This disc holds the complete first set played by Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio at the Blue Note in New York on Saturday, 4 June 1994. It comes from three nights that ECM documented in full on the box At The Blue Note: The Complete Recordings. ECM calls it a set that "embodies all the characteristics" that made this group, for many listeners, the preeminent trio in jazz. Five long performances, standards and two Jarrett tunes, run to just over seventy minutes.
Jarrett plays piano with Gary Peacock on double bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The trio played Friday, Saturday and Sunday sets at the club, and all were recorded. Manfred Eicher produced and Jan Erik Kongshaug was the engineer. Reviewing the 2019 single disc for Audiophile Audition, Robbie Gerson singled out the balanced microphone placement and the near absence of crowd noise.
The set opens with an Autumn Leaves of almost twenty-seven minutes, introduced by a long passage of solo piano before the trio settles into medium swing. Peacock takes a solo, DeJohnette answers with a fierce drum break, and the piece ends quietly on a repeated single note. Days of Wine and Roses follows at over ten minutes, and Jarrett's own Bop-Be is fast, with solos from all three. The longest medley joins You Don't Know What Love Is to Jarrett's Muezzin, with a long playout over a groove that Jazz Journal heard as Indian in feeling. A short When I Fall In Love closes the set.
When the disc returned in 2019, Dave Jones in Jazz Journal heard Jarrett on Autumn Leaves "sandwiched between Bill Evans and Brad Mehldau". He found the trio less at ease at high tempo in Bop-Be than in the slower pieces. Gerson gave it four and a half stars in Audiophile Audition and called the opener "vintage Jarrett". Rather than a selection of highlights, the disc keeps one set whole, in the order it was played that night.
This CD is the 2019 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings catalogue albums back into print in card packaging. It was first released in 1995 as ECM 1577, the single-disc edition of the Saturday first set.
