Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette

After the Fall documents the concert of 14 November 1998 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. That night Keith Jarrett returned to the stage after two years lost to chronic fatigue syndrome. With Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, the group often called the Standards trio, he plays songs from the Great American Songbook and a handful of bebop classics. The tape stayed unreleased for almost twenty years. Hearing it years later, Jarrett wrote: "I was amazed to hear how well the music worked."

By Jarrett's own account the evening was an experiment, held at a venue close to his home to test whether he could manage a full concert again. In his liner note he recalls telling the others that bebop might be the best idea. The set draws on Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane alongside the standards. Peacock plays double bass and DeJohnette drums. Jarrett produced the release himself, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer, from a live recording engineered by Alain Leduc.

The first disc is built on long readings. A fifteen-minute The Masquerade Is Over eases from a medium-up tempo, through a collective transition, into a relaxed lope. The thirteen-minute Autumn Leaves ends on a Latin groove riding on Peacock's bass riff. On the second disc Powell's Bouncin' with Bud gives Jarrett room for a long bebop solo. Pete La Roca's One for Majid later became a staple of the trio's concerts. There are ballads too, Late Lament among them, and the set ends quietly with When I Fall in Love.

The release was received as one of the trio's finest. In The Guardian, which made it Jazz Album of the Month, John Fordham wrote that its content and backstory "catapult it straight to the forefront of Jarrett's voluminous catalogue". Richard Williams on The Blue Moment found "no sense of frailty in evidence", only "a leanness and a clarity that make it exceptional". Williams also noted that many of these tunes appear on earlier trio albums, and argued that this should deter no one. In BBC Music Magazine Roger Thomas heard an infectious optimism in the trio's choice of bebop as an aid to convalescence.

Released by ECM Records in March 2018 as a double CD, ECM 2590/91, with a liner note by Jarrett.