Keith Jarrett, Dennis Russell Davies

CD version. Ritual is a written work for solo piano by Keith Jarrett, recorded not by its composer but by the pianist and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. It is an unusual entry in Jarrett's ECM catalogue, a single piece of about 32 minutes in which he does not play at all. Listening to it is close to hearing the core of a Jarrett solo concert, with the improvisation replaced by a fixed score and another pair of hands.

Jarrett and Davies have been friends and musical partners for some forty years. In the mid-1970s the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, under Davies, presented Jarrett's chamber music, and in the 1990s the two recorded Mozart piano concertos with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester. Near the beginning of that association Jarrett asked Davies to play a new composition for solo piano. Davies recorded it in June 1977 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Manfred Eicher producing and Martin Wieland engineering, and also wrote the liner notes. ECM released it only in February 1982.

The piece is heard in two continuous sections, originally the two sides of the LP. The first opens in a dense, almost crowded way, with clusters of energy separated by sudden empty spaces, and gradually moves into lighter, quieter territory. The second rests on heavier chording and a mood of hopeful melancholy, and closes on a single sustained note. Throughout there are the devices familiar from Jarrett's own recitals: rolling ostinatos, repeated vamps, dense arpeggios and long lyrical lines, all of them now notated and played with a classical interpreter's control.

Davies put the matter simply in his notes: "Those who know Keith will hear him in this music. It couldn't have been written by anyone else." AllMusic heard the vamps, ostinatos and wistful lyricism of the solo improvisations, without their bluesy, jazz-inflected feel, and found the work thoughtful and firmly tonal. On ECM Reviews in 2011, Tyran Grillo followed the first part from its tense start to a close in "bright solitude".

This is the CD edition of ECM 1112, first released on 1 February 1982. It was reissued in January 2014 in ECM's Re:solutions series, which brings back catalogue titles of the 1970s and early 1980s remastered from the original analogue tapes.