Keith Jarrett

Selected Recordings opened ECM's :rarum series in 2002, and Keith Jarrett compiled it himself from twenty years of his work for the label. The two discs cover recordings from 1974 to 1994 and pass through many of the settings he used at ECM: solo piano concerts, clavichord, pipe organ, overdubbed home recordings, the European Quartet and the Standards trio. All 24 pieces are his own compositions.

The first disc begins with three clavichord improvisations from Book of Ways (Ludwigsburg, 1986), then Heartland from the 1981 solo Concerts. Five short pieces come from Spirits (1985), on which Jarrett played every instrument himself, from Pakistani flute and tablas to soprano saxophone and piano, and produced the recording too. Spheres (7th Movement) comes from the pipe organ improvisations taped at Ottobeuren Abbey in 1976 for Hymns/Spheres. The disc closes with four quartet tracks with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen, two from Belonging (1974) and two from My Song (1977). The second disc moves from Dark Intervals (Suntory Hall, Tokyo, 1987) to two Invocations for soprano saxophone and organ. Then come part of the Munich concert of June 1981 and Late Night Willie, recorded by the quartet in Tokyo in 1979. With Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette come The Cure (Town Hall, New York, 1990) and two pieces from the trio's 1994 run at the Blue Note, before a closing organ Hymn of Remembrance. Manfred Eicher is credited as producer throughout.

The contrasts are sharp. The clavichord pieces have a small, metallic voice quite unlike his piano, and the Spirits excerpts are short, between one and a half and five minutes each. Against them stand the lyrical themes of My Song and The Journey Home, and the long piano solo Recitative, eleven minutes from the Tokyo concert.

Reviewing the set in PopMatters in 2002, Marshall Bowden called the pieces "simply breathtaking in their beauty and power", though he found the clavichord tracks the weakest part. Tyran Grillo, writing for ECM Reviews in 2020, heard in it "as intimate an itinerary as one could chart through the experiences of an artist without equal."

2CD, ECM 014 168-2, released on 29 April 2002 as :rarum I, the first of twenty volumes in which ECM musicians selected recordings from their own catalogue on the label.