Bye Bye Blackbird is the tribute that Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette recorded for Miles Davis in October 1991, about two weeks after his death. All three had played in Davis's bands at different times, and they went into the studio to play music in his memory. Alongside a choice of standards, the album is built around one extended collective improvisation, For Miles, which gives it a place of its own in the trio's long discography.
The session took place on 12 October 1991 at the Power Station in New York, the studio where the trio had recorded its first album, Standards, Vol. 1, in January 1983. Jay Newland engineered, Jan Erik Kongshaug mastered the tapes and Manfred Eicher was executive producer. The programme sets Davis favourites such as Thelonious Monk's Straight No Chaser and the Van Heusen and Mercer ballad I Thought About You beside Oliver Nelson's Butch And Butch and two trio improvisations. ECM released the album in April 1993.
The title track opens the record at more than eleven minutes, starting from the familiar tune and climbing into Jarrett's high register. You Won't Forget Me, a ballad of more than ten minutes, gives room to a reflective solo by Peacock. At the centre is For Miles, more than eighteen minutes of free trio playing in which Peacock's bass takes a consoling role and the piano opens into long, lyrical passages. Straight No Chaser and Butch And Butch swing hard, and the short Blackbird, Bye Bye closes the circle opened by the first track.
In the Financial Times, Garry Booth called it "an empathetic tribute to the late Miles Davis" and valued its view of Jarrett outside the introspection of the solo concerts. France's Jazz Magazine singled out For Miles as the point where the trio touches the sublime. Looking back in 2012, Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews wrote that among the trio's albums it "sits above the rest for its sheer profundity of expression".
This CD is the 2008 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums of the catalogue back into print in card sleeves with their original artwork. Bye Bye Blackbird was first released in 1993 as ECM 1467.
