Keith Jarrett

CD version. Facing You is Keith Jarrett's first solo piano album and his first recording for ECM, made in Oslo in November 1971 and released in March 1972. Its eight original pieces opened the long line of solo work that later led to The Köln Concert, and the album has been cited as an influence by countless pianists since.

Jarrett was on the road in Europe with the Miles Davis band at the time, and he made the album on a day off from the tour, on 10 November 1971. The session took place at Arne Bendiksen Studio, where ECM had already recorded Jan Garbarek and Terje Rypdal in the label's first Oslo years. Manfred Eicher produced it, Jan Erik Kongshaug was the engineer, and the music was published by Kundalini Music.

The ten-minute opener, In Front, is the most complex piece on the record. Robbie Gerson, reviewing it for Audiophile Audition in 2018, heard a gospel romp with roots in stride piano, driven by a muscular left hand and broken by a mellower interlude. My Lady; My Child is a slow, inward ballad built over a hypnotic pulse in the left hand, in which Gerson caught a possible echo of Danny Boy. The closing Semblence packs so many techniques into three minutes that it plays like an etude. Between them sit shorter pieces of very different character, from a tango-like figure in Lalene to the jaunty stride of Starbright.

Critics have kept returning to the album as the starting point of Jarrett's solo art, and in 1973 it was followed on ECM by the triple album Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne. On ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo rated it essential and wrote that "every note seems perfectly placed". For the album's fiftieth anniversary, George W. Harris wrote in Jazz Weekly that it "more than stands the test of time".

This is the CD edition in ECM's Touchstones series, which keeps landmark albums from the catalogue in print in card sleeves; this one comes in a gatefold card sleeve. Facing You was first released in 1972 as ECM 1017.