Keith Jarrett

LP version. On 16 July 2016 Keith Jarrett closed a European solo tour at the Philharmonie im Gasteig in Munich, the home town of ECM. Munich 2016, released in 2019, documents the whole evening: a spontaneous suite in twelve parts followed by three encores. Two strokes in 2018 ended his concert career, so this tour turned out to be his last, and this night its final stop.

The tour had opened on 3 July in Budapest and passed through Bordeaux, Vienna and Rome. The Budapest and Bordeaux concerts were later issued by ECM as well. In Munich Jarrett played alone on a Steinway that Fono Forum praised for its sound and tuning. He produced the recording himself, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer and Martin Pearson as engineer. Roland Spiegel of Bayerischer Rundfunk noted that the concert came two days after the terror attack in Nice, near the hotel where Jarrett had been staying. He heard the pianist begin the evening in a stern, intense mood.

Part I, close to fourteen minutes, opens on hard counterpoint over growling bass figures before the music slowly lifts. Part III brings one of the first lyrical peaks, a melody with the substance of a standard. Across the later parts Jarrett moves between free-tonal abstraction, gospel-tinged vamps, blues with touches of stride and a small rolling boogie. The encores are tender readings of It's a Lonesome Old Town, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Gerhard Winkler's Answer Me, My Love. That last song was made famous by Nat King Cole but has long been known to German listeners as Mütterlein.

Critics placed the concert among his strongest late solo recitals. In the Financial Times (2019) Mike Hobart heard "Jarrett at his fluent and inventive best", reworking the core of his aesthetic "in fresh and unexpected ways." For All About Jazz (2019) Karl Ackermann wrote that "the improviser's diversity and unrelenting inventiveness continue to be stunning." Jazz Views called it one of his most focused solo recitals since Rio (2011), and France Musique put it among the most intense concerts the pianist ever gave.

Double LP edition of ECM 2667/68 in a gatefold sleeve, released in November 2019 alongside the 2CD.