Keith Jarrett

CD version. Bordeaux Concert documents a solo piano recital that Keith Jarrett gave on 6 July 2016, during what turned out to be his last European tour. Two strokes in 2018 have kept him from the stage since then, and the concerts of that tour have since come out one by one. In Bordeaux the lyrical side of his playing comes to the fore, in a fully improvised suite of thirteen parts with no standards or encores to round it off.

The concert took place at the Auditorium of the Opéra National de Bordeaux, in front of about 1,400 listeners, and Jarrett had arrived on stage with nothing prepared. His connection with the city went back to a trio concert there in 1970. Martin Pearson recorded the performance, Jarrett is credited as producer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. It follows Munich 2016 and Budapest Concert, released by ECM in 2019 and 2020 from the same tour.

The suite opens with a darkly chromatic piece built from churning waves of sound, a start that several critics heard as close to atonal. From there the music moves through many moods. Part III is a quiet ballad with bittersweet dissonances, and Part VII has a pastoral serenity. Part IX sounds like a gospel hymn, while Parts V, VIII and X are the most intense, and a single real blues surfaces along the way. Towards the end the sense of farewell grows in Part XII, before Part XIII closes the evening almost in a whisper. Some passages recalled for French reviewers the flow of the Köln Concert and of Bremen/Lausanne.

In Le Monde Francis Marmande described a music "rousing a community of listening at the edge of silence." Charles Waring in Mojo called it "a poignant reminder of Jarrett's alchemical brilliance as a pianist," and Thomas Conrad wrote in Stereophile in 2022 that the sadness of hearing it, knowing Jarrett may never play again, turns into gratitude by the end. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung gave it five stars and found it more intimate than the Munich and Budapest concerts.

CD edition, ECM 2740, released in September 2022, with a cover photograph by Max Franosch.