Sleeper is a complete concert by Keith Jarrett's European Quartet, recorded at the Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo on 16 April 1979 and released for the first time in 2012. The group, often called the Belonging band after its first album, recorded rarely and played only now and then. This double album captures it near the end of its short life, in a full evening of long originals by Jarrett.
Jarrett plays piano and percussion, Jan Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones, flute and percussion, Palle Danielsson double bass and Jon Christensen drums and percussion. The quartet had made Belonging in 1974 and My Song, released in 1978, and a month after Tokyo it played the New York dates heard on Nude Ants. The same Japanese tour later gave Personal Mountains, issued in 1989. The Tokyo concert was organised by AI Music with Trio Records, ECM and Bose. The tapes were mixed in 2012 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo by Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug.
The two discs follow the two sets and the encore. The first opens with Personal Mountains, over twenty minutes long, then Innocence and So Tender. The second is dominated by Oasis, a piece of twenty-eight minutes that begins with wooden flute and gamelan-like percussion. It continues with Chant of the Soil, where bass and drums lock into a groove under Garbarek's phrasing, and Prism, before New Dance closes the night. Throughout, Jarrett's piano and Garbarek's reeds trade lines over a rhythm section that moves between swing, hard-rocking vamps and lyrical ballad passages.
Critics welcomed the release as a key document of the band. In The Guardian John Fordham compared it with Personal Mountains and judged that this one "is the better set". Writing in The Independent on Sunday, Phil Johnson picked out So Tender and Chant of the Soil as "out-there dream music of incredible drive, sensitivity and, yes, funk". The ECM notes recall the verdict of Jarrett's biographer Ian Carr, that the quartet's influence was out of all proportion to its brief life.
This is the double CD on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 2290/91, first released in July 2012.
