba tour of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classical music.

What made this both impressive and (I’ll fill in the blank now) weird, was that the sounds Jarrett produced apparently were directed at himself as much as at the audience. A pianist of great technical expertise, Jarrett is also, in some massively naïve way, his own audience--a man determined to forget all that he knows of the musical past each time he sits down at the keyboard, yet a man who, in the act of improvisation, tries to remember as much of that past as he can. Of course this leaves the rest of the audience at the mercy of Jarrett’s wayward memory, with our kicks depending on whether the things he “discovers” are, on any given night, discoveries for us, too.

So if his music is to have its proper effect, it calls for an audience as naïve as he is--either that or an, audience that can will itself into naïveté, as Jarrett seems to do. In either case, a kind of romantic tampering with the self is the goal--an attempt to wipe the mind clean and then discover, with an innocent, newborn bliss, a “you” that’s better than the one you forgot.

[Stefan Wood]

nice.

[clifford_thornton]

Ethan Iverson responds.

It's mostly always rewarding to read Iverson. But he can't get down into the insightful alleys the way Shipp does. Unless we're talking strictly mechanics. Especially with regard to the psychology of Black musicians from the more immediate past. Iverson just doesn't have the background to think about those things. He can respond to them sure, but he wont arrive at them on his own.

Wish more things like this would pop up from time to time.

Hey - I'm agreeing with a freelancer post!

[jlhoots]

Looking for trouble I suppose, but I prefer Jarrett to Shipp.

[mjzee]

Here's an interview with Oscar Peterson where he agrees with Matthew Shipp! (Scroll to the end of the interview)

http://jazztimes.com/articles/29232-oscar-peterson-in-conversation

[MomsMobley]

worst thing you can say about Matthew is his taste in hip-hop/electronic music producers was rather questionable. Yet he also made David S. Ware more listenable than he in fact was so... Hell, Matthew almost makes Joe Morris seem interesting, which he assuredly is not.

Iverson, of course, is a witless, if not entirely useless interlocutor.

And did ya'll see he admitted-- honesty points, OK-- he was unfamiliar with the great Joe Sample?

are you kidding me? No wonder Iverson's music is so po' faced, corny and self-satisfied with its own banal limitations.

Joe's had some lesser moments as a commercial artist but I'd take any of 'em over Jarrett's dogshit classical efforts AND every horrible (low) "standards trio" release. (Life's too short to even pretend to listen to Ethan iverson again.)

DeJohnette gets a pass for reasons that should be obvious but 1) Jarrett makes generally excellent tune less interesting to the point of unlistenability and 2) Gary Peacock is just as bad-- whatever few inspired moments he had in the 1960s are long subsumed in subsequent decades of utter crap.

I used to tolerate the argument that Jarrett at least subsidized x # of more interesting ECM records but since Andras Schiff is just as boring there as he nearly always was on Decca and Teldec, who can care?

As for Hampton Hawes, Raise Up Off Me alone >>>>>> Jarrett's fucking career, American Quartet included.

JAZZ CRUSADERS "Soul Caravan"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg3_fx-AAKo

RICHARD PRYOR "Deer Hunting"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvOwF54M0Y8

Edited July 25, 2013 by MomsMobley

[MomsMobley]

Glad to see Joe Sample getting some props as well. I know this probably isn't what Shipp had in mind, but this type of "out there" MOR-Jazz is not something that just any chump could make work at all, much less make it work this well.

Jarrett? Does he play as well as he gets paid?

Mo' Joe!! I seem to have forgotten how to embed videos myself (really) so thanks for that. I'll spin Hampton Hawes "The Sermon" now in everyone's honor, Leon Thomas' too.

[David Ayers]

Moms in the house!

[robertoart]

worst thing you can say about Matthew is his taste in hip-hop/electronic music producers was rather questionable. Yet he also made David S. Ware more listenable than he in fact was so... Hell, Matthew almost makes Joe Morris seem interesting, which he assuredly is not.

Iverson, of course, is a witless, if not entirely useless interlocutor.

And did ya'll see he admitted-- honesty points, OK-- he was unfamiliar with the great Joe Sample?

are you kidding me? No wonder Iverson's music is so po' faced, corny and self-satisfied with its own banal limitations.

Joe's had some lesser moments as a commercial artist but I'd take any of 'em over Jarrett's dogshit classical efforts AND every horrible (low) "standards trio" release. (Life's too short to even pretend to listen to Ethan iverson again.)

DeJohnette gets a pass for reasons that should be obvious but 1) Jarrett makes generally excellent tune less interesting to the point of unlistenability and 2) Gary Peacock is just as bad-- whatever few inspired moments he had in the 1960s are long subsumed in subsequent decades of utter crap.

I used to tolerate the argument that Jarrett at least subsidized x # of more interesting ECM records but since Andras Schiff is just as boring there as he nearly always was on Decca and Teldec, who can care?

As for Hampton Hawes, Raise Up Off Me alone >>>>>> Jarrett's fucking career, American Quartet included.

JAZZ CRUSADERS "Soul Caravan"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg3_fx-AAKo

RICHARD PRYOR "Deer Hunting"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvOwF54M0Y8

Bit of a hip hop/electronics connoisseur now are we Mooms.

Good to see you keeping up with the Jones's