Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Paul Motian

CD version. At The Deer Head Inn documents a single evening, 16 September 1992. That night Keith Jarrett went back to the small jazz club in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, where he had played as a teenager. He brought Gary Peacock on bass and Paul Motian on drums, a trio that never played together again. The seven standards that ECM released in 1994 are now counted among the highlights of Jarrett's large discography.

Jarrett was born in Allentown and grew up nearby, and he later described his teenage engagement at the Deer Head as "my first serious trio job on piano". His regular trio of the period paired Peacock with Jack DeJohnette. Motian, his drummer in the 1970s, had not performed with him for 16 years, and his presence changes the feel of the music. Peacock and Motian had also played together in a mid-1960s edition of the Bill Evans trio. The drummer Bill Goodwin recorded the night for documentary purposes, with Kent Heckman as engineer, and Goodwin is credited as producer.

The programme opens with Solar by Miles Davis and closes with Rodgers and Hart's It's Easy To Remember, with Basin Street Blues and Bye Bye Blackbird in between. Five of the seven pieces run past nine minutes, and the trio takes its time. On Jaki Byard's Chandra Motian plays with brushes behind a loping, slightly crooked groove, and Peacock answers with quick, playful lines. On You Don't Know What Love Is, the longest track at almost thirteen minutes, all three raise the stakes, and the music moves between surges and moments of release.

Stereophile wrote that the music "has the dash and the unabashed lyricism of Keith Jarrett's best work", and Zan Stewart of the Los Angeles Times called it "a compendium of grace". In his liner notes Jarrett recalled "a warm, humid, rainy autumn night in the Pocono Mountains". Thirty years after this disc, in 2024, ECM published eight further pieces from the same evening as The Old Country, approved by Jarrett with Manfred Eicher.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1531, first released in April 1994.