On Inside Out the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, known for years as the Standards Trio, sets the songbook aside. Apart from a closing When I Fall in Love, everything on this London concert recording is freely improvised, with no prior discussion and no set structure. Jarrett wrote in his liner notes that he had always been interested in "turning things inside out", and that free playing is "an amazingly important part of the true jazz history".
The music comes from two concerts at the Royal Festival Hall in London, on 26 and 28 July 2000, recorded by Martin Pearson and produced by Manfred Eicher. ECM saw it as picking up where Changeless had left off thirteen years earlier. All three players had a long history with open forms. In 1960s New York, Peacock played with Albert Ayler and in the Paul Bley trio. DeJohnette was a member of Muhal Richard Abrams' Experimental Band in Chicago in 1963 and later played with John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
Three long improvisations, each around twenty minutes, take up most of the disc. From the Body grows out of a tiny, insistent three-note figure in the piano into a mass of rhythms and motifs, with an extended bass solo along the way. The title track starts with swing and settles onto an earthy one-chord blues. In the short Riot, Ian Carr of BBC Music Magazine heard "extraordinary rhythmic violence and dissonance" in Jarrett's playing. Jarrett himself stressed how much the blues ran through these sets, even in free playing.
Critics placed the record high in the trio's long run. DownBeat gave it five stars in January 2002, and James Hale wrote there that the band's name had "ceased to signify the band's repertoire" and now "stands for the level they set for other improvisers". Reviewing the concert itself in The Guardian, John Fordham noted "plenty of flat out jamming and animated, one-touch conversation" next to the hushed passages, with familiar tunes surfacing only at the edges.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1780, with five tracks and a booklet carrying Jarrett's liner notes. It was first released by ECM on 1 October 2001.
