The Carnegie Hall Concert documents Keith Jarrett's solo recital in New York on 26 September 2005, his first solo appearance in North America in about a decade. In place of the single unbroken improvisation of his early concerts, he plays two sets of short, self-contained pieces, ten in all, followed by five encores. ECM describes the result as almost an autobiographical portrait of the improviser, and the double album presents the whole evening. The audience is very much part of the record, its applause and calls for more heard between the pieces.
The concert took place in the Isaac Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, presented by George Wein's Festival Productions. Jarrett produced the recording himself, with Martin Pearson as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. The format of brief, separate improvisations continues the approach he had taken on Radiance, his solo recording from Japan in 2002. The ten parts range from just over three minutes to a little more than nine.
The pieces move between dense, angular, sometimes atonal writing, gospel-tinged grooves, impressionist harmonies and ballads invented on the spot. Richard Cook, in BBC Music Magazine, heard it as almost a sampler of Jarrett's work, from mercurial flights to tranquil ballads and the rocking hoedown of Part VII. Four of the encores are Jarrett originals. The Good America and Paint My Heart Red come first, then My Song, written for his Scandinavian quartet and first recorded in 1977. True Blues leans into blues and boogie-woogie, and the evening closes with the standard Time On My Hands.
In The New York Times, Nate Chinen wrote that the album captured "a performance that surpassed even the hopes of the crowd which clamored for, and got, five encores". Fred Kaplan of The Absolute Sound admired the economy of the improvisations, each theme stated, varied and closed in under ten minutes. Ray Comiskey made it CD of the week in The Irish Times. In Stereophile in February 2007, Larry Greenhill called it "an extraordinary recording that captures a magical concert".
This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 1989/90, first released in September 2006.
