CD version. Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne documents two complete solo piano concerts that Keith Jarrett gave in 1973, at the very start of his solo odyssey. Both evenings were improvised from a blank page, before remarkably disciplined audiences. First issued in November 1973 as a three-LP box, it was the first Jarrett concert recording ECM released, and it opened the series of solo concerts that led to The Köln Concert.
The Lausanne concert came first, on 20 March 1973 at the Salle de Spectacles in Epalinges, recorded by Radio Suisse Romande. The Bremen concert followed on 12 July in the Kleiner Sendesaal of Radio Bremen, a hall praised for its sound. Jarrett and Manfred Eicher produced the album from the radio tapes, and in a shared booklet note they wrote that they had tried to give listeners "the closest thing to being there". It followed Facing You, Jarrett's solo studio album for ECM.
Each concert unfolds in long spans, divided only into parts. Bremen runs about 63 minutes in two parts, and Lausanne about 65 minutes on its own disc. Jarrett builds large structures from small melodic cells, moving between insistent ostinatos, hymn-like passages over a melodic core, and gospel vamps. Blues, barrelhouse and boogie surface and dissolve, and he uses the full width of the keyboard. In the second half of Lausanne he also knocks on the body of the piano and plucks the strings, the most openly avant-garde moment of the set.
The reception was overwhelming. The set was named album of the year by Time, the New York Times, Down Beat and Stereo Review, and in Germany it won the Großer Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. In Stereo Review Chris Albertson called it "the finest new album of jazz piano I have heard in twenty years". Fifty years later, in London Jazz News (2023), Phil Johnson heard the opening Bremen side and the closing Lausanne as "genius-quality improvising that it's hard to credit". A survey of Jarrett's recordings in Mojo placed it first.
This is the two-CD edition on ECM Records, ECM 1035/37, of the album originally released in 1973, with Bremen on the first disc and Lausanne on the second.
