A Multitude of Angels gathers four complete solo concerts that Keith Jarrett gave in Italy in October 1996, nearly five hours of music on four discs. They were the last concerts in which he improvised each set as one unbroken span, the form he had developed since the early 1970s. "These were the last concerts I played having no breaks within each set," he writes in the liner notes. Twenty years after the tour, ECM released them as the final chapter of that long-form solo work.
The concerts took place between 23 and 30 October 1996 at the Teatro Comunale in Modena and in Ferrara, the Teatro Regio in Turin and the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa. Jarrett was already struggling with the illness later diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, and he writes that he "was busy playing as though it was the last time". He recorded the concerts himself, close-miking the piano onto a DAT machine, and is credited as producer and engineer. The tapes were mastered in Munich by Christoph Stickel with Manfred Eicher. Two years passed before he played in public again.
Each concert has two parts of half an hour or more, plus encores. Jarrett describes the scope himself: "Jazz is ever present here, alongside my deep closeness with classical music (modern and ancient, Ives and Bach)." The first Modena set runs 34 minutes, opening quietly and lyrically before a rocking groove takes hold under Jarrett's stamping foot. Ferrara, Part I, the longest piece at almost 44 minutes, rides on slowly rolling chords before blues and jazz figures break through. The encores bring two familiar songs, Danny Boy in Modena and Harold Arlen's Over the Rainbow to close Genoa.
Reviewing the set in The Guardian (2016), John Fordham pointed to "the intensity, variety, and astonishing technical command of these performances", including the funky blues encore at the end of Genoa. In The Irish Times, Cormac Larkin heard "a kind of apogee, the completion of an arc that had begun in the early 1970s". Stereophile and All About Jazz ranked it among the best of his solo recordings.
Four-CD box on ECM Records (ECM 2500-03), first released on 4 November 2016, with liner notes by Jarrett.
