Listening: Inside Out, Keith Jarrett Trio

“It is only our sensitivity to the flux that determines whether the music succeeds or fails.” – Keith Jarrett

The long-running trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette released an adventuresome album in the first year of the 21st century. An improvised concert recorded in 2000, Inside Out begins with some poly-rhythmic piano, bass, and drums, with DeJohnette all over his cymbals (as usual), and Jarrett and Peacock playing on each other’s cues. Then Jarrett comes in with his signature high-pitched vocables. Typically, jazz pianists who vocalize during their playing use a low-pitched voice, but Jarrett usually puts his vocalizations into a higher register than these other players. (I’m using the “eternal present” tense here; unfortunately, Jarrett stopped performing in 2018.)

This opening track, “From the Body,” sets the avant-garde tone for the whole album. As someone close to me likes to say of such music, “[i]t’s as if they’re all playing in different rooms and can’t hear each other!” It’s an acquired taste, I say. It took me a while to get over Jarrett’s vocalizations. To me, most of them sounded like a fly buzzing around a microphone. His vocalizations are increased during his jazz performances, and reduced during his improvised concert performances (yes, improvising each concert all the way through) such as his Bordeaux Concert.

Peacock gets a light-toned solo partway through “From the Body,” with Jarrett accompanying on piano (and vocals), and DeJohnette using some tom-toms to add flavor. DeJohnette has said that his drum set is tuned to be a melodic instrument. Here, that shows. Jarrett elaborates on a simple motif while Peacock continues his light-toned bass improvisations, and DeJohnette plays off Jarrett’s motif with his tuned tom-toms and a single, quiet cymbal splash. He avoids using the snare during this long passage. Jarrett vocalizes throughout, clearly enjoying himself.

A rapid, two-handed polyphonic figure begins after the previous section, with Jarrett playing unaccompanied for several measures and DeJohnette entering with cymbals before Peacock joins. This gives way to some well-placed silence, then some quiet, slower polyphony by Jarrett, with the rest of the trio playing tacet. Peacock strikes his bass, sounding like someone kicking the piano (a la Francesco Tristano Schlimé on his On Early Music, in the classical solo piano idiom) while DeJohnette uses his tom-toms like tympani, sounding like tympani. Jarrett laughs without breaking stride on his elaborate improvisation. The dynamic level increases gradually, with DeJohnette helping the trio to build some steam as Jarrett’s two-handed improvisation continues. Peacock plays in the background and in a minimal way. The rhythm slows and stops, and the audience breaks into loud, extended applause.

DeJohnette begins the title track with a short drum solo, establishing the rhythm for the beginning of the piece. Jarrett joins in, playing sparsely. Peacock thrums in rapid fire. Jarrett continues his vocalizations, and I’ll stop talking about all but the most notable of them, since he vocalizes nearly continually through the album. There is a good reason—probably many good reasons—an All About Jazz user poll voted DeJohnette as best living jazz drummer a year or so ago. On this album, with a free-jazz style to it, DeJohnette can open himself up and show his imagination running wild. I am especially fond of what he can do with just a ride cymbal and a snare drum. When playing with Jarrett, DeJohnette generally stays away from heavy use of the snare. Peacock blends into the mix seamlessly, occasionally plucking a few stand-out notes, and generally melding with DeJohnette and Jarrett before performing another solo with sparse accompaniment with DeJohnette.

Peacock and DeJohnette give way to a slow, classical-sounding chord progression by Jarrett. DeJohnette may be using his hand on the rough surface of the snare, rather than using a brush, as I have seen a jazz drummer do before, punctuating things with an occasional hi-hat snap. Jarrett plays in a church-like, gospel idiom, but playing only chords before adding melody, many measures in. Peacock joins in, too. Eventually, Jarrett, after several whoops and much moaning, breaks into full jazz improv, and the whole trio is playing, DeJohnette even using a few brief snare rolls.

Jarrett slows down, playing chords in the gospel style again, and Peacock and DeJohnette ease up. The tightness of the trio’s unity does not change; this is a tight, long-practiced trio skilled in listening to each other. The gospel style gives out to a drone-style improvisation reminiscent of some of Jarrett’s playing on the Köln Concert album. DeJohnette uses a half-time, rock and roll-like, bass-snare pattern. It’s hard to tell if he is using brushes or sticks at this point. This half-time groove plays out and slows and quiets, the audience breaking into applause and whistling and hollering at about the twenty-minute mark of the track.

Piano and bass exchange a couple of tentative phrases at the start of “341 Free Fade,” before Peacock throws himself into a solo, plucking the strings hard and using the entire fingerboard. The bass timbre ranges from bright and “rosiny” or “sticky,” to dark and smooth and without the sound typical of classical double bass (the higher frequencies being diminished in this part, that is). It sounds as if Peacock puts in some vocalizations. Piano and drums come in, with Jarrett whooping while Peacock continues to solo. DeJohnette is doing his characteristic complex cymbal-rhythm playing, this time on the hi-hat.

Peacock and Jarrett both solo at the same time, or they are accompanying each other—it isn’t clear which. The barrage of hi-hat, piano, and bass—with Peacock laying down a pedal tone now and then, on the low bass string, letting it ring and undergird the complex melodic and chordal lines with a sub-bass support—gets my head bobbing. There is enough dissonance in the next single-note lines by Jarrett to keep it surprising but not so much it becomes unpleasant. Jarrett’s left hand keeps time with a simple chord pattern for a while, then everything breaks loose, and piano, vocalizations, bass, and DeJohnette’s entire drum set, are in constant motion, in a tumult, short of ten minutes into the track, about halfway through. For the next ten minutes it’s a free-for-all jam, and then everyone plays like they’re tired out and going to sleep, and the track fades out without use of a fader.

Fading in with the use of a fader, the group is already underway on the fourth track, “Riot.” Jarrett effectively uses the bottom register of the piano to pound out a compelling and uneven rhythm. DeJohnette is using his whole drum set, especially cymbals and, notably, a lot of kick-drum. Peacock and Jarrett both pause and let DeJohnette keep the rhythm going, and then come back in, their conversational mode an exchange of low piano notes and high acoustic bass notes. Jarrett’s right hand and Peacocks high bass notes complement each other in their near unison playing. The crowd erupts as if into a riot after the short piece.

The crowd is, apparently, versed in the Great American Songbook. When Jarrett plays the first chords of “When I Fall in Love,” the crowd bursts into applause to indicate their recognition of the song and their appreciation of Jarrett’s choosing to play it. Then, quiet fills the recording, providing the trio with a space for their slower paced, more traditional piano trio-sounding take on the standard. The distinctive free-jazz feel of this album does not go away, with Peacock soloing over Jarrett’s playing of the melody and chords, and DeJohnette’s prominent and irregular drumming, especially on his signature use of cymbals. It is the piano that carries the “traditional” feel, while altogether the trio maintains the modern jazz feel with greater freedom and greater improvisation throughout the piece than “traditional” jazz. The avant garde speaks on this album, even in this beautiful rendition of a jazz standard. Silent spells and tacet periods are used effectively, with Jarrett’s piano playing solo for about a minute, before Peacock and DeJohnette come back in, gently, and Jarrett builds into a chordal swell before the song relaxes and ends on the bell-like tinkling of a few quick, ascending piano notes.

With nearly the entire concert improvised, this is, in a way, what was to become a typical Keith Jarrett solo performance, only in a trio format. In the liner notes, Jarrett said of the free-form improvisation he was planning for the three to do, “It is only our sensitivity to the flux that determines whether the music succeeds or fails.” I think in life, too, our sensitivity to the flux plays a large role in whether our projects succeed or fail.