Still Live catches the standards trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette in concert at the Munich Philharmonie on 13 July 1986. Spread over two discs and more than an hour and a half, it takes familiar songbook tunes as starting points for long, open-ended performances. Several tunes run past ten minutes, and one medley grows into a piece of Jarrett's own before returning to the songbook.
The concert took place in the Philharmonie im Gasteig and was recorded digitally by Martin Wieland, with Manfred Eicher producing. Jarrett plays piano, Peacock double bass, DeJohnette drums. The cover is by Barbara Wojirsch, with photography by Rose Anne Colavito. The next day, an off day between trio concerts, Jarrett went into Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg alone and recorded the clavichord improvisations of Book of Ways.
The first disc moves from My Funny Valentine and a sprightly Autumn Leaves, where Peacock steps forward over a crisp snare, to a seventeen-minute The Song Is You. There Jarrett plays with unusual care, pausing between dense clusters, then drops out amid applause so the bass and drums can carry the tune before he brings it back to the boil. The second disc holds the nineteen-minute sequence of You and the Night and the Music, the improvised Extension and an Intro into Someday My Prince Will Come. High, string-like figures give way to dark harmonies over a steady left hand. The concert closes on Benny Golson's I Remember Clifford, slow and spare.
Writing for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called it "one of the most magical live recordings in ECM's annals, both in terms of content and technicality". He singled out DeJohnette's brushwork on When I Fall in Love and the occasional snare accent in The Song Is You. The long medley, in his view, proves that for all their sensitivity Peacock and DeJohnette can swing hard.
This is the double CD edition on ECM Records, ECM 1360/61, in a double jewel case; it includes Billie's Bounce, which was issued only on the CD. The album was first released in March 1988.
