Rio documents the whole solo concert Keith Jarrett gave at the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro on 9 April 2011. Across two discs he plays fifteen improvisations, most of them short and each with a character of its own, ending with a run of encores. It came out forty years after Facing You, his first ECM album and also a solo piano record, and many critics placed it among his finest solo concerts.
The evening was the second date of a short South American tour that also took in São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Jarrett had played in Brazil only once before, more than twenty years earlier, and before the tour he said he felt he had "unfinished business" there. Afterwards he said: "I really had no idea what I meant, but this concert is it." He had given only seven solo concerts that year, and he praised both the sound of the hall and the enthusiastic audience. Jarrett produced the album himself, with Martin Pearson as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
The pieces are titled simply Part I to Part XV. Part I opens with clipped, staccato figures and stamping chords, and the romantic harmonies and soft trills of Part II move into more open ground. In Part V, the pounding bass of the left hand gradually gives way to a lyrical close, as Andy Gill noted in The Independent. Elsewhere there are ballads, a blues, gospel figures, Latin and African vamps and passages of free playing. The last improvisation, with its tremolo in the right hand, reminded one Swiss critic of Beethoven's Appassionata.
Press response was strong across Europe and the United States. In DownBeat, Paul de Barros gave it five stars and called it "the most astonishingly beautiful album he has made in many years". John Fordham, in The Guardian in 2011, found it warmer and less abstract than the 2006 Carnegie Hall concert, and wrote that "Rio represents Jarrett at his most exuberant". Several reviewers also remarked on the cover, a field of yellows and reds by Mayo Bucher, a rare burst of colour for the label.
This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 2198/99, released in November 2011.
