Keith Jarrett

CD version. Munich 2016 captures the solo concert Keith Jarrett gave at the Philharmonie im Gasteig on 16 July 2016, the last night of a European tour. Over two discs he builds a spontaneous suite in twelve parts, moving between pieces of polyrhythmic and harmonic complexity, touches of the blues and folk-song lyricism. He closes with three standards as encores. The concert took place in the city where the ECM label was born, before an audience that hangs on every note. It belongs to a line of solo concert recordings that goes back to Solo Concerts Bremen/Lausanne in 1973.

Jarrett produced the album himself, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Martin Pearson engineered the recording and Christoph Stickel mastered it. The twelve parts and three encores together run to about ninety-three minutes. Fono Forum praised the hall's superbly voiced and perfectly tuned Steinway, and Nigel Jarrett in Jazz Journal found that the recording conditions in the Philharmonie sound perfect.

The fourteen-minute Part I opens in the lower register, dark and largely atonal, before settling over a rocking bass figure. Part III is the first lyrical peak, a gentle hymn-like melody that critics compared to a spiritual, to Schumann and to church song. The blues returns in Part IX, which edges toward boogie-woogie. The first encore is Gerhard Winkler's Answer Me, My Love, long known to German listeners as Mütterlein. Nat King Cole made it famous abroad. It's A Lonesome Old Town and Somewhere Over The Rainbow follow, the latter played with what Mojo called a transcendent touch.

Critics ranked it with his strongest solo releases. Thomas Conrad, who made it Stereophile's Recording of the Month, wrote that the three ballads are "traced with a devotion that lights them from within". Garry Booth in BBC Music Magazine heard "no sign that it's the final date on the tour's European leg, such is Jarrett's focus and energy". Patrick Hadfield of London Jazz News singled out the aching Answer Me, My Love. Writing for AllMusic, Mike Jurkovic set it alongside Radiance, The Carnegie Hall Concert and Rio, among the peaks of Jarrett's later solo work.

Released by ECM Records in November 2019 as a double CD, ECM 2667/68.