No End shows a side of Keith Jarrett that his piano records never revealed. He recorded it alone at his home studio in New Jersey in 1986, and it stayed unreleased for 27 years. It presents him on electric guitars, Fender bass, drums, tablas and percussion, layering parts into twenty untitled grooves. Piano appears only in a small role. Spread over two discs, it is one of the most unusual albums in his large catalogue.
The music was made at Cavelight Studio, where a year earlier, between May and July 1985, Jarrett had recorded Spirits, another one-man album built from overdubs. This time he worked with two Tandberg cassette machines: he played a part on one and added another on the second, listening on headphones. In his liner notes he says there was "no forethought or composition" in the usual sense. There was only a feeling, a rhythm, a bass line or a melody, and "None of this was written down." Jarrett produced and engineered the sessions himself and drew the picture on the back cover. Manfred Eicher is credited as executive producer.
The pieces are numbered from No End I to No End XX, ten to a disc, none of them longer than seven and a half minutes. Drums and percussion carry most of them, played with steady precision, and the picked electric guitar lines move over his own bass parts. No End XII has a mournful sweep that one critic heard as close to a spaghetti western, while No End XVIII breaks away from the steady pulse around it. Tape hiss and the occasional overload remain audible. Jarrett also adds voice and recorder here and there, and the piano is barely heard until about halfway through the set.
"I have always been drawn to instruments that you touch directly, without a mechanism in between," Jarrett writes. Drums, he adds, "were always with me in some way." Writing in JazzTimes, Travis Rogers called the album "a work of rhythm and melodic rhyme". The ECM Reviews site described it as "the secular counterpart to" Spirits.
This is the double CD on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 2361/62, first released in November 2013, with liner notes by Jarrett.
